What struck me most, though, seeing all the possibilities of misleading video presented side by side, is that “deepfakes” don’t seem particularly threatening. Of the three examples of actual prominent deepfakes provided, two are basically, anti-deepfake PSAs — videos created with the express purpose of educating people about the misinformation potential contained in deepfakes. In other words, the best examples of widespread deepfaked videos are videos in which Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama were deepfaked to warn people not to fall for deepfaked videos. That seems, well, like a good thing. (The third of the three examples is a video created with the express purpose of putting Nic Cage’s face on Donald Trump’s body, which is misinformation of a kind, I suppose, if you’d never seen Donald Trump or Nicolas Cage before.)

In fact, much more frightening than the example deepfakes in the guide — more frightening than any of the example videos that used computers to edit or manipulate videos — were the clips on the opposite end of the spectrum: “unaltered video” presented “in an inaccurate manner” so as to “misrepresent the footage and mislead the viewer.” What makes these unedited and unmanipulated videos “frightening” to me is that they’re being shared by prominent political figures under incredibly dishonest premises. Who needs deepfakes when you have a congressman like Matt Gaetz willing to share video of a crowd in Guatemala and suggest that it shows a crowd of Hondurans being paid by George Soros to migrate into the U.S.?