4 ms·

The next step is "turning pencil drawings into photos" and using it to fabricate evidence on grand scale. Why bother catching politicians doing something when

The next step is "turning pencil drawings into photos" and using it to fabricate evidence on grand scale. Why bother catching politicians doing something when you can just draw them in? Will wreak havoc on societies with weak politics/reporting culture.

fritzo 10y ago
This will hurt journalists reporting on facts more than it will hurt targets of smear campaigns. Journalist: "Here is a compromising photo of a politician." Politician: "Here are 1M photos of every politician doing every imaginable illegal act. Prove that your one photo is not similarly fabricated."
- thadjo 10y ago
  verifying the source of an image via a blockchain is probably going to have to be a thing
  - anchpop 10y ago
    When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What do blockchains have to do with this?
    - HappyTypist 10y ago
      Blockchain are timestamped, cryptographically stamped and immutable.
- oconnore 10y ago
  Good journalism is typically not dependent on "gotcha" images. It might hurt amateur twitter reporting, though.
  - jackpirate 10y ago
    What?! Iconic photos are crucial for telling news in a way people remember. For example: * We remember Tienemen square because of [tank man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man) * We remember napalm in Vietnam because of [Phan Thi Kim Phuc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man) * There are too many pictures from the civil rights movement, so I'll [just link to the Getty's gallery](http://www.gettyimages.com/event/the-american-souths-troubling-history-of-racism-560585453#freedom-riders-on-a-greyhound-bus-sponsored-by-the-congress-of-racial-picture-id154784547 http://www.gettyimages.com/event/the-american-souths-troubli...). These pictures tell the story of violence against black far better than any article ever could.
badosu 10y ago
This is the first thing I thought, really scary.
wyager 10y ago
How long until personal testimony and non-repudiable crypto signatures are the only admissible evidence in court?
- thriftwy 10y ago
  Maybe it's the good thing. Law worked like this for ages and in some ways they managed. Of course it relied heavily on everybody knowing everybody else in much smaller societies, but that we can do also by doing an AR face lookup on every person we ever interact with.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Since the provenance of other evidence usually is a matter of personal testimony except where the provenance is not in dispute, I'm not sure why that would be necessary; the reliability of evidence is already determined by evaluation of personal testimony. Of course, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable even when not intentionally deceptive, and testimony is much easier to falsify even without any technical aid than any other form of evidence, so relying solely on personal testimony wouldn't really help to avoid fabricated evidence, anyway.
nkassis 10y ago
This is very impressive tech and has a lot of good applications for movies and art but I'm with you that it does scare me that it will find it's most common use case as a tool for propaganda by governments.
eanzenberg 10y ago
So... photoshop?
- cr0sh 10y ago
  I think beyond photoshop - more like the ability to seamlessly insert or "imagine" situations that never occurred in real life. For instance, imagine if you could feed in a ton of images of person A - then a ton of images of porn - then have the system imagine a porn scene. ...or a drug-usage scene. ...or any other thing you could think up. It's even possible this could be pushed into a generated movie. You could even work the "voices" in (have the person say virtually anything you want, nearly perfectly, synched perfectly with the facial expressions/movements/body language). There's a lot of scary, yet interesting possibilities here! Hmm - think of the possibilities for CGI effects? Rather than having to build a 3D model, just have the software imagine the scene (I know - much easier said than done - but I think the possibility is there, now). Another idea: Could this kind of software take a movie or still image, and "imagine" a three-d model from it? I don't see why not... ...and yes, I understand this software as being a particular form of a neural network, and that for any of this it takes massive compute power in the form of multiple-GPU time and a ton of memory - and likely isn't yet in the realm of doing it yourself at home except in simpler examples - which might still take days or weeks to train, and a good amount of time to render; I just want to indicate that I have a certain minor level of understanding of what this software is about and that I don't believe for a second that it is a basic "photoshop" filtering system.
  - Gh0stRAT 10y ago
    I've seen some work on using GANs to generate 3D models from single images, but the results aren't particularly high-quality yet.[0] [0]http://3dgan.csail.mit.edu/ http://3dgan.csail.mit.edu/
radarsat1 10y ago
> "turning pencil drawings into photos" errr.... I hate to break it to you but... https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix/blob/master/imgs/examples.jpg https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix/blob/master/imgs/example...

fritzo 10y ago

This will hurt journalists reporting on facts more than it will hurt targets of smear campaigns. Journalist: "Here is a compromising photo of a politician." Politician: "Here are 1M photos of every politician doing every imaginable illegal act. Prove that your one photo is not similarly fabricated."

thadjo 10y ago
verifying the source of an image via a blockchain is probably going to have to be a thing
- anchpop 10y ago
  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What do blockchains have to do with this?
  - HappyTypist 10y ago
    Blockchain are timestamped, cryptographically stamped and immutable.
oconnore 10y ago
Good journalism is typically not dependent on "gotcha" images. It might hurt amateur twitter reporting, though.
- jackpirate 10y ago
  What?! Iconic photos are crucial for telling news in a way people remember. For example: * We remember Tienemen square because of [tank man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man) * We remember napalm in Vietnam because of [Phan Thi Kim Phuc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man) * There are too many pictures from the civil rights movement, so I'll [just link to the Getty's gallery](http://www.gettyimages.com/event/the-american-souths-troubling-history-of-racism-560585453#freedom-riders-on-a-greyhound-bus-sponsored-by-the-congress-of-racial-picture-id154784547 http://www.gettyimages.com/event/the-american-souths-troubli...). These pictures tell the story of violence against black far better than any article ever could.

badosu 10y ago

This is the first thing I thought, really scary.

wyager 10y ago

How long until personal testimony and non-repudiable crypto signatures are the only admissible evidence in court?

thriftwy 10y ago
Maybe it's the good thing. Law worked like this for ages and in some ways they managed. Of course it relied heavily on everybody knowing everybody else in much smaller societies, but that we can do also by doing an AR face lookup on every person we ever interact with.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Since the provenance of other evidence usually is a matter of personal testimony except where the provenance is not in dispute, I'm not sure why that would be necessary; the reliability of evidence is already determined by evaluation of personal testimony. Of course, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable even when not intentionally deceptive, and testimony is much easier to falsify even without any technical aid than any other form of evidence, so relying solely on personal testimony wouldn't really help to avoid fabricated evidence, anyway.

nkassis 10y ago

This is very impressive tech and has a lot of good applications for movies and art but I'm with you that it does scare me that it will find it's most common use case as a tool for propaganda by governments.

eanzenberg 10y ago

So... photoshop?

cr0sh 10y ago
I think beyond photoshop - more like the ability to seamlessly insert or "imagine" situations that never occurred in real life. For instance, imagine if you could feed in a ton of images of person A - then a ton of images of porn - then have the system imagine a porn scene. ...or a drug-usage scene. ...or any other thing you could think up. It's even possible this could be pushed into a generated movie. You could even work the "voices" in (have the person say virtually anything you want, nearly perfectly, synched perfectly with the facial expressions/movements/body language). There's a lot of scary, yet interesting possibilities here! Hmm - think of the possibilities for CGI effects? Rather than having to build a 3D model, just have the software imagine the scene (I know - much easier said than done - but I think the possibility is there, now). Another idea: Could this kind of software take a movie or still image, and "imagine" a three-d model from it? I don't see why not... ...and yes, I understand this software as being a particular form of a neural network, and that for any of this it takes massive compute power in the form of multiple-GPU time and a ton of memory - and likely isn't yet in the realm of doing it yourself at home except in simpler examples - which might still take days or weeks to train, and a good amount of time to render; I just want to indicate that I have a certain minor level of understanding of what this software is about and that I don't believe for a second that it is a basic "photoshop" filtering system.
- Gh0stRAT 10y ago
  I've seen some work on using GANs to generate 3D models from single images, but the results aren't particularly high-quality yet.[0] [0]http://3dgan.csail.mit.edu/ http://3dgan.csail.mit.edu/

radarsat1 10y ago

> "turning pencil drawings into photos" errr.... I hate to break it to you but... https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix/blob/master/imgs/examples.jpg https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix/blob/master/imgs/example...