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Fake Obama created using AI tool to make phoney speeches [video]
- nkrisc 9y agoI wonder if it's easier to make a fake speech of someone who talks the way Trump does? Not making this a political thing, but I've noticed that he's not very eloquent and frequently starts and stops in his speech and changes what he's saying mid sentence. Might it be easier to synthesize that type of speech pattern since any awkwardness can be hid in the erratic speech the real person employs?
- honestoHeminway 9y agoImagine, if you will a world, where trump speaks for obama-care.
- pjc50 9y agoI've seen claims that translators struggle with Trump because of this - accurately translating what he says comes out as incoherent, which makes people think that the translator is doing a bad job. Although I think to some extent he relies on fragmented speech. It's all about emotional pattern recognition, rather than something that people engage with rationally. Tony Blair also tended to do this, with long verbless sentences.
- Cenk 9y agoThe Daily Show had a segment on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qL1un6NPZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qL1un6NPZA
- mnm2 9y agoWow, that's like 100% scripted to please the target audience
- ryanx435 9y agoyeah. The Daily Show has got a pretty standard formula. I read an article about how they, and their spin off shows like John Oliver, basically use the same script pattern for most of their shows in order to hypnotize their audience. Hold on, I'm going to try to find the article. edit: well, the only source I can find after a quick search is this post on an anonymous message board, but it covers the main points pretty well: http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1479/14/1479145599055.jpg http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1479/14/1479145599055... a more detailed discussion is here: http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/98690960/ http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/98690960/
- somedangedname 9y ago"The SJW is the odious little Eichmann with his jackboots up on a fair trade coffee table..." Really??? That's rich coming from /pol
- anotherbrownguy 9y agoMost of the political "comedy" shows are like this. If you are not 100% brainwashed with their political agenda, they are painful to watch.
- pjc50 9y agoI have some bad news for you about television.
- lostcolony 9y agoTo be fair, even in English he's incoherent.
- e12e 9y agoI've written naive markov chains that appear way more coherent than Donald Trump on a bad day. Politics aside, I think it is amazing that anyone would vote for the guy - I suppose it indicates how great a distance there is between the average voter and the average politician, if most can't seem to tell the difference between those that are able to string together coherent sentences and paragraphs, and those that don't.
- DanAndersen 9y agoPerhaps a stack-based representation of speech would work well? There was an interesting post on the English language StackExchange that talked about Trump's speaking style and how, due to its more off-the-cuff structure, ends up nesting various subjects in layers, pushing and popping from the stack: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311381/donald-trumps-run-on-sentences/311418#311418 https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311381/donald-tr... Seems like the kind of verbal structure that the puzzle-minded among HN might actually enjoy piecing together actually!
- nkrisc 9y agoWow. That makes it easier to understand, but certainly not easy.
- jbrl 9y agoWell it's better than what we have now...
- jnbiche 9y agoI was really suprised when the original paper for this didn't make it to the top of HN: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/AudioToObama/ http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/AudioToObama/ Nor any of the follow-up articles I posted. Given onslaught of fabricated "news" that spread around the last election, this type of ML technology is almost guaranteed to play a role in the next one.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lightbyte 9y agoAfter watching the video from that link, I'm very fearful for what people are going to do with this technology in the next decade. This combined with Adobe's new "speech photoshop" will make excellent propaganda.
- sven-99 9y agoWell there is such a thing as productive and useful propaganda. Apple knows how to get ppl to line up for blocks to sell a 100 buck phone for 600. Disney's current formula of starwars/marvel/animation is so effificent at getting ppl to shell out cash that last year they basically told analysts they had enough resources and the formula to produce a star wars type movie every week, there are just not enough ppl to buy it. So knowing how to manipulate ppl is now quite scientific. It just has to be towards a constructive end. Something beyond religious/celebrity worship and consumerism and consumption. With such power, if all it takes is one douchebag to cause massive harm very quickly, then you should also believe it is possible for person to do massive good very quickly.
- lightbyte 9y ago>With such power, if all it takes is one douchebag to cause massive harm very quickly, then you should also believe it is possible for person to do massive good very quickly. I'm not sure that applies for this technology. What massive good could be done by making a fake video of someone talking?
- arnaudsm 9y agoThe next generation of fake news is going to be fantastic.
- avaer 9y agoI look forward to a time when journalists doing journalism is what's valued in the news. When technology to fake things is everywhere, maybe we'll pay for accurate newspapers again. With something other than our willingness to be manipulated by advertising.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 9y ago> When technology to fake things is everywhere, maybe we'll pay for accurate newspapers again. We didn't pay for them before, how could we do so again? Advertisers have always been the main funding for newspapers and sensationalism (clickbait before clicks) and propaganda have always been major influences on the medium. Sure, things got worse for decades leading up to the arrival of internet news, and continued to get worse after that, but the golden age of readers footing the bill for accurate newspapers never happened.
- avaer 9y agoThis is kind of a slap in the face to anyone who's considered themselves a journalist, as well as anyone who bought a newspaper for the news. It also makes me wonder how the news industry ever got started if it never sold "news", but only something wrapped in that veil. I don't know anything about the history of news; do you have any good reading material to recommend?
- untog 9y agoProblem is, there are always moments journalists aren't present for. Think Romney's "48%", Hillary's "deplorable", Trump's "grab em by the pussy". In all of those situations the video evidence is what proved the story. Without that all a journalist can do is trust the accounts of the people present, which aren't trustworthy at all.
- EGreg 9y agoI have been saying for a while now that our current systems are all relying on the inefficiency of an attacker. Soon, video and audio of an event or speech be proof of anything. The only way to prove identity will be to have a device which can do challenge-response. Without it, you won't be able to prove you're not a robot over the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14787882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14787882 Forget "hacking elections". A botnet will be able to hack our trust in one another (see CIA reputational attacks), AI will be used to chat up girls online better than any person (see fb AI sales bots), and so on. Computers can already beat us at Chess, Go, etc. How much different is humor, honor and reputation once companies add one more breakthrough to deep learning to model them? An attacker that can make 100,000 jokes a second each of which is excellent? The missing breakthrough is how to automate the "human judging" factor. This is the problem when figuring out diets or treatments etc. Clinical trials take a long time. Same with textbooks. Once we figure out how to speed that part up, we are going to be able to make AI that knows what's probably going to be funny ahead of time.
- nocoder 9y agoIsn't this similar to Adobe project Voco? If not how are they different. There is also another tool called Face 2 face. I think overtime people will assume everything to be fake unless it agrees with their pre-conceived notions of truth.
- lightbyte 9y agoProject Voco creates speech based off new text for a person, this creates video based off speech. When these technologies get better I assume you'd be able to use Adobe's technology to fake a speech from someone, than use this to create a video for it.
- jessaustin 9y ago...their pre-conceived notions of truth. This is the wrong way to think about this, I think. Think of media consumers, instead, as Bayesians. We have prior beliefs, we consume media, and our posterior beliefs are a function of both of those. As the process iterates over time, our priors are updated, but more slowly over time. This is why children believe everything they hear from authority figures, while those with memories e.g. tend to doubt the offered justifications for the new war when we consider how similar they are to the previously-offered-but-eventually-disproved justifications for the previous wars.
- nocoder 9y agoPerhaps...but this has been my observation recently. A persons ideological position is always used as a gauge to judge the quality/value of his opinion on a particular topic. If a person is of/ perceived to be of an ideological disposition different then mine and then whatever he or she says gets discounted. Your argument about people being Bayesian assume that they are rational. In practice, you find people sticking to their prior beliefs even more strongly even when the evidence to contrary is stronge, so called backfire effect. In fact, a lot of people reject the evidence simply based on the Ideological disposition of the source that it comes from and terming it as XX wing conspiracy.
- kmfrk 9y agoI really recommend the Adobe demonstration of their VoCo speech audio "photoshopping" because of Jordan Peele's reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw. More technology demos should have unscripted, sincere reactions like that.
- wubbfindel 9y agoThat's pretty impressive! nice demo too.
- yorwba 9y ago> More technology demo should have unscripted, sincere reactions like that. I'd agree with you if you scratched like that. See here for an opinion on this demonstration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002787
- kmfrk 9y agoI really recommend the Adobe demonstration of their VoCo speech audio "photoshopping" because of Jordan Peele's reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw. More technology demo should have unscripted, sincere reactions like that.
- wubbfindel 9y agoI read a book last month that featured a faked president video created by an AI. Kill Process by William Hertling Link: http://amzn.eu/c1ZJNcv http://amzn.eu/c1ZJNcv Seems it was closer to non-fiction than I expected.
- wubbfindel 9y agoWhy the downvote? Am I not allow to link to a book that shows fact has caught up with fiction?
- wubbfindel 9y agoActually, wrong book. It was Darknet by Mathew Mather. Oops
- _pmf_ 9y ago"And make no mistake."
- Oras 9y agoWhat worries me is that this is just a public research done in uni. What should we expect from secret projects then?!
- kristiandupont 9y agoI guess that we will start to rely on multiple recordings of an event to consider it proven. Until, of course, 3D recreations start to appear rendering that useless as well.
- honestoHeminway 9y agoI dread the narcisim this allows to unleash, as people will just select whatever they believed in the first place to be true. The only solution to this is a education towards knowledge masochism. Destroy what you believe in, only in failure there is truth.
- 24gttghh 9y ago> I dread the narcisim[sic] this allows to unleash, as people will just select whatever they believed in the first place to be true. I think we've gone past this point already.
- nthcolumn 9y agoSeeing is believing they say but what did people do years ago when they only ever caught a glimpse from behind a large crowd of their future president talking out the back of a caboose on the literal whistle-stop tour? Some people say they saw Abe Lincoln once, some people were even right.
- stillsut 9y agoThere's been a growing fear of how much dirt is going to get spilled when the current generation with omnipresent camera-phones goes to run for office. But this signals that we could be nearing the end of the age of embarrassing leaked video or audio! From now on, it could be plausible to deny a video and say someone built a neural net and faked it - 'at least I have no recollection of those events.' (The excuse will work for supporters) The Mitt Romney's '47% are takers' could go down historically as the last great leak where leaks could be believed.
- isaaclyman 9y agoThis demonstrates an immediate need for a trustworthy video hosting service--maybe with a companion app that records using some combination of crypto/proprietary formats/trust networks/I don't know what else, this isn't my area of expertise. Things are going to get pretty bad here soon if video evidence loses its street cred.
- untog 9y agoBut how is it considered trustworthy? That's basically the central struggle every media organisation has right now and I don't see an easy answer. Yours is an interesting idea, though. I dread to think how much it would have to exclude though - probably have no Android client because I'm sure a rooted phone could easily provide a fake video source. Maybe even on a jailbroken iOS device too. And once that becomes possible the entire platform is ruined.
- isaaclyman 9y agoYeah, it might need to be a custom-made camera, made for news organizations and wealthy vloggers. And each device would need to be audited regularly. It would be a nightmare but not as much of a nightmare as not knowing whether anything you see on video is real or computer-generated.
- pishpash 9y agoWhy do you need all this? Just authenticate the video file with a digital signature. It is even possible to build it into the video encoding itself, and I am almost certain there are already research papers on this, if not implementations.
- stevenh 9y agoThe audio itself can also be faked now. https://lyrebird.ai/demo https://lyrebird.ai/demo
- rybosome 9y agoI'm truly frightened by this. We are still struggling with how to deal with the "post-truth" world, and that's with the assumption that pictures are hard to fake, video even more so, and audio nearly impossible. Fake news is going to reach a fever pitch when "speeches" of Obama leak saying, "We have to take all the white people's guns". And conversely, when a genuine "grab 'em by the pussy" leaks again, a huge chunk of people willfully will not believe it. Seems possible that we could come up with technological and journalistic solutions, given enough time, but it's moving too quickly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 9y agoYes, I think this may mean the end of any kind of political centre in the US. The different sides will simply have entirely different coverage of the same events, and will entirely refuse to believe each other's claims. Only a small distance from the current situation. But I can't see how people would voluntarily move back from that brink.
- emodendroket 9y agoFrom the material posted it seems that this is basically a high-tech, convincing version of those late-night sketches where they have a fake version of their mouths moving; it doesn't actually solve the audio problem.
- cmahler7 9y agowould be pretty easy to use an impersonator or something like lyrebird.ai to create the audio.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoYes but you can also track down the original video to prove something is fake. In order to have something truly convincing you need a video of Obama (or anyone else) that no one else has.
- theelfismike 9y agoI hope they call it Fauxbama.
- lafytahoe 9y ago"Fake Obama" is an example of a pleonasm, or tautology. Like "Free Gift", or "True fact".
- skc 9y agoIf you've ever gone through the pain of trying to convince someone why some picture or video is an obvious fake then you know just how terrifying this technology is.
- agentgt 9y agoNow we just need some way to digital sign speeches (and hopefully eventually with quantum cryptography). I'm not sure how but perhaps this could actually improve the issue of fake news with or least the assimilation if there as a broader realization how easily things can be faked... probably not though (I'm eternally an optimist).
- Retr0spectrum 9y agoSignatures only solve half of the problem. What if someone is filmed doing something wrong? They wouldn't sign it, and anyone could just say the footage was faked.
- e12e 9y agoIs the first section of the video badly out of sync for anyone else? Both the real and fake initial segments appear way off to me?
- ipunchghosts 9y agoCame here to say the same thing.
- samcodes 9y agoLooking ahead 10-20 years, I don't see how anyone born from 2015 onwards has any solid concept of reality the way I feel I know it. Between things like this and AR, I feel like "real" vs "simulated" will seem to the AR natives to be a pedantic distinction... Like how my parents still distinguish between "having met someone" and "someone I have talked to on the internet."
- emodendroket 9y ago> Like how my parents still distinguish between "having met someone" and "someone I have talked to on the internet." I am not sure that that distinction is really gone.
- cmurf 9y agoWhere'd you two meet? On the internet.
- emodendroket 9y agoI think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that because such an exchange is plausible there is no meaningful distinction between online and in-person communication.
- jacoblambda 9y agoI really don't think there is much of a difference anymore. I remember meeting people online and hanging out with them (talking, working on projects together, playing games, etc) and it honestly didn't feel any different than meeting someone in person and doing the same thing despite the fact that I have never seen some of these people in person. I find it especially difficult to differentiate a meaningful distinction between the two when my interactions with people go from in person to online or vice versa. We just do the same stuff we did normally, albeit maybe those things occur in different settings such as at a computer instead of face to face at a restaurant or wherever.
- colanderman 9y ago
- imranq 9y agoWhat's the benefit with a technology like this? Seems like it can only cause harm
- emodendroket 9y agoWell, maybe this doesn't actually answer the question but the obvious "legitimate" use would seem to be military/intelligence psy-ops. E: maybe dubbing foreign films could work better
- evan_ 9y agoIf you were able to make it work in real-time you could do some really cool stuff with characters in multi-user VR spaces. Your avatar could be shown to move its mouth in a realistic way as you spoke to other users, which would go a long way towards building a feeling of "realness".
- scarmig 9y agoIt makes you wonder just how far fake content--and fake content involving real people--can go. Imagine a world where a service exists to which you can upload a dozen images of someone, along with a voice clip. In response, it can generate all kinds of videos--from the benign, to the person saying horrible racist things, to the person starring in graphic pornography. It seems technically feasible in the medium term. But how do we react to it? Strict limits on the production or storage of these pseudo-artifacts? Criminal penalties for distribution? A cultural rejection of pretty much all video and audio evidence?
- Balgair 9y agoOh man, it's gonna get way crazy. Imagine the 'mean girls' in HS with this tech. Imagine trying to be a male HS teacher with this around. We're gonna have to regulate the shit out of the internet just to keep teachers in schools and verify that they did not in fact cuss out a classroom and chug vodka.
- cmurf 9y agoProof of provenance. We're going to need signed videos...
- dkarapetyan 9y agoTime to learn how digital signatures work.
- LeoNatan25 9y agoLike with other, more easily forgeable conteby, such as text quotation, we will find ways to provide a chain of trust in order to authenticate what has classically appeared much more difficult to spoof, such as voice or video. The only challenge that will remain is explaining to people that the nonsense they watch on Facebook is not factual just because it is on Facebook. “Use the force, Harry” – Gandalf
- Diederich 9y agoWhen an open source package author releases a pile of source code, that person typically also releases a cryptographic checksum of the code. In the future, when the President (or CSPAN, or CNN, or Fox News, or whoever) releases a segment (which they do all the time), they'll need to release (in a public, 'timestamped' way) a cryptographic checksum of the content. I have many of the same fears as people here about future fake news, where the reality of something already comes as a distant second behind the outrage produced. So even if we had this big pile of content and checksums, the outrage echo chambers will still be going nuts. But it's at least a partial technical solution to these problems. (And I'm glossing over all kinds of other complications too, such as 'what format' and 'where does it get stored' etc etc)
- tudorw 9y agoI think it's reasonably certain some alternative network with these kinds of features will emerge, validating authenticity of the contents origination was a known requirement of theoretical networks , because it's hard, both technologically, but more fundamentally the sociopolitical aspects are mind boggling, loss of privacy, trust in the state, etc etc, this will take a while to resolve, but someday people will be looking back and laughing :)
- Diederich 9y agoI spend a non-trivial amount of time hoping that people, myself included, in the future will look back at many things and laugh. (:
- aaron695 9y agoThis also may allow high quality educational videos to be created. (Think of all those smart people who are bad presenters) And high quality entertainment. Ain't all bad.
- signa11 9y agoand then you have this as well: https://lyrebird.ai/ https://lyrebird.ai/
- dheera 9y agohttp://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/frequency-of-miracles-time-graph-camera-invented-photoshop-invented.jpg http://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/frequency-of-... Basically, we now have the video version of this graph. It came a little later than Photoshop, but as with any technology, anything that is technology possible will be implemented by somebody at some point in the future.
- armenarmen 9y agoAfter the Falkland island war the British anarchopunk band Crass spliced together and leaked a tape that made it seem like the attack was a false flag and that Reagan wanted to start a war with the soviets in Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatchergate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatchergate
- transitionnel 9y agoWell...this kind of thing is here to stay, and at least some good may come of it. We can all be reminded that even "true" words are still just words. An example from all of history: (This is only semi-serious, but felt like a good thought experiment). > Oligarch to politician - "Make this economic change." > Politician to team - "Give me post-facto justification for this change I am making." aka "Spin this" > Team - Applies economics to numbers > Team to politician - "Here you go." > Politician to people - "Economics does not lie." > Vaunted economics publications - "Sold. And thanks for the like." > Economic failure > Future politician - "Well, we just didn't know then what we know now." > Historian of the future - "Their economic calculations lacked the full set of economic forces and incentives. The economists of the time were in effect hand-waving because they ignored a fundamental economic force--the oligarch. Given the size of the oversight, I'd say they were complicit." Thoughts: --Economic policy sold without disclosure (or even acknowledgement) of these massive forces is knowingly flawed, and a willing lie to handle people. --Economic theory is rooted in psychology. When an economic decision is spun to cover hidden motives, the psychological motive basis of that instance of economics is, by definition, false. --Data can still fool good economists when it is cherry-picked; any data produced by a non-omniscient process is going to be flawed to some extent. * This is not to say anything good or bad about oligarchs. Merely that they are a tremendous force, and economics, political policy, and civil discussion could greatly improve with a more accurate model of their effect on global systems. * I'd love to see an economic modeling tool able to place "black boxes" where market distortions are occurring due to probable hidden forces. Captive markets are a real nuisance.