8 ms·
By the time the next US election comes around it's very likely this technology, combined with Lyrebird etc. will allow anyone to make [politician] convincingly
by fredley 9y ago
By the time the next US election comes around it's very likely this technology, combined with Lyrebird etc. will allow anyone to make [politician] convincingly say or do anything they like.
I can't make my mind up if this will make the current fake news / filter bubble situation worse, or if it will make it so bad that people learn to distrust any kind of digital media entirely.
I'm still not sure, given that the use of these tools for political gain seems inevitable at this point how we will actually verify a video is real in the near future.
- aluhut 9y agoI'm surprised nobody build this Trump watersports video yet. The tool is probably still to complicated to use. There is a business opportunity.
- evansj 9y agoMaybe we're seeing so much coverage of deepfakes just so there is plausible deniability if the watersports video leaks?
- aluhut 9y agoNice twist.
- wand3r 9y agoWhat is "Trump watersports"? I haven't heard of it and that is a searchterm I am not super interested in getting google NSFW results from. Is it what I think it is, I haven't heard about this at all?
- aluhut 9y agoThere is a conspiracy theory about trump urinating on a prostitute on his visit to Russia some years ago. The theory states that Putin has a tape of it.
- ddebernardy 9y agoProbably a reference to the Trump pee tape: http://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-jesse-watters-bizarre-reason-why-trump-pee-tape-isnt-real-if-798083 http://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-jesse-watters-bizarre-...
- wand3r 9y agoYep, that's what I expected. I read the article and while it hasn't been proven, if this exists and was released it would be pretty appalling.
- ddebernardy 9y agoMethinks it's only a matter of time when someone creates a phony video using a software like deepfakes. What a bizarre age we live in...
- jjgreen 9y agoThe rumour that Russian intelligence have video of Trump getting pissed on by prostitutes, the #goldenshower hashstag is used I believe. No idea of its veracity.
- lightbyte 9y agoThe claim is not that he was getting pissed on, it is that he paid prostitutes to pee on a bed that the Obama's previously used.
- giarc 9y agoNext election the "grab her by the p*" soundbite would have been "fake sound". It's really two problems. One, making people say things they didn't say. And two, allowing people to deny things they really did say.
- sharemywin 9y agoThe second probably being much more damaging.
- ctrl-j 9y ago> Next election the "grab her by the p*" soundbite would have been "fake sound". You mean the last election right? A lot of people believed it was faked.
- tehwebguy 9y agoWell those people cannot be helped, he admitted it plainly.
- akhilcacharya 9y agoNo disagreement on that, but even he allegedly started saying it is faked recently.
- j_koreth 9y agosource ?
- giarc 9y agohttp://www.cnn.com/2017/11/27/politics/donald-trump-access-hollywood-conspiracy/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/27/politics/donald-trump-access-h...
- ctrl-j 9y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-...
- gk1 9y ago> or if it will make it so bad that people learn to distrust any kind of digital media entirely. There are already fake news sites out there that are "so bad" you'd think nobody would believe them, and yet... Still, it's important we inform people this is possible, so that at least the more reasonable among them can view future videos through a skeptical lens. I'm sure by now many HN readers are not surprised by this technology, but many outside of HN would be blown away.
- losteric 9y agoHerd immunity? Perhaps naive people believe those spam sites because smarter people believe the better spam sites that share the same narrative... However, distrusting digital media isn't the solution either - there are plenty of trash magazines publishing conspiracy theories and other absurdities. Plus, digital media has revealed huge segments of America are becoming culturally isolated and undemocratic. A return to print media might shift funds back to deep professional investigative journalism that covers those issues... or just give owners better returns.
- blauditore 9y agoI don't think this will be a big issue. The same could already be done with still images years ago, if not decades. And with enough time and resources, the same can be applied reasonably well to videos, manually frame by frame or using CGI. It takes a lot more to make it undetectable as fake though, and I guess the same applies to deepfakes. Once people get used to the fact such face swaps can be done, they'll be more sceptical and demand realness verification in case of published sensitive material.
- sbarre 9y agoMost people barely question the validity or truth of news they see on TV, and that's real footage.. You really think those same people will actually question if a video was real in the first place, particularly if it reinforces their world-view?
- simias 9y agoI'm not so much concerned about people making politicians and other personalities say something they haven't, rather I worry that these personalities will now have plausible deniability for any footage of them doing or saying something embarrassing. It's always harder to prove a negative and in this case you'd have to prove that it can't be a fake. Now imagine figuring out which video is real amid a flurry of fakes.
- sbarre 9y agoPutting aside the US or first-world elections/media.. It's worrying to think of how this technology could be used in parts of the world where there is much less widespread understanding of this level of digital manipulation.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoYour fears are greatly overblown. Haven’t we been able to “Photoshop“ people convincingly for a very long time? People are less sceptible to this than you think. Even when scandals do break, it’s not a picture or video that’s proof, it’s a picture or video that produces witnesses.
- tome 9y agoVideo has been pretty much immune to "Photoshopping" AFAIK. The new technology also makes it extremely cheap.
- platz 9y agonein. or there was that time a german variety show 'false flagged' the germans by doctoring a video of yanis varoufakis to have him 'stick the middle finger to germany' during a talk he gave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-1LQu6mAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-1LQu6mAE). There were witnesses; but they didn't stop the confusion and outrage that ensued due to the effects of viral media. Would this pass a sophisticated technical analysis of the video? No - is there time and public understanding for the results of said sophisticated technical analysis to prevent the damage before it is done? no. The notion that witnesses or forensic analysis can combat the speed of information, especially across borders, is a bit quaint.
- cf498 9y agoIts something entirely different to fake a face instead of a finger in a video. Then again, the deep fakes I have seen so far arent really that convincing either. But one can only wonder how much you can improve such a thing. With politicians of whom a wide array of video material exists and were you have the option to create an incident, instead of altering existing ones, the possibilities are really interesting.
- platz 9y agodid we really post that link at the same time, or did you edit your other response to match?
- psergeant 9y agoI wrote some thoughts on this: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certification https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
- deegles 9y agoYou can't prevent someone from making a fake, but one could at least use cryptographic signatures to prove they made a statement on video/audio.
- tboyd47 9y agoWe need to start thinking about what criminal justice will look like when digital recordings are all considered hearsay. That's bound to happen. And perhaps it should... if average people have the technology now, how long has it been in the hands of police departments, newspapers, militaries, and intelligence agencies? We tend to focus on fakes with high-profile people like politicians and celebrities, but it can clearly be done with everyday people as well. The author was able to produce a fake video segment of a well-lit, animated conversation involving his wife. She's directly in front of the camera, speaking and making hand motions for several seconds. How much easier would it be to insert a face into grainy security camera footage, or a shaky clip of a large crowd at a political rally?
- 794CD01 9y agoThe presence of one source can be easily dismissed, but if you have 500 independent sources that produce video of the same event from their own angles and timespans in an interconsistent way, it's far more likely that the recorded event happened as opposed to all of these different sources lying.
- tboyd47 9y agoReally? How much harder is it to run the OP's script with 500 input videos as opposed to only one? Especially if they're very similar? How many people have the expertise needed to identify a faked video, and how much training would they need?
- jakear 9y agoThe great part is that using a GAN means we cannot automatically distinguish a fake from a real... because that's the whole point of the GAN.
- 794CD01 9y agoAt that point there is no such thing as identifying faked videos. Instead you'd rely on the abundance of independent videos and see how consistent they are. Generating a lot of them doesn't do you any good unless you can insert them into the black boxes of the 3 planes and 40 cars in the area, the databases of all the drone operators, the internal storage of all the nearby smartphones, etc.
- 794CD01 9y agoPeople should never have been trusting media in the first place, digital or otherwise. And for the most part, they don't have to. Humans believe what they want to believe or are told to believe. Evidence has little to do with it.
- douglaswlance 9y agoInformation will need to be verified by consensus on a decentralized blockchain.
- tw1010 9y agoJust like there is a social system in place to sift fact from rumors (via watercooler chatter, snopes, networks of trust), at least to a degree where society doesn't collapse into chaos, in the same way will we be able dampen any damage that this new technology might cause. I think this whole "fake videos of politicians" will become a way smaller issue than what doomsayers predict it will be.
- konschubert 9y agoIt's basically the same situation as we had with print before television. It's all about which sources you trust. In fact, it has always been that way. Deepfakes just makes it more obvious. Which is maybe a good thing.
- zodPod 9y agoSomething that comes up a lot on the deepfakes sub is the notion that this should make people more skeptical. They use the phrase "If anything can be real, nothing is real" and I think it makes a lot of sense.
- macawfish 9y agoThat's not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes it's necessary for people to believe something factual. Blanket skepticism can be very destructive in these cases.
- JohnStrange 9y agoIt will make things way worse, since politicians from now on can and will plausibly deny any video evidence about them. Candidates will literally rewrite history instead of merely suffering from amnesia and any real evidence will end up in battles between one TV show 'expert' against another. On a bright side, young aspiring actors can make porn movies to get some cash early in their career without necessarily having to fear it will ruin their career many years later - those movies will exist anyway.
- rexpop 9y agoHopefully, this makes celebrity untenable.
- Asdfbla 9y agoI find the more concerning thing is not that people will believe that a fake is real, it's more that they won't believe something real is real anymore. Already nowadays the whole thing about fake news and alternative facts has segments of the population flat out not believing the truth. This may very well be greatly exacerbated in the future where, regardless of the amount of evidence you bring, people will just disregard it as fake.
- zodPod 9y agoIf it can be faked, is it really evidence? I mean, you're worrying about people not believing assertions at that point. This is already something that can be faked just not by the masses yet and not easily. You should always look for multiple sources of anything and not just believe one source that shows you any evidence of something being true.
- zokier 9y agoThere was this essay posted on HN some time back, where the main thesis was that teaching people to be critical about media strengthened the positions of antivaxers, flatearthers and so on, because they did not rely on traditional media so they were then sort of considered more trustworthy. And now deepfakes etc throws just more fuel in the fire that burns trust, people end up more and more believing things that happen to make them feel good.
- olivermarks 9y agoBelieving 'the truth' is a huge can of worms here. Verifying the legitimacy and accuracy of 'news' claims and representations has always been very difficult for the lay person. We are now well into an era when 'the truth' is even harder to find. 'Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see' (Edgar Allen Poe) has now become 'believe nothing of what you see' too, at least until you have verified to your level of satisfaction...
- clarkmoody 9y agoIt's time for cryptographic signatures in cameras (phones and otherwise) so that you can prove something is unadulterated. Apple signing key -> your phone's key -> signature over hash of the media (edit: for video, embed signatures every so often to you can verify a shorter clip out of the whole). Embed Apple's signature and your pubkey in the metadata of the image, and TwitYouFace will verify on upload that it's authentic. Of course, you can't fix stupid unless you talk about a complete overhaul of public education... And even then, people are people.
- ggg9990 9y agoThat doesn’t prove anything. Make your fake video, point your phone camera at it, record.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoTry it. Seriously, try and record a realistically looking recording off the screen. Movie pirates have been trying to perfect it for decades, and even their best attempts look obvious.
- 05 9y agoUnless you build DRM right into camera sensor (which is, admittedly, not that hard), you can use an FPGA chip to receive your source video in HDMI format, convert it to CSI interface and send it to the phone SoC over the camera flex cable.
- ggg9990 9y agoIf you can make a porn video of someone look like a porn video of someone else, I’m sure the technology to solve this problem is not far off.
- clarkmoody 9y agoMaybe a second layer of AI that cleans up that video-of-video look? Philosophically though, I think it's a good thing that many are learning not to trust information from self-proclaimed authorities :-)
- root_axis 9y agoIt's likely that we'll soon enter a new era of technological cat-and-mouse as tools are developed to automatically detect artifacts caused by digital processing and counter-techniques are developed to minimize the appearance of those artifacts.
- filoeleven 9y agoHow will we actually verify a video is real in the near future? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, for many of the same reasons. I think one answer can be found in device-level signing of images and A/V feeds. A recorder can integrate its cryptographic signing and keystore on the same chip as its CCD/audio controllers, like Apple’s T2 chip does, so that it has the ability to sign direct feeds from the hardware as being such. This might be more complicated for A/V than still images, since a large enough recording would have to be written to disk. Perhaps some rolling scheme could be devised. For an added measure of verification, the SoC could upload them (optionally encrypted) to a distributed public store like a blockchain or IPFS, proving that they were created at/around a certain time. This seems like it would be useful in concert with other tools for news agencies (who should be leading the way in providing as much documented research and evidence for things as they can, as a matter of course, while protecting their sources), law enforcement (who is losing the public’s trust when it comes to the chain of custody and testimony), etc. We jumped very far ahead both in how much importance we place on digital documents and in how easily we can forge them, so we need to catch up fast on finding robust mechanisms for verification.
- UncleMeat 9y agoKerry was getting photoshopped into propaganda photos in 2004. The new thing isn't fake documents. The new thing is a highly scalable social media infrastructure to share false documents widely.
- amai 9y agoThere will be no next election in the US.