New conspiracies over YouTube shooting are dangerously built on a real threat

It's been a few days since the shooting at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California, but already a new level of shooter conspiracy theories has taken hold, including on YouTube's own platform.

It's an issue that's reared its head for YouTube in particular after a number of recent incidents, including the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the deadly mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. And now it's moved on to this weeks tragedy.

Already, some conspiracy theorists are spreading the idea that the shooter, Nasim Aghdam, was a victim of free speech impairment. And, of course, there are accusations that Aghdam was a member of the "deep state."

But there's a quieter, far more disturbing theory proliferating on YouTube itself about Aghdam not even being real. While it hasn't pushed its way to the top of YouTube's trending like some of the Parkland "crisis actor" theories, it's garnered a little traction while also breathing new life into another issue entirely.

The video in question, "Y Does the Youtube Shooter Looks Like An A.I. Computer Program?" has only garnered around 86,000, views but it's still quite a weird one, suggesting that Aghdam is actually an AI creation.

It's... yeah.

The video's narrator draws attention to what she considers Aghdam's "stiffness" and compares it to an infamous AI-generated fake Barack Obama video.

While it's one of the most-viewed videos on the topic, it's hardly the only one.

And this is where a conspiracy can often turn dangerous, by including a kernel of truth. Because these face-swapped/fake AI videos -- called deepfakes -- are, indeed, a real thing and a real problem.

In case you somehow missed it, the rise of deepfake videos in recent months has dominated boards like Reddit and plagued sites like Pornhub where users have uploaded pornographic videos in which the faces of celebrities have seamlessly been stitched onto the actors.

But this kind of technology can be used for far more nefarious things than just porn videos. That fake video using Obama's image to say something he didn't actually say that the one conspiracy theorist used? It's real and it's terrifying.

And it's given these folks a basis of truth on which they can build what is otherwise an insane idea, an idea that also requires buy-in that the actual YouTube shooting was a false flag operation involving one of the largest tech companies in the world (Google, which owns YouTube).

YouTube and Google, have both faced harsh criticism for the way their algorithms push fake news (even on kids apps) and both have promised they're trying to take better control of this. YouTube even recently said they'd start utilizing Wikipedia information to help readers suss out what's real and what's not, though that's hardly an authoritative source.

But this week's shooting has directly affected YouTube (and Google) in a way none of the other previous incidents have, meaning there will likely be more attention given to it. While that's a good thing, these conspiracies evolve and become tougher to pin down. And that's going to take all the energy and resources these companies can muster.