7 ms·

Fake Barack Obama delivers a PSA about “deep fakes” using a deep fake video

153 points by jmheinkle 8y ago

minimaxir 8y ago
BuzzFeed's article with the backstory behind this video: https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-peele-psa-video-buzzfeed https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-pe... (Disclosure: I work for BuzzFeed)
- passivepinetree 8y ago
  Off topic, but what is working for Buzzfeed like? I used to hate everything Buzzfeed-branded, but it seems like it's been improving journalistically recently. How are the working conditions? Do you believe in your purpose?
  - eropple 8y ago
    Even "lately" is unfair, I think. They hired Mark Schoofs (ProPublica) in 2013 and have steadily been doing work since probably even before that.
nlawalker 8y ago
Can the misleading headline be fixed? The actual headline is more clear about what this is.
- jmheinkle 8y ago
  Added “Fake” in front of Obama. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.
Mc_Big_G 8y ago
Many people already fool themselves by simply refusing to fact-check anything that doesn't support their biases. If you thought "alternative facts" were bad now, just wait for this tech to hit 100% believability.
- aphextron 8y ago
  The disturbing fact is that this stuff is progressing in near real-time. A year ago these things were still totally unpassable. Now this Obama video could very easily fool a good percentage of people on mobile. I've no doubt it will be imperceptible within another year or two.
  - millzlane 8y ago
    It doesn't take much for people to panic.
white-flame 8y ago
> It's a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources That's the rub, isn't it? Who's a "trusted" new source? All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Lots of people therefore consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don't to be more "trusted" in response. We shouldn't "rely" on single points of perceived trust, especially in this massive for-profit, for-power media industry. We need to be broadly informed from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable sense of what's going on.
- untog 8y ago
  > All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Bunching those together feels disingenuous. Do the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, etc etc all have their own perspectives? Sure. That's bias, to an extent. But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting? To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal. The same is not the case for Infowars. I agree with you that everyone should have as diverse a media diet as they can, but suggesting that every company is as bad as each other is simply inaccurate.
  - carry_bit 8y ago
    > To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal. Caught how? You could show people the original video, but the reputable outlet and its allies would be pushing the narrative that the so-called "original" video is a deep fake produced and pushed by conspiracy theorists. After all, our outlet would never lie, would they? I suspect the scandal would be less publication-ending than you think.
  - white-flame 8y ago
    The magnitude of incorrectness/malicousness in reporting is irrelevant to this: No single source will leave you with a broadly-informed understanding, even if by simple way of time/space constraints in their output. Even the simplest of biases affects editorial decisions as to which content to prefer over others. Omissions of viewpoints or of counterpoint example stories means you don't get the big picture, even without some massive media scandal. People scream distrust at media channels for leaving out information they view as critical, and go elsewhere to find those details (for better or worse).
illustrioussuit 8y ago
Non-Amp (Canonical) URL: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-new... Speedtest comparison: https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X6_31f1012439e81cf8edeff5385b1f6cfb,180417_JG_9bac43c1583615cbfa464953736f2861 https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X...
- gowld 8y ago
  Another comparison (goes the other way after 4.5s) https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_FK_cee1cf11d92a90a01c8354ae88bef2d3,180417_PE_d9c937eab738e6e85f82ee1253f72094 https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_F...
- liam-tait 8y ago
  Glad i could read the title https://imgur.com/a/bFoPk https://imgur.com/a/bFoPk
TillE 8y ago
That sounds like a really bad Obama impersonator. The video is OK but still obviously fake. If you look at the progression of film CGI, with its persistent flaws despite massive budgets, there's no reason to suspect that indistinguishable fakes are coming any time soon.
- gowld 8y ago
  Sure, the video is obviously fake. But it's also good enough that it's not "obvious" to anyone who doesn't remember Obama's exact face and voice, and it's good enough that it gives plausibility to anyone calling a real video with slightly distorted audio or video a fake!
- da_chicken 8y ago
  We've been able to fake voice recordings for decades. Doing it again is not the impressive part of the video. It's a tech demo for the video showing how close it is to working. The point of the video is that this was made with Adobe After Effects and FakeApp and 56 hours of rendering time. COTS software on COTS hardware. You won't even need a good impersonator, however. The same technology behind FakeApp that blends this video together could be used to blend audio together. This is supposed to look fake and sound fake because you're supposed to see it as fake. What happens when that isn't true anymore?
ppod 8y ago
The voice sounds wrong, is the voice AI? I'm sure I've seen better AI voice demos than this --- though the video is impressive.
- tschwimmer 8y ago
  The voice is just Jordan Peele (comedian) doing a Barack Obama impression. The 'AI' is in the video, specifically the lip syncing.
  - comex 8y ago
    What’ll really be interesting is if someone gets deep voice conversion to produce a plausible output, and combines it with this technique. As is, I think it’s still not enough to really fool people, at least with that particular voice actor... But people really tend to trust voices.
    - roddux 8y ago
      I'm sure LyreBird will get there eventually: https://soundcloud.com/user-535691776/dialog https://soundcloud.com/user-535691776/dialog As far as I can tell, it's still early days for the audio faking side of things. I'd give it a year or two before it's indistinguishable from real voice. Then we're in trouble.
    - georgemcbay 8y ago
      Adobe has demoed software for this (interestingly, Jordan Peele also in this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw Whether the demo is accurate or massaged, I can't say as I've never used the software myself. But if it is anywhere near as good as their demo suggests, it produces output that is more natural than the current deepfakes video outputs (though it also isn't perfect).
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      It has already been done. 20 years ago a research team created a very convincing fake Whoopie Goldberg. Never heard about it since. Anyone's guess who blacked out that technology.
otakucode 8y ago
I'm a little disappointed that it took this long for people to get over the 'OMG celebrity porno' thing about deepfakes to actually start dealing with the real potential consequences. Deepfakes open up an amazingly large list of questions, from the mundane to the truly challenging. That someone will see imagery that fulfills a sexual fantasy is, by far, one of the most trite and harmless possible uses of this technology. Realtime video synthesis has been around for awhile. I recall reading in 1999 that if you watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, the advertisements on the buildings you see won't be the advertisements that are actually present in real life. They were being replaced on the fly with different ads. Now, it's basically possible to replace people. Everywhere that people appear. And this isn't something we can deal with simply by going off of gut reaction and intuition, it really raises significant questions. Who will be the first politician to use a younger version of themselves to promote themselves? Which celebrity will be first to replace not the face, but their body, in film to make themselves more attractive? Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? Or maybe they'll only bring in the actual celebrity for close shots? This can be done on commodity hardware, and will only get easier. It will be used for schoolyard bullying, for amazingly uplifting and important artistic works, for debasement and aggrandizement. It's one of these things that we've got to do some thinking about as a society.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  > Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? I believe that studios have done with dead actors. Paul Walker and the guy who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One being examples that came immediately to mind.
  - pixel_fcker 8y ago
    That’s using fully digital versions of those actors though. We’re a long way from being able to use AI for those kind of performances yet.
paul7986 8y ago
that doesn’t sound like Obama.. ppl would definitely comment wondering why he sounds different.
- kelnos 8y ago
  Right, it's just Jordan Peele doing an impression. I agree that a lot of people would immediately notice the difference and get that it's fake, but I expect there's also a significant number of people who wouldn't.
- BinaryIdiot 8y ago
  It's not him for sure but I thought it sounded really good. It's only going to get better, too, when we have a good AI or other type of solution to replicate his voice and mannerisms.
ezoe 8y ago
I don't know, for this type of fake video, you don't even need a face mapping or a voice mapping implemented by deep learning. Just take any random Barack Obama video which we have plenty of, use similar male voice, or copy&paste convenient Obama's voice without context, and some people believe it. It won't fool everybody but that is not that important. Some people still believe it and act accordingly(Pizzagate conspiracy theory) and that's more than enough to achieve the malicious intent.
walrus01 8y ago
Here's what I'm worried about with fake video. If you think fake Russian bot news in US politics is a problem, consider the following. Facebook is increasingly populated with a large number of new users from developing nations who are basically one or two generations removed from subsistence farming. The level of naivete and rumor spreading that you can see in Pakistani Facebook is alarming. Now combine nation-state funded agitprop campaigns with naive users and fake video. Read the following article and imagune how much worse it could be if a malicious organization with funding decided to further weaponize content on myanmar-oriented Facebook groups and pages. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...
- adamson 8y ago
  Why should we assume that being one or two generations removed from subsistence farming implies that a user is naive? There are plenty of naive persons worldwide who grew up in middle class households in the West who are just as naive. I don't think the connection is that clean.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    As an example: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f... My spouse, who is a native fluent speaker of the languages, follows a large number of Dari and Urdu language Facebook groups and friends. If you think Americans have a problem with reposting stupid things that can be easily debunked by Snopes, you would not believe the amount of naivete on display daily in those language formats. It's hard to explain unless you've seen it firsthand. People who are one generation removed from subsistence farming are not less intelligent than others. However, they and the family have had a lot less time to view mass media bullshit (tv cable news, internet, etc) and develop the mental callouses necessary to understand the nature of media biases, who owns what media organizations. And in general have had less formal secondary education at the post high school level that teaches critical thinking, skepticism and gain some degree of innoculation against propaganda.
tbodt 8y ago
Can we get the link changed to the non-amp version? https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-new...
jdoliner 8y ago
I think people are seeing the risks of people creating fake videos but there's another risk that I think is being overlooked. As convincing fake videos become a reality and articles like this inform the general public of that reality it becomes incredibly easy to dismiss any inconvenient videos as deep fakes. If Mitt Romney had made his 47% comment in the present climate he likely would have been able to skate by saying that was a deep fake, created by political adversaries.

153 points by jmheinkle 8y ago

BuzzFeed's article with the backstory behind this video: https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-peele-psa-video-buzzfeed https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-pe... (Disclosure: I work for BuzzFeed)

passivepinetree 8y ago
Off topic, but what is working for Buzzfeed like? I used to hate everything Buzzfeed-branded, but it seems like it's been improving journalistically recently. How are the working conditions? Do you believe in your purpose?
- eropple 8y ago
  Even "lately" is unfair, I think. They hired Mark Schoofs (ProPublica) in 2013 and have steadily been doing work since probably even before that.

nlawalker 8y ago

Can the misleading headline be fixed? The actual headline is more clear about what this is.

jmheinkle 8y ago
Added “Fake” in front of Obama. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Mc_Big_G 8y ago

Many people already fool themselves by simply refusing to fact-check anything that doesn't support their biases. If you thought "alternative facts" were bad now, just wait for this tech to hit 100% believability.

aphextron 8y ago
The disturbing fact is that this stuff is progressing in near real-time. A year ago these things were still totally unpassable. Now this Obama video could very easily fool a good percentage of people on mobile. I've no doubt it will be imperceptible within another year or two.
- millzlane 8y ago
  It doesn't take much for people to panic.

white-flame 8y ago

> It's a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources That's the rub, isn't it? Who's a "trusted" new source? All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Lots of people therefore consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don't to be more "trusted" in response. We shouldn't "rely" on single points of perceived trust, especially in this massive for-profit, for-power media industry. We need to be broadly informed from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable sense of what's going on.

untog 8y ago
> All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Bunching those together feels disingenuous. Do the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, etc etc all have their own perspectives? Sure. That's bias, to an extent. But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting? To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal. The same is not the case for Infowars. I agree with you that everyone should have as diverse a media diet as they can, but suggesting that every company is as bad as each other is simply inaccurate.
- carry_bit 8y ago
  > To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal. Caught how? You could show people the original video, but the reputable outlet and its allies would be pushing the narrative that the so-called "original" video is a deep fake produced and pushed by conspiracy theorists. After all, our outlet would never lie, would they? I suspect the scandal would be less publication-ending than you think.
- white-flame 8y ago
  The magnitude of incorrectness/malicousness in reporting is irrelevant to this: No single source will leave you with a broadly-informed understanding, even if by simple way of time/space constraints in their output. Even the simplest of biases affects editorial decisions as to which content to prefer over others. Omissions of viewpoints or of counterpoint example stories means you don't get the big picture, even without some massive media scandal. People scream distrust at media channels for leaving out information they view as critical, and go elsewhere to find those details (for better or worse).

illustrioussuit 8y ago

Non-Amp (Canonical) URL: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-new... Speedtest comparison: https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X6_31f1012439e81cf8edeff5385b1f6cfb,180417_JG_9bac43c1583615cbfa464953736f2861 https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X...

gowld 8y ago
Another comparison (goes the other way after 4.5s) https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_FK_cee1cf11d92a90a01c8354ae88bef2d3,180417_PE_d9c937eab738e6e85f82ee1253f72094 https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_F...
liam-tait 8y ago
Glad i could read the title https://imgur.com/a/bFoPk https://imgur.com/a/bFoPk

TillE 8y ago

That sounds like a really bad Obama impersonator. The video is OK but still obviously fake. If you look at the progression of film CGI, with its persistent flaws despite massive budgets, there's no reason to suspect that indistinguishable fakes are coming any time soon.

gowld 8y ago
Sure, the video is obviously fake. But it's also good enough that it's not "obvious" to anyone who doesn't remember Obama's exact face and voice, and it's good enough that it gives plausibility to anyone calling a real video with slightly distorted audio or video a fake!
da_chicken 8y ago
We've been able to fake voice recordings for decades. Doing it again is not the impressive part of the video. It's a tech demo for the video showing how close it is to working. The point of the video is that this was made with Adobe After Effects and FakeApp and 56 hours of rendering time. COTS software on COTS hardware. You won't even need a good impersonator, however. The same technology behind FakeApp that blends this video together could be used to blend audio together. This is supposed to look fake and sound fake because you're supposed to see it as fake. What happens when that isn't true anymore?

ppod 8y ago

The voice sounds wrong, is the voice AI? I'm sure I've seen better AI voice demos than this --- though the video is impressive.

tschwimmer 8y ago
The voice is just Jordan Peele (comedian) doing a Barack Obama impression. The 'AI' is in the video, specifically the lip syncing.
- comex 8y ago
  What’ll really be interesting is if someone gets deep voice conversion to produce a plausible output, and combines it with this technique. As is, I think it’s still not enough to really fool people, at least with that particular voice actor... But people really tend to trust voices.
  - roddux 8y ago
    I'm sure LyreBird will get there eventually: https://soundcloud.com/user-535691776/dialog https://soundcloud.com/user-535691776/dialog As far as I can tell, it's still early days for the audio faking side of things. I'd give it a year or two before it's indistinguishable from real voice. Then we're in trouble.
  - georgemcbay 8y ago
    Adobe has demoed software for this (interestingly, Jordan Peele also in this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw Whether the demo is accurate or massaged, I can't say as I've never used the software myself. But if it is anywhere near as good as their demo suggests, it produces output that is more natural than the current deepfakes video outputs (though it also isn't perfect).
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    It has already been done. 20 years ago a research team created a very convincing fake Whoopie Goldberg. Never heard about it since. Anyone's guess who blacked out that technology.

otakucode 8y ago

I'm a little disappointed that it took this long for people to get over the 'OMG celebrity porno' thing about deepfakes to actually start dealing with the real potential consequences. Deepfakes open up an amazingly large list of questions, from the mundane to the truly challenging. That someone will see imagery that fulfills a sexual fantasy is, by far, one of the most trite and harmless possible uses of this technology. Realtime video synthesis has been around for awhile. I recall reading in 1999 that if you watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, the advertisements on the buildings you see won't be the advertisements that are actually present in real life. They were being replaced on the fly with different ads. Now, it's basically possible to replace people. Everywhere that people appear. And this isn't something we can deal with simply by going off of gut reaction and intuition, it really raises significant questions. Who will be the first politician to use a younger version of themselves to promote themselves? Which celebrity will be first to replace not the face, but their body, in film to make themselves more attractive? Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? Or maybe they'll only bring in the actual celebrity for close shots? This can be done on commodity hardware, and will only get easier. It will be used for schoolyard bullying, for amazingly uplifting and important artistic works, for debasement and aggrandizement. It's one of these things that we've got to do some thinking about as a society.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
> Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? I believe that studios have done with dead actors. Paul Walker and the guy who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One being examples that came immediately to mind.
- pixel_fcker 8y ago
  That’s using fully digital versions of those actors though. We’re a long way from being able to use AI for those kind of performances yet.

paul7986 8y ago

that doesn’t sound like Obama.. ppl would definitely comment wondering why he sounds different.

kelnos 8y ago
Right, it's just Jordan Peele doing an impression. I agree that a lot of people would immediately notice the difference and get that it's fake, but I expect there's also a significant number of people who wouldn't.
BinaryIdiot 8y ago
It's not him for sure but I thought it sounded really good. It's only going to get better, too, when we have a good AI or other type of solution to replicate his voice and mannerisms.

ezoe 8y ago

I don't know, for this type of fake video, you don't even need a face mapping or a voice mapping implemented by deep learning. Just take any random Barack Obama video which we have plenty of, use similar male voice, or copy&paste convenient Obama's voice without context, and some people believe it. It won't fool everybody but that is not that important. Some people still believe it and act accordingly(Pizzagate conspiracy theory) and that's more than enough to achieve the malicious intent.

walrus01 8y ago

Here's what I'm worried about with fake video. If you think fake Russian bot news in US politics is a problem, consider the following. Facebook is increasingly populated with a large number of new users from developing nations who are basically one or two generations removed from subsistence farming. The level of naivete and rumor spreading that you can see in Pakistani Facebook is alarming. Now combine nation-state funded agitprop campaigns with naive users and fake video. Read the following article and imagune how much worse it could be if a malicious organization with funding decided to further weaponize content on myanmar-oriented Facebook groups and pages. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...

adamson 8y ago
Why should we assume that being one or two generations removed from subsistence farming implies that a user is naive? There are plenty of naive persons worldwide who grew up in middle class households in the West who are just as naive. I don't think the connection is that clean.
- walrus01 8y ago
  As an example: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f... My spouse, who is a native fluent speaker of the languages, follows a large number of Dari and Urdu language Facebook groups and friends. If you think Americans have a problem with reposting stupid things that can be easily debunked by Snopes, you would not believe the amount of naivete on display daily in those language formats. It's hard to explain unless you've seen it firsthand. People who are one generation removed from subsistence farming are not less intelligent than others. However, they and the family have had a lot less time to view mass media bullshit (tv cable news, internet, etc) and develop the mental callouses necessary to understand the nature of media biases, who owns what media organizations. And in general have had less formal secondary education at the post high school level that teaches critical thinking, skepticism and gain some degree of innoculation against propaganda.

tbodt 8y ago

Can we get the link changed to the non-amp version? https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-new...

jdoliner 8y ago

I think people are seeing the risks of people creating fake videos but there's another risk that I think is being overlooked. As convincing fake videos become a reality and articles like this inform the general public of that reality it becomes incredibly easy to dismiss any inconvenient videos as deep fakes. If Mitt Romney had made his 47% comment in the present climate he likely would have been able to skate by saying that was a deep fake, created by political adversaries.