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Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

253 points by anarbadalov 9y ago

banderman 9y ago
History rhymes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
- empath75 9y ago
  also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
ygaf 9y ago
Do we need digital signing on every image/video in the news?
- Gys 9y ago
  I like it. Maybe a system similar to certificates used in https. So trusted partners signing photos and videos, maybe news agencies. The partners will be careful because there existence depends on this trust system. We will still have un-trusted photos and videos, but they can be recognized as such. Maybe browsers can add a small default 'logo' to an image or video, like the green lock now next to urls.
  - freeloop10 9y ago
    > The partners will be careful because there existence depends on this trust system. Th3 partners will be careful to not make waves. This does not mean they'll report the truth.
  - Retra 9y ago
    How does their existence depend on the trust system? All they have to do is sign videos. They can sign fake videos just as well as real ones.
    - wybiral 9y ago
      Yes but then there will be an auditable trail of signatures that would allow someone to tell who originally approved of the fake content.
- freeloop10 9y ago
  Signing by who?
  - beamatronic 9y ago
    Dan Rather Only slight snark intended. But let’s say the signing chain involves high profile individuals or corporations
  - wybiral 9y ago
    For news we can assume that it's signed by the journalists and news agencies who created the content. Or who researched the origin and are willing to put their credibility on the line. Edit: To clarify, this doesn't prove if something is real or fake. It just makes attribution of the origin easier and creates a traceable chain of trust.
    - Retra 9y ago
      So no video editing then?
      - wybiral 9y ago
        Not without losing the signature. But if you take a clip from a larger video you can (and should) refer back to the source.
      - iagooar 9y ago
        Maybe with a chain like with SSL certificates & authorities? Or maybe there could be a reference database with all the versions signed by a given authority so that you could verify it's an approved version? Why not go even further and show the same kind of alerts / block content if the source / signature can't be trusted?
      - chocolate_ 9y ago
        For my master's thesis, I designed/built a prototype that would track video modifications and add them to a signed report like this. Maybe it's finally relevant: http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2015/E_Houle_060215.pdf http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2015/E_Houle_0...
- beamatronic 9y ago
  Perhaps the model for “trusted news” would follow other established certificate signing models
  - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
    So what would the trust criteria be? There is a lot of credible disagreement about trustworthy media sources today after all.
    - beamatronic 9y ago
      The idea is that you could at least trace news back to the source. Whether you “trust” Fox News or ABC News or whoever is up to you. So this would be a client that shows you News items which are each signed and verified where they came from.
    - CM30 9y ago
      Especially given that in the modern media landscape, standards for what's considered trustworthy have changed significantly. Think about it, before it was usually 'did this journalism thing professionally without having a conflict of interest', and that's roughly how the likes of Wikipedia define reliable sources. But now that's not the case, and in many cases, it's amateurs who more trustworthy than the so called professionals are. That's true in science reporting (where it's often academics writing blogs and stuff outside of their university employment), it's true in technology (where many reliable sources are run by hobbyists) and it's true of the gaming and entertainment media worlds where fan sites, blogs and YouTube channels are often far more reliable than large media organisations are. A good solution here would basically need to be able to figure out that Science Blogs is more reliable than say the Daily Telegraph when it comes to science reporting, or that Serebii.net is more likely to be right about Pokemon than say the Guardian or BBC is.
49bc 9y ago
I really don’t think anyone is underestimating it. We’re just not buying into the hype. We somehow managed highly-realistic fake images. Why can’t we do the same with video?
dosycorp 9y ago
But not fake narratives, fake writing or fake news. Convenient that new media celebrities and individuals have greatest audience creation power through video, whereas traditional media still holds sway in print / news. So clearly, understand the origins of the narrative that "fake video" is more dangerous: creator videos are stealing mindshare from traditional media. So of course trad media wants to believe it's dangerous. Because it is dangerous to them. But not for the reasons it pretends. At least not more than fakery in trad media. Which there is plenty of. Including disguising a defense of their (failing?) business model, as a moral polemic, a subliminal plea that you need to trust "authority" outlets like them, more. But funny how the concentration of "authority" power, which occurs in places like fact check /snopes, is the very thing those places pretend to be against. Better in this distributed age to trust a sea of independent creators than a few authority sites, right? Even if the creators are all russian bots the concentrated few could all be pushing a single line. Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience. And get more of that, instead of more exposure to media.
- dangoor 9y ago
  > Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience. And get more of that, instead of more exposure to media. This is fine for certain contexts, but what about cases that can be important for individual people but outside their personal experience? Did Trump sign an Obamacare repeal (an example from the article)? That kind of thing matters for being an informed voter, but few people were physically present through the various bills that went before Congress. For much of day-to-day life, I agree with you. I just also think that reputation matters.
  - dosycorp 9y ago
    "Informed voter" Ha! An oxymoron that Socrates would have chided you for. :)
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      Y'en a pas un sur cent et pourtant ils existent.
wybiral 9y ago
Weaponized Mandela Effect?
threatofrain 9y ago
People don't underestimate it, they just don't know what to do about it. That's arguably more of a technological problem than a policy problem, the technical and philosophical problem of how to detect fakes.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Well I'll tell them what to do: Throw billions of dollars at data science prizes to create open sourced ways of detecting deep fakes. Have western intelligence agencies keep some methods private too, so we can detect it when someone has a way of getting through the open sourced scanners. Figure out how then did it, then open source a third way of detecting what they did while keeping the private scanners private. This is so obviously a problem to everything that we simply cannot allow this threat to be tolerated. Truth itself cannot be under attack. We simply must be able to trust video.
  - jpatrickpark 9y ago
    Billions of dollars might not be enough... I don't really see ways of detecting sufficiently realistic fake videos. The best we could do might be to find the original unaltered video, given that we have access to such video (which is unlikely if the fake video is meant to be an attack). Even then, it's not sufficient evidence to say the new one is fake (one can argue that the original is fake).
- hanbura 9y ago
  Technological solutions will help, but software to spot fake videos will lead to an arms race between video creation and video classification. The more promising angle is imho the society angle. Most people view their memory as the best source of truth, when in reality it's well established in psychology that our memory is incredibly unreliable. Previously this was mostly a problem for the justice system, now we risk entire nations being gaslighted. What we should be doing is trusting our written word, not our memory. Basically writing diaries and keeping newsletter articles, and checking both from time to time to keep wrong memories from manifesting All of that is very teachable
tgamba 9y ago
Except all video is fake, that is, all videos are artifacts, artificial things. "We’re not so far from the collapse of reality" -- am I the only one who finds this inane? No video is real. Critical thinking as applied to the written word applies equally to the image. It's not rocket science.
- royjacobs 9y ago
  Except everyone has been conditioned over the latest ~100 years to assume that everything they see in a video is real. That is: unless explicitly contextualised as fake, like when watching a movie. Your premise that everyone should just "apply some critical thinking" directly contradicts the events of the last couple of years, not just in the field of video but within any form of media.
  - Senderman 9y ago
    It sounds like you're agreeing with the original comment, but I think you might be paraphrasing it to highlight the absurdity. And it does seem absurd, but it's true: almost everyone has been conditioned to accept news footage as 'pure' truth, something at the other end of a reality-scale from, say, movies. I think it's hard to remember is that the majority of video is tailored with intent to evoke specific a response: To some degree, your reaction and emotions are at the mercy of the video producer - just like in a movie. Except in a movie, you have the safety switch of remembering it's "not real" - I think the lack of a corresponding mental failsafe with news causes subtle hysteria, confusion, and frustration. Contrary to a lot of conspiracy, I don't think it's malicious (mostly), and I believe fundamentally journalism has noble goals - but I don't see it as deniable that "news" as a whole is under pressure to be compelling, and that, albeit subtly, twists what we're exposed to. Crying "be more sceptical" isn't very helpful - it certainly wouldn't have helped me. I think more knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes of newsmaking might be more along the lines of what would help people, but I don't really know. "Fake" almost isn't the right word. "Disconnected from reality" - subtly - that's the phenomenon causing trouble, in my view. But anything that's disconnected from reality, taken as truth, is open to manipulation; scepticism is appropriate.
  - 9y ago
creaghpatr 9y ago
So are they advocating for tougher libel laws? The photo and video used as examples are pretty obviously fake, but even if it was indistinguishable, what then? Fake photoshopped images are so common now that ppl should assume any highly controversial/compromising photo that isn't corroborated by AP or Reuters is probably fake. Doesn't stop people from believing in fake photos or fake stories, but that's how it's always been and fake videos are the next logical step. Only solution I can see is to make it easier to prosecute entities that have demonstrated intent to defraud the public with fake news/images/video. The press would absolutely hate that, and rightfully so.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- hanbura 9y ago
  >The press would absolutely hate that, and rightfully so. Not only the press. Whoever is making the decision what's real is the ultimate censor and can decide which reality the voting public sees. Of course convincing, largely circulated fakes have a similar effect. But in a largely unregulated scenario it will at least be possible to notice that conflicting versions exist
  - creaghpatr 9y ago
    Would also need to distinguish between fake and parody too. For organizations like The Onion, will they create 'deep-fake' parody videos. Will they be allowed to? Since they can create parody news and images, I'm inclined to believe yes.
    - baq 9y ago
      Law must be adapted to technology. I wouldn't take anything for granted.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  It's not a legal problem... even the courts are going to have to grapple with the deeper underlying issue of how do we detect fake evidence. Courts rely on videos, pictures, and audio too.
fenwick67 9y ago
We've been able to make convincing fake video since the 60s (see Kubric). Even impersonators with good makeup can get pretty close. I don't see how new tech changes anything.
- VikingCoder 9y ago
  It makes it easier, cheaper, faster to create fake content. And then it's easier to get viewers and to spread virally. It's like you're asking why a modern CPU is any different than a PDP-11, since they're both Turing machines.
- PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
  As cost goes down it becomes more accessible. Take a fake video of the president. People are likely to be willing to buy the explanation someone went through the trouble of hiring an actor and makeup specialist to make such a fake video. But a fake video of a school board member? Does anyone really have the resources to spend all the money needed to hire a look alike and make a video? Would people be more willing to think like that and assume the video is true? I think so. Apps that can create realistic fake videos will get better and cheaper, meaning that increasing numbers of people will be able to create more convincing fake videos. At least for a while the technology will outpace the social awareness, and this gap is where we will see problems. Imagine a new form of cyber bullying that relied of using a fake app.
- SteveJS 9y ago
  It lowers the cost and effort, on an incredibly effective form of lying. It is effective because it engages a set of senses we have a harder time questioning ... and for good reason ... it’s (currently) easy to spot these unless you are really distracted. That’s because our brains blind us to how it constructs what we see ... we don’t get to continuously deconstruct our consciousness of red or blue, or a three dimensional reality. Such an adaptation would have been counterproductive. These videos cross back and forth in the ‘uncanny valley’ right now. I could easily tell it’s a fake, though i can’t explain why. Our ability to spot these with effort won’t be true forever. I do fully agree that people have overcome public lying in many forms. It does take a while for society as a whole to adjust.
lolc 9y ago
There will be a plethora of "Deepfake" apps for your pocket computer tomorrow. People will learn quickly not to trust video. They will have no choice because they don't want to fall for pranks. Humanity will stand through this.
- rossdavidh 9y ago
  My thought is that it is much like what to do about any new technological threat, for example too many calories or too much information or too many distractions while driving. Bad things happen, and after about a generation coping mechanisms get developed, and some people adopt them more successfully than others. One is reminded of how populations adapt to new diseases. One valid question, though, is whether or not the pace of introducing new technological threats to society has increased, such that we see something less like the Old World adaptation to the Black Death or malaria, and something more like the New World indigenous populations failure to adapt to getting all the Old World diseases introduced one after the other in quick succession.
  - lolc 9y ago
    We're able to distinguish entertainment "fake" video from "real" video in our minds. The separation is not clear-cut, and fictional movies affect our thinking about real events. So I understand the concern. But faking video is not a new invention. It's happened before and in a way I welcome the broad availability of faking-tools to inoculate against the fakes that have been with us since video existed. Now everybody will know that videos can be faked.
    - baq 9y ago
      Now everybody will be able to create convincing fakes. That's not continuous progress, that's a phase change.
      - lolc 9y ago
        I'm sure the same line of argument was made when desktop printers became abundant.
uptown 9y ago
There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in order to form a comprehensive viewpoint on anything, one much choose whom to trust. And that it's this part of the process of "understanding" which has been exploited. That people have been encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence. In this light point, when facts are irrelevant -- and if fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust then I fear for those advocating fact-backed positions. It's clear they'll face an uphill battle.
- gameswithgo 9y ago
  >That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure to In the case of climate change it is actually possible to self-inform yourself about some of the key aspects of climate change. Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". This was part of my path into figuring out who to trust, and it did take a while. Not everyone is going to have the time or inclination, and this is only 1 of a few dozen important political issues to understand! By the way my conclusion was that yes, global warming is absolutely a real thing, and absolutely caused by human activities.
  - uptown 9y ago
    > "Raw data is freely available (noaa and others)" But still - this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others. His point isn't really even about climate change. It's about debating the merits of any position, and what sources of information you trust to reinforce your position.
    - 9y ago
snowwrestler 9y ago
It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet. Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal website is going to be believed much more readily than an article by "Barack Obama" on some random blog. The same thing will happen with video. Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet, will generally not be believed until they're authenticated by some trustworthy source. This already happens with "amazing" web videos; they attract "this is fake!" comments unless they're vetted and vouched for by (for example) a news service.
- ajross 9y ago
  > Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. That's just stunningly naive. Imagine if Pizzagate or some other such nonsense was accompanied by a video of Podesta mumbling something about sex slaves. Fake News is a a real thing even without video corroboration. > Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet, You honestly think Breitbart of FOX wouldn't have run that in a heartbeat?
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    How many people believe Pizzagate is real? Shall we litigate the exact numerical definition of "not many?"--which is what I said, not "none."
    - lkbm 9y ago
      > How many people believe Pizzagate is real? That's a question that made me want an answer. It seems that, as of 2016, it may have been a lot: > Among the questions asked by pollsters was whether respondents believed that leaked emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager and published by WikiLeaks prior to the Nov. 8 election “contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse — what some people refer to as ‘Pizzagate.’ “ > ... > Specifically, 9 percent of registered Republicans who responded to the question said the allegations were “definitely true,” coupled with 40 percent of Republicans casting the claim as “probably true.”[0] A different December 2016 poll[1] also seems to put "yes"/"definitely" at it at 14%[1] with a lot of "maybes". Given the margins in US Presidential elections, it seems like the answer is "enough to matter". (Not that I think PizzaGate turned anyone from voting for Clinton or to voting for Trump, but fake news stories probably swayed a lot of voters overall.) [0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/28/pizzagate-theory-believed-by-nearly-half-of-republ/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/28/pizzagate-t... [1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_120916.pdf https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
SilasX 9y ago
Don't we get some version of this effect with fictional movies and TV shows? Your brain parses it as real, so you accept it at some deep level, even when you know it's fake.
wufufufu 9y ago
So what? If I didn't have access to any news outlets for the past 2 years, my life wouldn't have changed at all. Let's say there's a percentage of the population X% which is capable of being tricked by the current level of fake news. Do you think with new technologies, X will increase drastically? I guess that it will not change at all.
acjohnson55 9y ago
I think it's important to note that the truth has never been widely available, to the point where it might be useless to think of truth as being a real concept to begin with. One could say that for a blip of time, we lived in a world where a large percentage of human were pushed largely accurate (if incomplete) information by mass media, allowing for something resembling consensual reality and informed democracy. We have always had to delegate verification of information to third-parties, whether those be text books, media organizations, or government officials. I don't think we should be overly sentimental about the passing of this "golden age". We have never been a society ruled by facts and logic and we have been regularly misinformed all along. The difference now is perhaps a decentralization of who is controlling this misinformation and the realization by elite institutions that they now have to contend with their loss of monopoly, either by combatting perceived and real falsehood or coopting it. It is admittedly deeply unsettling, but only to what was probably a false sense of security. Maybe instead of fretting about how to obtain more truthiness in the face of these new dynamics, the more fundamental question remains how can we achieve human welfare in a world where informed democracy is an illusion?
- CM30 9y ago
  Similarly, it's also worth noting that the means of verifying a story or claim weren't widely available for a long time either. Seriously, go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so. How did you verify any claims at all? You usually just took people's word for it, or assumed their writings/paintings/memories were accurate. Unless you had the means to actively verify a claim yourself and the claim was about something you still could verify (aka the people involved weren't dead and the organisations and places there still existed), you never really could be sure. And the same sort of setup goes for other forms of evidence too. Audio evidence, video evidence, even things vital to crime solving now like fingerprinting and DNA testing are all new in the greater scheme of things. For most of human civilisation, being at least somewhat unsure of what's true and what isn't has been the norm, and the time periods where forms of evidence were easy to obtain and hard to fake few and far between. So yeah, it's definitely like a reset back to the olden days, and the challenges are certainly more about how to deal with informed democracy becoming an illusion again.
api 9y ago
I think it's safe to say that today any "evidence" without verifiable provenance can be entirely ignored. Absolutely anything can be forged, and in many cases using consumer PCs and readily available software. That means anonymous evidence or evidence with dodgy sources has zero credibility whatsoever.
hsribei 9y ago
One point that is often lost on the discussions of fake video/"deepfake" is that this development won't only make it easier to fool people into believing something that's made up, but it might also make people more distrustful of things which are actually true. When it's been spread out enough that anything can be doctored to an indistinguishable extent, everything becomes deniable by those being caught, and the skepticism explosion is going to raise the bar for investigative journalism / actual evidence to standards high enough that few will have the resources to produce them.
- baq 9y ago
  This is arguably what Putin's trolls are really after. If western societies stop trusting themselves, both internally and externally, it's an easy target for his men to pick up what's left of them. Note that non-democratic government's are much more resilient to this type of attack on trust, because there's much less of it to begin with.
- amarant 9y ago
  The optimist in me wants to say that this in turn might lead to people actually researching stuff and forming their own opinion instead of just going along with whatever headline they see first, but the pessimist in me says that's probably a pipe dream
Barjak 9y ago
I've been afraid of this for years. I guarantee you that there exist (or will exist) highly profitable consultancies which specialize in faking evidence. Just think about how easy it would be to launder a million here, a million there, disguised as legal fees in some of these large cases. We're approaching the limits of the traditional legal system with human juries. I don't how to solve this in the long term. I'll speculate that the solution will involve blockchains and a new, more minimal, totally decentralized legal system.
- PeCaN 9y ago
  > I'll speculate that the solution will involve blockchains and a new, more minimal, totally decentralized legal system. ok
- zackmorris 9y ago
  I was thinking blockchain as well, but as a source of truth. Imagine if all information on the web was spidered and added to a blockchain, then as new details emerge, those would be appended to the original data. So when someone fakes a video, the original video could/would get appended to the fake, along with the source of the fake, its financial connections to propagandists, etc etc etc. The problem will eventually become sifting signal from noise, because the "proof" will be everywhere. I still believe that in the light of full information, most people will come to see the truth. That depends on a lot of things though, like being educated, like having the time away from work and family commitments to ponder the deeper questions of life, like understanding the difference between deductive reasoning and dogma, etc. These are all things that authoritarians work tirelessly to take away. I guess what I'm saying is that the problem will become political, not technological.
SmooL 9y ago
I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of "We have fake images and fake news, how is this any different?", as well as "It's not like we could trust everything before, this doesn't really change anything". While both of those are true, they neglect two important details: 1) Fake videos are much more realistic than fake images, in the same way that fake images are much more realistic than fake text, and thus more believable 2) A large fraction of the population doesn't fact check anything and believes most anything that is spread around the internet, the logic being "if this many people viewed it and liked/reacted/shared this, it's probably true" I want to believe that we, as a society, have learned our lesson about fake news from the recent US presidential election, as well as Brexit. But I doubt it.
zyxzevn 9y ago
Reminds me of an old science-fiction where all events on the media were computer-generated fakes. There has been no "underestimating" of that potential. "Mind-warping" has been researched and is being research extensively by the CIA for some time. Most of that research is still top-secret, but well known are the extreme psychological manipulations of subjects during the MK-Ultra experiments. I will focus on the CIA and it's influence in the past, as this is more controversial and influential than that of other agencies/countries. The influence of MI5/6 or Mossad is great, but a lot of it is still hidden. The influence of the KGB was different, as the citizens did not really believe much in them to begin with. The Chinese are going a whole different way again. The CIA also did experiments involving the manipulation of the control of subjects in social media, like facebook. But it did not stop there. After the peace-protests during the Vietnam war, the CIA has infiltrated into the press and media and anti-war movements. They now use that influence to bend war and destruction into a peace-giving action. So we had "Freedom fighters" in Afghanistan etc. Which was portrait in the Rambo movie. And the US supported Saddam fighting Iran with US made chemical weapons. Later the US fights the parties that it created and armed. Some strange thing that keeps repeating in the US history. At the same time the CIA has the Phoenix program and other society destructive programs. They worked together with the "economic hitmen" and with local crime-lords to strengthen their destructive programs. The influence of the CIA in other countries was great, but it also worked into influencing the US elections. Jesse Ventura found himself talking with the CIA after he was elected, because they did not expect a "third party" candidate to win. And they wanted to prevent that in the future. Whistleblowers also show that they spy on political candidates, and pressure them (via blackmail?) before they even get into office. That way they can have direct influence on decisions. One well known example is that they spied on congress when they where investigating the CIA-torture program. Also they were able to destroy much evidence before it became public. Whistle blower Kevin Shipp explains how the CIA is out of control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQouKi7xDpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQouKi7xDpM But the CIA is not the only US-agency influencing the US elections. Every company is doing it too. Represent us: Corruption is legal in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig And just a few companies own all the press and media in the US. So while we are looking at potential fake videos, we have a fake press and fake democracy underneath that. It does not mean that everything is fake, but that it is controlled by agencies and companies that have their own agenda. And indeed we see videos and other media repeating agendas of certain political parties or of certain companies over and over again. We can actually stop this by putting the agencies and companies back into democratic control, and back into justice. And both need to be moved out of the democratic system. For example: Flint can never get fresh water if the companies and politicians involved can do whatever they like. It does not mean that other countries all do it better. Most have different kinds of corrupt systems in place. Small communities like Iceland, seem to be able to stop corruption. Maybe we can learn from them. So how can we counter this mind-warping? Well: How can you spot propaganda? If the same thing is repeated over and over again. When no evidence is shown. When a certain party or person is portrayed as "Hitler" or "devil" or as "heroes". When a problem is shown as black and white. When people are "just crazy". If you are only limited to 2 bad choices. If investigations are shallow, and many important questions are unanswered. Usually you can spot them with logical fallacies. So we need to learn to use logical fallacies and use critical thinking in all the news. And we need to be critical of all ideas. This includes your own ideas as our confirmation bias is also our downfall. And this brings us back to the story. If our mind is bend, we can learn to bend it back via critical thinking. And stop watching the news, if the same thing gets repeated over and over again.
aklemm 9y ago
Perhaps there's a need for an archive or registry of original video so that we can see all known footage of an historical figure. I'd like to have some way to combat the coming memes of John Wayne advocating for arming teachers and banning video games.
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
Is there not a chain of trust here that can be enforced with fairly simple technology. And then the trust in the technology is something like a "kite mark" - a global standard of handling video content. Let's take a simple example - I am a journalist who videos Obama talking. My raw video footage is tagged in each frame with a hash of the pixels in the frame. then I process the video, making linear cuts etc. If i publish the whole lot as a package, anyone else can come along and rerun the processing and check the hashes match up. This should be decentralisable and scalable. and we just have to get used to clicking the kitemark to check if anyone has verified the process or even run it ourselves. one could imagine a cottage industry of verifiers
- jpfed 9y ago
  I want to believe that something like this would work. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it the case that whatever signing could be performed on data coming from CCDs could also be performed on data coming from a GAN?
kazinator 9y ago
If fake videos become ubiquitous, people will not believe videos any more. Only complete idiots will riot over the content of a video. (The little problem there being that we have complete idiots.) There is one main problem with videos losing their credibility due to faking: namely that videos are a good weapon for documenting some nasty shit done by bad people.
bsenftner 9y ago
I developed an automated actor replacement VFX pipeline back in 2008, and patented the idea of automated actor replacements. My desire was to create a Personalized Advertising service where you and your family/friends appear in the ads on streaming video services. The system worked, I acquired the patents, globally, but needed VC or other financing to create the advertising service and agency. I got financing nearly closed with a number of investors, but every time a clause that the technology could not be used for porn was cited as their reason for pulling out. That issue was debated and I did not cave, as I knew an automated "insert anyone into porn" service was nothing I wanted to be associated. I pointed out the endless other possible applications, all high revenue, but simply having any limitations placed on the investors soured their ambition on the idea. Simply getting investors to understand it was difficult, even after demonstrating live actor replacements to them, and even then they were skeptical. I ended up pivoting to a game avatar service, and am now using the technology for facial recognition.
Arkaad 9y ago
What about fake photos?

253 points by anarbadalov 9y ago

banderman 9y ago

History rhymes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog

empath75 9y ago
also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

ygaf 9y ago

Do we need digital signing on every image/video in the news?

Gys 9y ago
I like it. Maybe a system similar to certificates used in https. So trusted partners signing photos and videos, maybe news agencies. The partners will be careful because there existence depends on this trust system. We will still have un-trusted photos and videos, but they can be recognized as such. Maybe browsers can add a small default 'logo' to an image or video, like the green lock now next to urls.
- freeloop10 9y ago
  > The partners will be careful because there existence depends on this trust system. Th3 partners will be careful to not make waves. This does not mean they'll report the truth.
- Retra 9y ago
  How does their existence depend on the trust system? All they have to do is sign videos. They can sign fake videos just as well as real ones.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    Yes but then there will be an auditable trail of signatures that would allow someone to tell who originally approved of the fake content.
freeloop10 9y ago
Signing by who?
- beamatronic 9y ago
  Dan Rather Only slight snark intended. But let’s say the signing chain involves high profile individuals or corporations
- wybiral 9y ago
  For news we can assume that it's signed by the journalists and news agencies who created the content. Or who researched the origin and are willing to put their credibility on the line. Edit: To clarify, this doesn't prove if something is real or fake. It just makes attribution of the origin easier and creates a traceable chain of trust.
  - Retra 9y ago
    So no video editing then?
    - wybiral 9y ago
      Not without losing the signature. But if you take a clip from a larger video you can (and should) refer back to the source.
    - iagooar 9y ago
      Maybe with a chain like with SSL certificates & authorities? Or maybe there could be a reference database with all the versions signed by a given authority so that you could verify it's an approved version? Why not go even further and show the same kind of alerts / block content if the source / signature can't be trusted?
    - chocolate_ 9y ago
      For my master's thesis, I designed/built a prototype that would track video modifications and add them to a signed report like this. Maybe it's finally relevant: http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2015/E_Houle_060215.pdf http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2015/E_Houle_0...
beamatronic 9y ago
Perhaps the model for “trusted news” would follow other established certificate signing models
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  So what would the trust criteria be? There is a lot of credible disagreement about trustworthy media sources today after all.
  - beamatronic 9y ago
    The idea is that you could at least trace news back to the source. Whether you “trust” Fox News or ABC News or whoever is up to you. So this would be a client that shows you News items which are each signed and verified where they came from.
  - CM30 9y ago
    Especially given that in the modern media landscape, standards for what's considered trustworthy have changed significantly. Think about it, before it was usually 'did this journalism thing professionally without having a conflict of interest', and that's roughly how the likes of Wikipedia define reliable sources. But now that's not the case, and in many cases, it's amateurs who more trustworthy than the so called professionals are. That's true in science reporting (where it's often academics writing blogs and stuff outside of their university employment), it's true in technology (where many reliable sources are run by hobbyists) and it's true of the gaming and entertainment media worlds where fan sites, blogs and YouTube channels are often far more reliable than large media organisations are. A good solution here would basically need to be able to figure out that Science Blogs is more reliable than say the Daily Telegraph when it comes to science reporting, or that Serebii.net is more likely to be right about Pokemon than say the Guardian or BBC is.

49bc 9y ago

I really don’t think anyone is underestimating it. We’re just not buying into the hype. We somehow managed highly-realistic fake images. Why can’t we do the same with video?

dosycorp 9y ago

But not fake narratives, fake writing or fake news. Convenient that new media celebrities and individuals have greatest audience creation power through video, whereas traditional media still holds sway in print / news. So clearly, understand the origins of the narrative that "fake video" is more dangerous: creator videos are stealing mindshare from traditional media. So of course trad media wants to believe it's dangerous. Because it is dangerous to them. But not for the reasons it pretends. At least not more than fakery in trad media. Which there is plenty of. Including disguising a defense of their (failing?) business model, as a moral polemic, a subliminal plea that you need to trust "authority" outlets like them, more. But funny how the concentration of "authority" power, which occurs in places like fact check /snopes, is the very thing those places pretend to be against. Better in this distributed age to trust a sea of independent creators than a few authority sites, right? Even if the creators are all russian bots the concentrated few could all be pushing a single line. Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience. And get more of that, instead of more exposure to media.

dangoor 9y ago
> Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience. And get more of that, instead of more exposure to media. This is fine for certain contexts, but what about cases that can be important for individual people but outside their personal experience? Did Trump sign an Obamacare repeal (an example from the article)? That kind of thing matters for being an informed voter, but few people were physically present through the various bills that went before Congress. For much of day-to-day life, I agree with you. I just also think that reputation matters.
- dosycorp 9y ago
  "Informed voter" Ha! An oxymoron that Socrates would have chided you for. :)
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    Y'en a pas un sur cent et pourtant ils existent.

wybiral 9y ago

Weaponized Mandela Effect?

threatofrain 9y ago

People don't underestimate it, they just don't know what to do about it. That's arguably more of a technological problem than a policy problem, the technical and philosophical problem of how to detect fakes.

3pt14159 9y ago
Well I'll tell them what to do: Throw billions of dollars at data science prizes to create open sourced ways of detecting deep fakes. Have western intelligence agencies keep some methods private too, so we can detect it when someone has a way of getting through the open sourced scanners. Figure out how then did it, then open source a third way of detecting what they did while keeping the private scanners private. This is so obviously a problem to everything that we simply cannot allow this threat to be tolerated. Truth itself cannot be under attack. We simply must be able to trust video.
- jpatrickpark 9y ago
  Billions of dollars might not be enough... I don't really see ways of detecting sufficiently realistic fake videos. The best we could do might be to find the original unaltered video, given that we have access to such video (which is unlikely if the fake video is meant to be an attack). Even then, it's not sufficient evidence to say the new one is fake (one can argue that the original is fake).
hanbura 9y ago
Technological solutions will help, but software to spot fake videos will lead to an arms race between video creation and video classification. The more promising angle is imho the society angle. Most people view their memory as the best source of truth, when in reality it's well established in psychology that our memory is incredibly unreliable. Previously this was mostly a problem for the justice system, now we risk entire nations being gaslighted. What we should be doing is trusting our written word, not our memory. Basically writing diaries and keeping newsletter articles, and checking both from time to time to keep wrong memories from manifesting All of that is very teachable

tgamba 9y ago

Except all video is fake, that is, all videos are artifacts, artificial things. "We’re not so far from the collapse of reality" -- am I the only one who finds this inane? No video is real. Critical thinking as applied to the written word applies equally to the image. It's not rocket science.

royjacobs 9y ago
Except everyone has been conditioned over the latest ~100 years to assume that everything they see in a video is real. That is: unless explicitly contextualised as fake, like when watching a movie. Your premise that everyone should just "apply some critical thinking" directly contradicts the events of the last couple of years, not just in the field of video but within any form of media.
- Senderman 9y ago
  It sounds like you're agreeing with the original comment, but I think you might be paraphrasing it to highlight the absurdity. And it does seem absurd, but it's true: almost everyone has been conditioned to accept news footage as 'pure' truth, something at the other end of a reality-scale from, say, movies. I think it's hard to remember is that the majority of video is tailored with intent to evoke specific a response: To some degree, your reaction and emotions are at the mercy of the video producer - just like in a movie. Except in a movie, you have the safety switch of remembering it's "not real" - I think the lack of a corresponding mental failsafe with news causes subtle hysteria, confusion, and frustration. Contrary to a lot of conspiracy, I don't think it's malicious (mostly), and I believe fundamentally journalism has noble goals - but I don't see it as deniable that "news" as a whole is under pressure to be compelling, and that, albeit subtly, twists what we're exposed to. Crying "be more sceptical" isn't very helpful - it certainly wouldn't have helped me. I think more knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes of newsmaking might be more along the lines of what would help people, but I don't really know. "Fake" almost isn't the right word. "Disconnected from reality" - subtly - that's the phenomenon causing trouble, in my view. But anything that's disconnected from reality, taken as truth, is open to manipulation; scepticism is appropriate.
- 9y ago

creaghpatr 9y ago

So are they advocating for tougher libel laws? The photo and video used as examples are pretty obviously fake, but even if it was indistinguishable, what then? Fake photoshopped images are so common now that ppl should assume any highly controversial/compromising photo that isn't corroborated by AP or Reuters is probably fake. Doesn't stop people from believing in fake photos or fake stories, but that's how it's always been and fake videos are the next logical step. Only solution I can see is to make it easier to prosecute entities that have demonstrated intent to defraud the public with fake news/images/video. The press would absolutely hate that, and rightfully so.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hanbura 9y ago
>The press would absolutely hate that, and rightfully so. Not only the press. Whoever is making the decision what's real is the ultimate censor and can decide which reality the voting public sees. Of course convincing, largely circulated fakes have a similar effect. But in a largely unregulated scenario it will at least be possible to notice that conflicting versions exist
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  Would also need to distinguish between fake and parody too. For organizations like The Onion, will they create 'deep-fake' parody videos. Will they be allowed to? Since they can create parody news and images, I'm inclined to believe yes.
  - baq 9y ago
    Law must be adapted to technology. I wouldn't take anything for granted.
threatofrain 9y ago
It's not a legal problem... even the courts are going to have to grapple with the deeper underlying issue of how do we detect fake evidence. Courts rely on videos, pictures, and audio too.

fenwick67 9y ago

We've been able to make convincing fake video since the 60s (see Kubric). Even impersonators with good makeup can get pretty close. I don't see how new tech changes anything.

VikingCoder 9y ago
It makes it easier, cheaper, faster to create fake content. And then it's easier to get viewers and to spread virally. It's like you're asking why a modern CPU is any different than a PDP-11, since they're both Turing machines.
PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
As cost goes down it becomes more accessible. Take a fake video of the president. People are likely to be willing to buy the explanation someone went through the trouble of hiring an actor and makeup specialist to make such a fake video. But a fake video of a school board member? Does anyone really have the resources to spend all the money needed to hire a look alike and make a video? Would people be more willing to think like that and assume the video is true? I think so. Apps that can create realistic fake videos will get better and cheaper, meaning that increasing numbers of people will be able to create more convincing fake videos. At least for a while the technology will outpace the social awareness, and this gap is where we will see problems. Imagine a new form of cyber bullying that relied of using a fake app.
SteveJS 9y ago
It lowers the cost and effort, on an incredibly effective form of lying. It is effective because it engages a set of senses we have a harder time questioning ... and for good reason ... it’s (currently) easy to spot these unless you are really distracted. That’s because our brains blind us to how it constructs what we see ... we don’t get to continuously deconstruct our consciousness of red or blue, or a three dimensional reality. Such an adaptation would have been counterproductive. These videos cross back and forth in the ‘uncanny valley’ right now. I could easily tell it’s a fake, though i can’t explain why. Our ability to spot these with effort won’t be true forever. I do fully agree that people have overcome public lying in many forms. It does take a while for society as a whole to adjust.

lolc 9y ago

There will be a plethora of "Deepfake" apps for your pocket computer tomorrow. People will learn quickly not to trust video. They will have no choice because they don't want to fall for pranks. Humanity will stand through this.

rossdavidh 9y ago
My thought is that it is much like what to do about any new technological threat, for example too many calories or too much information or too many distractions while driving. Bad things happen, and after about a generation coping mechanisms get developed, and some people adopt them more successfully than others. One is reminded of how populations adapt to new diseases. One valid question, though, is whether or not the pace of introducing new technological threats to society has increased, such that we see something less like the Old World adaptation to the Black Death or malaria, and something more like the New World indigenous populations failure to adapt to getting all the Old World diseases introduced one after the other in quick succession.
- lolc 9y ago
  We're able to distinguish entertainment "fake" video from "real" video in our minds. The separation is not clear-cut, and fictional movies affect our thinking about real events. So I understand the concern. But faking video is not a new invention. It's happened before and in a way I welcome the broad availability of faking-tools to inoculate against the fakes that have been with us since video existed. Now everybody will know that videos can be faked.
  - baq 9y ago
    Now everybody will be able to create convincing fakes. That's not continuous progress, that's a phase change.
    - lolc 9y ago
      I'm sure the same line of argument was made when desktop printers became abundant.

uptown 9y ago

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in order to form a comprehensive viewpoint on anything, one much choose whom to trust. And that it's this part of the process of "understanding" which has been exploited. That people have been encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence. In this light point, when facts are irrelevant -- and if fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust then I fear for those advocating fact-backed positions. It's clear they'll face an uphill battle.

gameswithgo 9y ago
>That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure to In the case of climate change it is actually possible to self-inform yourself about some of the key aspects of climate change. Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors". This was part of my path into figuring out who to trust, and it did take a while. Not everyone is going to have the time or inclination, and this is only 1 of a few dozen important political issues to understand! By the way my conclusion was that yes, global warming is absolutely a real thing, and absolutely caused by human activities.
- uptown 9y ago
  > "Raw data is freely available (noaa and others)" But still - this is a matter of whether one chooses to trust NOAA and others. His point isn't really even about climate change. It's about debating the merits of any position, and what sources of information you trust to reinforce your position.
  - 9y ago

snowwrestler 9y ago

It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet. Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal website is going to be believed much more readily than an article by "Barack Obama" on some random blog. The same thing will happen with video. Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet, will generally not be believed until they're authenticated by some trustworthy source. This already happens with "amazing" web videos; they attract "this is fake!" comments unless they're vetted and vouched for by (for example) a news service.

ajross 9y ago
> Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. That's just stunningly naive. Imagine if Pizzagate or some other such nonsense was accompanied by a video of Podesta mumbling something about sex slaves. Fake News is a a real thing even without video corroboration. > Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet, You honestly think Breitbart of FOX wouldn't have run that in a heartbeat?
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  How many people believe Pizzagate is real? Shall we litigate the exact numerical definition of "not many?"--which is what I said, not "none."
  - lkbm 9y ago
    > How many people believe Pizzagate is real? That's a question that made me want an answer. It seems that, as of 2016, it may have been a lot: > Among the questions asked by pollsters was whether respondents believed that leaked emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager and published by WikiLeaks prior to the Nov. 8 election “contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse — what some people refer to as ‘Pizzagate.’ “ > ... > Specifically, 9 percent of registered Republicans who responded to the question said the allegations were “definitely true,” coupled with 40 percent of Republicans casting the claim as “probably true.”[0] A different December 2016 poll[1] also seems to put "yes"/"definitely" at it at 14%[1] with a lot of "maybes". Given the margins in US Presidential elections, it seems like the answer is "enough to matter". (Not that I think PizzaGate turned anyone from voting for Clinton or to voting for Trump, but fake news stories probably swayed a lot of voters overall.) [0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/28/pizzagate-theory-believed-by-nearly-half-of-republ/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/28/pizzagate-t... [1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_120916.pdf https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

SilasX 9y ago

Don't we get some version of this effect with fictional movies and TV shows? Your brain parses it as real, so you accept it at some deep level, even when you know it's fake.

wufufufu 9y ago

So what? If I didn't have access to any news outlets for the past 2 years, my life wouldn't have changed at all. Let's say there's a percentage of the population X% which is capable of being tricked by the current level of fake news. Do you think with new technologies, X will increase drastically? I guess that it will not change at all.

acjohnson55 9y ago

I think it's important to note that the truth has never been widely available, to the point where it might be useless to think of truth as being a real concept to begin with. One could say that for a blip of time, we lived in a world where a large percentage of human were pushed largely accurate (if incomplete) information by mass media, allowing for something resembling consensual reality and informed democracy. We have always had to delegate verification of information to third-parties, whether those be text books, media organizations, or government officials. I don't think we should be overly sentimental about the passing of this "golden age". We have never been a society ruled by facts and logic and we have been regularly misinformed all along. The difference now is perhaps a decentralization of who is controlling this misinformation and the realization by elite institutions that they now have to contend with their loss of monopoly, either by combatting perceived and real falsehood or coopting it. It is admittedly deeply unsettling, but only to what was probably a false sense of security. Maybe instead of fretting about how to obtain more truthiness in the face of these new dynamics, the more fundamental question remains how can we achieve human welfare in a world where informed democracy is an illusion?

CM30 9y ago
Similarly, it's also worth noting that the means of verifying a story or claim weren't widely available for a long time either. Seriously, go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so. How did you verify any claims at all? You usually just took people's word for it, or assumed their writings/paintings/memories were accurate. Unless you had the means to actively verify a claim yourself and the claim was about something you still could verify (aka the people involved weren't dead and the organisations and places there still existed), you never really could be sure. And the same sort of setup goes for other forms of evidence too. Audio evidence, video evidence, even things vital to crime solving now like fingerprinting and DNA testing are all new in the greater scheme of things. For most of human civilisation, being at least somewhat unsure of what's true and what isn't has been the norm, and the time periods where forms of evidence were easy to obtain and hard to fake few and far between. So yeah, it's definitely like a reset back to the olden days, and the challenges are certainly more about how to deal with informed democracy becoming an illusion again.

api 9y ago

I think it's safe to say that today any "evidence" without verifiable provenance can be entirely ignored. Absolutely anything can be forged, and in many cases using consumer PCs and readily available software. That means anonymous evidence or evidence with dodgy sources has zero credibility whatsoever.

hsribei 9y ago

One point that is often lost on the discussions of fake video/"deepfake" is that this development won't only make it easier to fool people into believing something that's made up, but it might also make people more distrustful of things which are actually true. When it's been spread out enough that anything can be doctored to an indistinguishable extent, everything becomes deniable by those being caught, and the skepticism explosion is going to raise the bar for investigative journalism / actual evidence to standards high enough that few will have the resources to produce them.

baq 9y ago
This is arguably what Putin's trolls are really after. If western societies stop trusting themselves, both internally and externally, it's an easy target for his men to pick up what's left of them. Note that non-democratic government's are much more resilient to this type of attack on trust, because there's much less of it to begin with.
amarant 9y ago
The optimist in me wants to say that this in turn might lead to people actually researching stuff and forming their own opinion instead of just going along with whatever headline they see first, but the pessimist in me says that's probably a pipe dream

Barjak 9y ago

I've been afraid of this for years. I guarantee you that there exist (or will exist) highly profitable consultancies which specialize in faking evidence. Just think about how easy it would be to launder a million here, a million there, disguised as legal fees in some of these large cases. We're approaching the limits of the traditional legal system with human juries. I don't how to solve this in the long term. I'll speculate that the solution will involve blockchains and a new, more minimal, totally decentralized legal system.

PeCaN 9y ago
> I'll speculate that the solution will involve blockchains and a new, more minimal, totally decentralized legal system. ok
zackmorris 9y ago
I was thinking blockchain as well, but as a source of truth. Imagine if all information on the web was spidered and added to a blockchain, then as new details emerge, those would be appended to the original data. So when someone fakes a video, the original video could/would get appended to the fake, along with the source of the fake, its financial connections to propagandists, etc etc etc. The problem will eventually become sifting signal from noise, because the "proof" will be everywhere. I still believe that in the light of full information, most people will come to see the truth. That depends on a lot of things though, like being educated, like having the time away from work and family commitments to ponder the deeper questions of life, like understanding the difference between deductive reasoning and dogma, etc. These are all things that authoritarians work tirelessly to take away. I guess what I'm saying is that the problem will become political, not technological.

SmooL 9y ago

I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of "We have fake images and fake news, how is this any different?", as well as "It's not like we could trust everything before, this doesn't really change anything". While both of those are true, they neglect two important details: 1) Fake videos are much more realistic than fake images, in the same way that fake images are much more realistic than fake text, and thus more believable 2) A large fraction of the population doesn't fact check anything and believes most anything that is spread around the internet, the logic being "if this many people viewed it and liked/reacted/shared this, it's probably true" I want to believe that we, as a society, have learned our lesson about fake news from the recent US presidential election, as well as Brexit. But I doubt it.

zyxzevn 9y ago

Reminds me of an old science-fiction where all events on the media were computer-generated fakes. There has been no "underestimating" of that potential. "Mind-warping" has been researched and is being research extensively by the CIA for some time. Most of that research is still top-secret, but well known are the extreme psychological manipulations of subjects during the MK-Ultra experiments. I will focus on the CIA and it's influence in the past, as this is more controversial and influential than that of other agencies/countries. The influence of MI5/6 or Mossad is great, but a lot of it is still hidden. The influence of the KGB was different, as the citizens did not really believe much in them to begin with. The Chinese are going a whole different way again. The CIA also did experiments involving the manipulation of the control of subjects in social media, like facebook. But it did not stop there. After the peace-protests during the Vietnam war, the CIA has infiltrated into the press and media and anti-war movements. They now use that influence to bend war and destruction into a peace-giving action. So we had "Freedom fighters" in Afghanistan etc. Which was portrait in the Rambo movie. And the US supported Saddam fighting Iran with US made chemical weapons. Later the US fights the parties that it created and armed. Some strange thing that keeps repeating in the US history. At the same time the CIA has the Phoenix program and other society destructive programs. They worked together with the "economic hitmen" and with local crime-lords to strengthen their destructive programs. The influence of the CIA in other countries was great, but it also worked into influencing the US elections. Jesse Ventura found himself talking with the CIA after he was elected, because they did not expect a "third party" candidate to win. And they wanted to prevent that in the future. Whistleblowers also show that they spy on political candidates, and pressure them (via blackmail?) before they even get into office. That way they can have direct influence on decisions. One well known example is that they spied on congress when they where investigating the CIA-torture program. Also they were able to destroy much evidence before it became public. Whistle blower Kevin Shipp explains how the CIA is out of control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQouKi7xDpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQouKi7xDpM But the CIA is not the only US-agency influencing the US elections. Every company is doing it too. Represent us: Corruption is legal in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig And just a few companies own all the press and media in the US. So while we are looking at potential fake videos, we have a fake press and fake democracy underneath that. It does not mean that everything is fake, but that it is controlled by agencies and companies that have their own agenda. And indeed we see videos and other media repeating agendas of certain political parties or of certain companies over and over again. We can actually stop this by putting the agencies and companies back into democratic control, and back into justice. And both need to be moved out of the democratic system. For example: Flint can never get fresh water if the companies and politicians involved can do whatever they like. It does not mean that other countries all do it better. Most have different kinds of corrupt systems in place. Small communities like Iceland, seem to be able to stop corruption. Maybe we can learn from them. So how can we counter this mind-warping? Well: How can you spot propaganda? If the same thing is repeated over and over again. When no evidence is shown. When a certain party or person is portrayed as "Hitler" or "devil" or as "heroes". When a problem is shown as black and white. When people are "just crazy". If you are only limited to 2 bad choices. If investigations are shallow, and many important questions are unanswered. Usually you can spot them with logical fallacies. So we need to learn to use logical fallacies and use critical thinking in all the news. And we need to be critical of all ideas. This includes your own ideas as our confirmation bias is also our downfall. And this brings us back to the story. If our mind is bend, we can learn to bend it back via critical thinking. And stop watching the news, if the same thing gets repeated over and over again.

aklemm 9y ago

Perhaps there's a need for an archive or registry of original video so that we can see all known footage of an historical figure. I'd like to have some way to combat the coming memes of John Wayne advocating for arming teachers and banning video games.

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

Is there not a chain of trust here that can be enforced with fairly simple technology. And then the trust in the technology is something like a "kite mark" - a global standard of handling video content. Let's take a simple example - I am a journalist who videos Obama talking. My raw video footage is tagged in each frame with a hash of the pixels in the frame. then I process the video, making linear cuts etc. If i publish the whole lot as a package, anyone else can come along and rerun the processing and check the hashes match up. This should be decentralisable and scalable. and we just have to get used to clicking the kitemark to check if anyone has verified the process or even run it ourselves. one could imagine a cottage industry of verifiers

jpfed 9y ago
I want to believe that something like this would work. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it the case that whatever signing could be performed on data coming from CCDs could also be performed on data coming from a GAN?

kazinator 9y ago

If fake videos become ubiquitous, people will not believe videos any more. Only complete idiots will riot over the content of a video. (The little problem there being that we have complete idiots.) There is one main problem with videos losing their credibility due to faking: namely that videos are a good weapon for documenting some nasty shit done by bad people.

bsenftner 9y ago

I developed an automated actor replacement VFX pipeline back in 2008, and patented the idea of automated actor replacements. My desire was to create a Personalized Advertising service where you and your family/friends appear in the ads on streaming video services. The system worked, I acquired the patents, globally, but needed VC or other financing to create the advertising service and agency. I got financing nearly closed with a number of investors, but every time a clause that the technology could not be used for porn was cited as their reason for pulling out. That issue was debated and I did not cave, as I knew an automated "insert anyone into porn" service was nothing I wanted to be associated. I pointed out the endless other possible applications, all high revenue, but simply having any limitations placed on the investors soured their ambition on the idea. Simply getting investors to understand it was difficult, even after demonstrating live actor replacements to them, and even then they were skeptical. I ended up pivoting to a game avatar service, and am now using the technology for facial recognition.

Arkaad 9y ago

What about fake photos?