10 ms·

We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

136 points by theonionspeaks 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cpr 8y ago
Pretty clear the powers that be are using the mockingbird media to step up damage control for when certain damning videos of very powerful people start to drop...
olefoo 8y ago
I suspect it will be quite confusing for a while; but once people have been cheated a few times because of faked video it will become something else. We will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing. There is an opportunity for some type of chain of custody app that guarantees the integrity of footage from camera to screen...
- e40 8y ago
  We will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing. A small percentage will, but just like text-based fake news, most people will fall for it, every single time. Remember, fake video news that reinforces your world view will be so much easier to believe, just like with text-based news, than the truth.
  - olefoo 8y ago
    I'm not sure that most people fall for it every time; I think the problem is that many people prefer the fake version. They may know it's fake, but the lie that serves their prejudices is preferable to a truth that disadvantages them.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  > I suspect it will be quite confusing for a while; but once people have been cheated a few times because of faked video it will become something else. You're only half-right here. People will quickly wise up to fake video, but that will just make everything worse: every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, every video contradicting it will be "fake", just like what has already happened with text news. Your hypothetical chain of integrity between camera and screen won't put a dent in that conviction.
  - olefoo 8y ago
    > every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, every video contradicting it will be "fake" Yes, this has been true for quite some time already since even innocuous footage can be made to lie with creative editing. The chain of custody thing is already a problem and has been since courts started admitting photographic evidence.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  I'm not so sure if "we will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing" is going to happen - if anything, we should expect the video faking systems to adapt faster to this than masses of people; it currently has some issues with kinematics just because the concept is quite new and unpolished, give it an extra year or two, and those systems will pick up (and reproduce) the president's kinematics far better than I do.
api 8y ago
We are entering a period where nothing not directly sampled by one's five senses can be trusted. Any electronically recorded evidence can easily be faked and often using off the shelf consumer-grade equipment and software.
- derekp7 8y ago
  The problem (as stated in this article) is that we can't even trust that. Because we only have our memory of what our five senses detect, and these fake videos can alter our memory. One of the most vivid examples I recall was back in high school, seeing a video that was debunking the myth of "back masking" (having hidden messages when an "evil" metal song was played backwards). They played the same sound clip, with a transcription of the supposed hidden message on the screen, and I could clearly hear that message. Then they played the same clip but with a completely different message on the screen, and I could also distinctly hear that alternate message, in the same sound clip.
- zip1234 8y ago
  Check out the "You Are No So Smart" podcast. The author goes through all of the ways that our brain can be tricked/is tricked in daily life. https://youarenotsosmart.com/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/ For example, in one episode [https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory-illusions/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory-ill...]: "Julia Shaw’s research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that’s a potentially dangerous belief. Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime. In this episode, you’ll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth." TL/DR: What is reality? How can I even trust my senses?
  - api 8y ago
    That podcast is great. Should also be required listening for anyone who does any kind of investment. One reason people keep falling for the same scams over and over is that they think they're too smart to fall for a scam.
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
Everyone's talking about fake news but I'm just excited for the potential of democratizing movie making.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  Indie filmmakers could/would pirate actors' likenesses, the same way electronic musicians currently make bootleg remixes.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    It shouldn't be any harder to create unique digital-only actors https://news.developer.nvidia.com/generating-photorealistic-fake-celebrities-with-artificial-intelligence/ https://news.developer.nvidia.com/generating-photorealistic-... than to pirate likenesses.
    - gowld 8y ago
      Your digital star would need to work to achieve fame comparable to a real star. It's possible, but a difficult competition against the existing human social systems.
      - romwell 8y ago
        Well, Hatsune Miku[1] says hello, as do all four members of Gorillaz[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz
- xamuel 8y ago
  Or reviving dead actors/celebrities. New John Wayne films, new early-Beatles performances. Or personalized films: insert your own family into (insert family-friendly classic film). I hope we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
maybe it's just fakenews for you, but I've watched the video and decided that Obama saying: "stay woke bches", is the reality I want to fucking live in.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  on a serious note, it raises a lot of questions for forensics & anyone currently relying on the assumption that CCTV footage is enough proof in court. Considering how many IP cameras are already on shodan this is worrying for a many of reasons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525443
cryoshon 8y ago
at the moment, there are telltale signs of deepfakes if you know what to look for. various video editing issues, image glitches (visible in the obama/ahmadinejad photo in the article), lighting inconsistencies, sound oddities, etc. frighteningly, these glitches can be hard enough to detect even when the fakes are made with an amateur's level of attention to detail. this implies that there is already a very widespread use of the technology by people with the capability to edit out these glitches. with the technology of today, i think that state actors or potentially corporate actors could very easily generate nearly undetectable deepfakes if they cared to do so. i expect that they already have, in fact. but probably not where there would be a massive public eye to scrutinize an improbable or a ridiculous forgery. that would be too risky. instead, the state of the art of deepfakes is likely invested in making the realm of the plausible "into reality" in a targeted way for the sake of shifting opinion of small populations rather than 100% forming new opinions or causing an about face of prior opinions. consider, for instance, two allied militant groups in some warzone that the US has an interest in. the default condition for these populations is the fog of war, wherein information is often hard to come by and rumor runs rampant, especially among the combatants themselves. the US doesn't want the alliance of the groups to persist for whatever reason. now, introduce a very convincing deepfake video of the commander from one militant group plotting to do something that the other group -- and perhaps some of the original group's members -- would disagree with. there might be immediate chaos between the groups, but probably not. the most likely result will be that some people from each group see the deepfake and get convinced, then perpetuate the false information to others who haven't seen it. over time, the relations between these two groups will become strained, and their alliance may fray or fall apart altogether. the incentive to be able to cause these kinds of changes is undeniable. especially when populations are compromised in their ability to fact-check information by hard problems like insufficient internet access, deepfakes will be especially effective. the article worries about the total capitulation of reality at home to that of the fabricated image. no, that is not the risk at present. we have too many alternative channels to validate information. in fact, we are likely to evaluate information without even intending to by discussing information learned via one channel -- perhaps a deepfake -- with other people who may have learned about it via a different and contradictory channel. skepticism is becoming built-in. for people who aren't in the deep-information environment, however, deepfakes are already powerful enough to tilt reality to its preference...
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I don't think we're underestimating it at all, but we are simply already overwhelmed by fake text-based news like Twitter and websites/newspapers, as well as TV news shows spouting falsehoods. While fake video is surely going to be coming down the pipeline and will make things worse, the current issues are already terrible. Just looking at the 2016 US election, for instance, it was found that multiple fake stories were able to gain a tremendous amount of traction: whether that's the pope endorsing either candidate, health rumors about HRC, or the swirling controversies of Russia/emails/hacking. The solution has to be that individual citizens become educated, I don't see any silver bullet here.
- smofnoopttzzaaa 8y ago
  Certain types of elites will fight against education for this very reason. It erodes their control.
creaghpatr 8y ago
I think the risk is inversely proportional to how famous the person is. A political figure or celebrity will likely have the resources and publicly available metadata to show a video is fake beyond a reasonable doubt. I’d be more concerned to see manufactured outrage having some random supporter saying/acting bad to someone on the other team, inciting the Twitter swarms to descend- by the time they dox the individual it’s too late for that person to go back to their normal life.
- ethbro 8y ago
  You can't disprove a negative. If it's technically indistinguishable, I can't see a valid line of attack against it.
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  This has always been the case for libel and slander and other misinformation. High-profile people have more resources to fight bad information (devoted supporters, real life social networks, money, lawyers), and they're more likely to have detractors who've tested their capabilities already. The risk to them is great, but they have more tools to recover. The ones least equipped to defend against misinformation are people who have suddenly broken into the public sphere but lack the support systems to help their case. Typical sorts of people in this situation are fresh politicians (often local), viral 15-minutes-of-fame celebrities, and internet randoms who are called out online.
Bucephalus355 8y ago
FWIW, all audio/video communication technologies have been some what comically overestimated in their abilities. Two examples: - Henry Ford, believing that since “sight” was the universal language, movies (along with airplanes) would unite all people and places - Many people who believed television was so captivating when it first started to be introduced in the late 20s and early 30s, that it would replace nearly all books and teachers in schools I think people adapt really well to technologies more than we give them credit for. Of course the first few years lots of scams and dangers can arise, but they are figured out somewhat quickly by the powers that be.
- Miredly 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but your example falls a little flat when you look at how Fox News became the lynchpin of the shit-show the US is sinking in to right now. People adapted to it, sure- but that's the problem.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    If a single TV station had the power you describe you would think they might be a little more successful at using it by now. Not saying they have no effect, but if the station never existed I don't think our history would be drastically different.
    - gowld 8y ago
      What's make you think they are unsuccessful? Sure, a TV station can't annoint a President of whatever. The power to destroy is a weaker power than the power to create, but is still an immense power. Rupert Murdoch's lifelong business philosophy is that all information gatekeepers should be destroyed, so that no one's opinion (or facts) are elevated over any other's. It's pure libertarian-democracy of ideas that throws the baby (education and critical thinking) out with the bathwater (suppression of outsider voices). The modern "Internet of Trolls" is the culmination of his philosophy. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/rebekahwade-newsoftheworld https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/reb...
  - 8y ago
ryandvm 8y ago
I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.
- ZeroBugBounce 8y ago
  So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?
  - nawgszy 8y ago
    It seems to me it's the mere fact that humanity's rise was borne on the back of its ruthless drive and selfish greed, and the same things that made us the best hunters also influence society in myriad ways. In my eyes, greed, hierarchy, and limited compassion / an inability to share are the filter, and all society's diseases are the symptoms.
    - thaumaturgy 8y ago
      I'm really disappointed when I hear this kind of thing. It's a sentiment that so many people believe, and want to believe, and choose to believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's almost like a pernicious, psychological cancer, except it can also spread virulently to other susceptible hosts. Humanity's rise is due to lots of factors, especially the countless individuals who have worked to improve the health, well-being, safety, and wealth of the people around them. Greed is but one aspect of humanity, and unbounded greed destroys societies. Yeah, there are problems in 2018, but to sit here today, in the relative comfort of modern society, and say "we only have all this because we're terrible animals" is hugely disrespectful to the work of a lot of people.
      - ccvannorman 8y ago
        Hear, hear. Yes, you can look back at our animal past and at Chimpanzees and say we're a brutal, greedy, what-ever. But that is only a tiny sliver of conscious existence. What makes us human is the constant progression towards humanity - compassion, love, and society-wide safety and abundance. See Hans Rosling for some promising trends rooted in global facts over the past 100 years. Yes, there are still bad things "left over" from being animals, but these are declining over the decades ::across the board::
octosphere 8y ago
We’re also underestimating the mind-warping potential of detecting fake video via carefully trained algorithms.
- politician 8y ago
  Why not both? Generative Adversarial Networks http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative-adversarial-networks-code-tensorflow/ http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative-adversarial-n...
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    The particular videos are designed by this approach (GANs), and thus the generator is highly adapted to generate data that can't be distinguished from a real video with these techniques. If it's built with state-of-art GANs, then you don't be able to reliably detect it with discriminators from these state-of-art GANs. If you manage to build a better automatic discriminator than the authors did, then they could directly use it in the adversarial approach to build a better generator, and your detection approach would again cease functioning. Remember that in the end there's a fundamental asymmetry - in theory, there could be a perfect generator (not that we're close to perfect yet) that generates undistinguishable samples, and thus there can not be a perfect discriminator.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Questioning the authenticity of records (be they second hand accounts of events, paper documents or 1s and 0s) has been the norm since it became common for people other than royals and clergy to be able to read and write. Jefferson and Adams would not find the concept of "fake news" foreign at all. The sophistication of the authentication mechanism for a document usually has to do with the use case. Official letterhead was good enough for most important routine correspondence. Birth certificates get stamped. Money has fairly sophisticated anti-counterfeiting features. We'll remember the late 20th and early 21st century as the exception to the rule because during that time period if there was an audio/video recording of something you could be reasonably assured that it was legit. That won't be the case going forward. Audio and video will become a free for all like every other medium.
denimalpaca 8y ago
A good way to fight this is to cryptographically sign videos/audio. Might be a bit computationally expensive compared to a text message, but for very high-profile people, having a copy of the video/audio and it's cryptographic signature will be absolute proof against fakes. We don't even need AI algorithms to learn how to detect fakes in this case, it just becomes a matter of comparing hashes.
- munk-a 8y ago
  When there is a binary on the internets available from various mirrors with the primary authority on it distributing a SHA of it's contents then we can use that SHA to verify the contents of the binary... The issue here is that there is no trusted authority on the video, the people distributing the video are the content originators so we can use a signature to verify the video wasn't corrupted in transmission but not that it wasn't edited before it was signed. (this technique would work well if the concern was that videos from some primary source were being edited by a CDN entity helping to stream that video to viewers, which is entirely separate from the article)
  - sixothree 8y ago
    Wouldn't the authority have to be the device manufacturers?
    - munk-a 8y ago
      How would they technically accomplish this? Whenever a camcorder or phone or webcam was used would the hash be transmitted to the manufacturer and registered there? Would the device sign the video signature with some secret key? (similar to that big secret number you're not allowed to show) Assuming you got it to work sanely, how would you ensure that all manufacturers properly locked down their devices? Assuming there's a reasonable trust framework and you're able to enforce it... How would you allow legitimate video editing without allowing people to edit video to create misleading images? How would a movie cut between characters and an exploding model in a legitimate and signed manner without allowing someone to splice a politician's speech in with terrorist training videos? There is a lot wrong with this "Tech can fix it" approach.
steego 8y ago
It wasn't long ago that we didn't even have video, before that we didn't even have pictures. You had the option of believing or rejecting one or more accounts. You also had the option of suspending your belief/disbelief until you felt like corroborating evidence swayed you one direction or the other. Personally speaking, I'm often surprised at how certain people are about the information they ingest. It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" where points out that people more likely to read a paper critically if it uses a bad fonts, poor layout and some typos. It's not a ground-breaking conclusion, but the studies also implied that people tended to read papers less critically when they looked good. The idea is the mind has the tendency to substitute out critical thinking with heuristic thinking whenever it can. If a paper superficially resembles serious paper from a well-respected journal, there's a real temptation to ease up on the scrutiny because many other signals are suggesting your enhanced scrutiny is a waste of time and energy. I can't say for sure if our reliance on video and photographs over the last 100 years or so had helped or hurt our critical thinking. It's very easy to argue the hard work of photographers have been critical to bringing important issues and events to our attention. On the other hand, you can argue an over-reliance on images have stripped us from engaging our imagination. I know in a world of fake news, it would seem like the last thing we need is to engage people's imagination. When we hear the word imagination, most of us think about the skill the lets one fabricate novel stories or alternate realities. We don't think about imagination as a tool that people use to try to figure out our reality. A vivid imagination not only knows how to fabricate alternate realities, but it also knows how to incorporate information from the senses, books, articles and information to test and consider different world views. We need people who can absorb information about how the world works, and can project possible realities as well as many possible futures. I know I'm going long on this comment, and I don't want to come off as an optimist, but maybe we can use the advent of fake video to cultivate a culture that stops trusting passive sources of information (video) and begins to engage healthy critical thinking instead. I could be way off the mark and would love to hear someone tell me what I'm missing.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jokoon 8y ago
Who will the public believe if it is a high profile video? This might just end in court... This will induce peaks of paranoia into the minds of conspiratorial people. The bad side effect is that now, you can call any video a deep fake, and attack the authenticity of any video used against you.
stretchwithme 8y ago
Another potential use of blockchain technology. When an image is first captured, the time and a fingerprint generated from it will be recorded in a public blockchain that can't be tampered with. Then we can disregard images that don't have valid dates that match when the image was supposed to have been recorded.
- gowld 8y ago
  "We" can, but 99.99% of the public won't.
- tCfD 8y ago
  All this will do is encourage the proliferation of innumerable bespoke blockchains, created by parties interested in stamping legitimacy on illegitimate content. Each of these blockchains will be presented as equivalent to "the blockchain" with respect to being trustworthy proofs of original untampered content timestamps.
politician 8y ago
My personal belief is that we should be generating vast amounts of deep fake videos and audio clips now that the technology is available. We should intentionally and hastily move to pollute the information streams around us as rapidly as possible in order to force an evolution in how we process information. To attempt to slow down this arms race, or to ignore its implications just puts us at a further disadvantage to those that want to capitalize on the potential it brings them to arbitrage our "default accept" mindset against their fake agenda. For example, China's Great Wall will not protect them from deepfakes and indeed it actually makes the delivery of deepfakes into China more effective. The advantage afforded by weaponizing deepfakes only lasts as long as the audience defaults to trust without verification.
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  That's step 1. Step 2 is to provide a product that resolves the issue through crypto/blockchain certification.
  - andrewmcwatters 8y ago
    What does this mean? Can you elaborate?
- yifanl 8y ago
  So a form of targeted accelerationism? That's an interesting thought, but assuming it works as intended, wouldn't the end result of this be a total destruction of trust? A whole society where all non-physical interaction is treated with total suspicion can't be a pleasant one to live in. Maybe that's the end result either way though.
  - politician 8y ago
    The idea is to step back from the idea that we can trust media sources without verification. Trust _but verify_. Small groups and towns, places where people live and have a regular continuous presence, are more likely to be places of higher trust. Your typical broadcast media sources or your typical corporate social media sources, places where anyone with any agenda can buy their way onto your screen are not places that deserve high trust without verification. Given what we know now, screens of all kinds should be (and IMO, will become) known as low trust environments. Hastening that is paramount because in the intervening time you have a population that's susceptible to all sorts of manipulation. I'm suggesting nothing new. Be nice to people, and don't believe everything you read.
ikeboy 8y ago
We don't need fake videos when people like James O'Keefe and Sasha Baron Cohen can achieve the same effect using real footage obtained under false pretenses.
laurex 8y ago
What this article is getting at is that memory and "truth" are not really compatible concepts, which I think most neuroscience supports. Research around vision generally shows that even what we see, first hand (not in video) is an assemblage or construction, not a "record." Yet humans in general tend to believe that if they see something, it's either real or "faked" (like magic) rather than suspect because of the natural limitations of our brain system (which are also advantages for survival). We also have an even harder time to distinguish 'reality' when our emotions are involved. "Fake" video does present more of an issue, I think, than past "fake media", because we simply have more emotional response to it than other media.
extralego 8y ago
Are there any libraries for this available yet? What are the solutions we will use to verify authenticity? Will live speaking events become more valuable as a result? Many different angles of video will probably not be of much use alone, but useful for public events. I can imagine events in which the audience is surrounding the speaker, creating difficult-to-replicate-from-multiple-angles background noise. But this is just delaying the inevitable.
threatofrain 8y ago
What are people supposed to do about fake evidence when the main problem is the technological ability to detect? This isn't exactly a legal or social awareness problem. If a video is circulating the web and people don't know if it's real, but it looks real, and experts can't affirm its fakeness, then what are people supposed to do?
CM30 8y ago
Honestly, I have to wonder; is this just really returning back to the way things used to be? Think about it, we haven't had video or photo evidence for all that long relatively speaking, and it's only over time that our ability to 'prove' things became more absolute. First it was just speech and choosing who to believe, then writing came into the picture (along with paintings and drawn art), then over time voice/sound/radio recordings, photography, videos, etc. For most of human history, we haven't had great evidence, and in many ways were in the exact same situation we may end up in after these fake videos hit the mainstream. History is a long line of people attempting to 'prove' things, and fakers gradually getting better at lying in a near endless arms race. We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and we'll survive in that situation again in future.
- steego 8y ago
  > We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and we'll survive in that situation again in future. Surviving isn't the issue, quality of life is. You made the point that "fakers [have] gradually [gotten] better at lying in a near endless arms race." While I understand that things have a tendency to stay the same, history has also shown trends that have lasted thousands of years can also be punctuated in relatively short periods. Sure, people have lied and faked for thousands of years, but fake videos just might be the critical inflection point that in our timeline that creates a huge asymmetry of power and influence. What sets this apart isn't the technical quality of the lie, it's the agents that are performing the lie: Machines. Not only are machines capable of fabricating evidence, they are incredibly effective at measuring the efficacy. Lies can be cheaply produced, tailored for very specific micro-demographics, and directly sent to their intended recipients. The early 20th century showed us how broadcast radio could be exploited for propaganda warfare. The early 21st century could show us how history rhymes when well financed organizations or nation states can finance disinformation campaigns that leverage machine learning.
flingo 8y ago
Anyone know of technology to invisibly watermark video/audio? This would be great for enforcing copyright on sites like youtube.
- criddell 8y ago
  The watermarking scheme would have to survive the compression that YouTube applies to video.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cpr 8y ago

Pretty clear the powers that be are using the mockingbird media to step up damage control for when certain damning videos of very powerful people start to drop...

olefoo 8y ago

I suspect it will be quite confusing for a while; but once people have been cheated a few times because of faked video it will become something else. We will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing. There is an opportunity for some type of chain of custody app that guarantees the integrity of footage from camera to screen...

e40 8y ago
We will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing. A small percentage will, but just like text-based fake news, most people will fall for it, every single time. Remember, fake video news that reinforces your world view will be so much easier to believe, just like with text-based news, than the truth.
- olefoo 8y ago
  I'm not sure that most people fall for it every time; I think the problem is that many people prefer the fake version. They may know it's fake, but the lie that serves their prejudices is preferable to a truth that disadvantages them.
Analemma_ 8y ago
> I suspect it will be quite confusing for a while; but once people have been cheated a few times because of faked video it will become something else. You're only half-right here. People will quickly wise up to fake video, but that will just make everything worse: every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, every video contradicting it will be "fake", just like what has already happened with text news. Your hypothetical chain of integrity between camera and screen won't put a dent in that conviction.
- olefoo 8y ago
  > every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, every video contradicting it will be "fake" Yes, this has been true for quite some time already since even innocuous footage can be made to lie with creative editing. The chain of custody thing is already a problem and has been since courts started admitting photographic evidence.
PeterisP 8y ago
I'm not so sure if "we will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing" is going to happen - if anything, we should expect the video faking systems to adapt faster to this than masses of people; it currently has some issues with kinematics just because the concept is quite new and unpolished, give it an extra year or two, and those systems will pick up (and reproduce) the president's kinematics far better than I do.

api 8y ago

We are entering a period where nothing not directly sampled by one's five senses can be trusted. Any electronically recorded evidence can easily be faked and often using off the shelf consumer-grade equipment and software.

derekp7 8y ago
The problem (as stated in this article) is that we can't even trust that. Because we only have our memory of what our five senses detect, and these fake videos can alter our memory. One of the most vivid examples I recall was back in high school, seeing a video that was debunking the myth of "back masking" (having hidden messages when an "evil" metal song was played backwards). They played the same sound clip, with a transcription of the supposed hidden message on the screen, and I could clearly hear that message. Then they played the same clip but with a completely different message on the screen, and I could also distinctly hear that alternate message, in the same sound clip.
zip1234 8y ago
Check out the "You Are No So Smart" podcast. The author goes through all of the ways that our brain can be tricked/is tricked in daily life. https://youarenotsosmart.com/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/ For example, in one episode [https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory-illusions/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory-ill...]: "Julia Shaw’s research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that’s a potentially dangerous belief. Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime. In this episode, you’ll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth." TL/DR: What is reality? How can I even trust my senses?
- api 8y ago
  That podcast is great. Should also be required listening for anyone who does any kind of investment. One reason people keep falling for the same scams over and over is that they think they're too smart to fall for a scam.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

Everyone's talking about fake news but I'm just excited for the potential of democratizing movie making.

creaghpatr 8y ago
Indie filmmakers could/would pirate actors' likenesses, the same way electronic musicians currently make bootleg remixes.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  It shouldn't be any harder to create unique digital-only actors https://news.developer.nvidia.com/generating-photorealistic-fake-celebrities-with-artificial-intelligence/ https://news.developer.nvidia.com/generating-photorealistic-... than to pirate likenesses.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Your digital star would need to work to achieve fame comparable to a real star. It's possible, but a difficult competition against the existing human social systems.
    - romwell 8y ago
      Well, Hatsune Miku[1] says hello, as do all four members of Gorillaz[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz
xamuel 8y ago
Or reviving dead actors/celebrities. New John Wayne films, new early-Beatles performances. Or personalized films: insert your own family into (insert family-friendly classic film). I hope we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

maybe it's just fakenews for you, but I've watched the video and decided that Obama saying: "stay woke bches", is the reality I want to fucking live in.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
on a serious note, it raises a lot of questions for forensics & anyone currently relying on the assumption that CCTV footage is enough proof in court. Considering how many IP cameras are already on shodan this is worrying for a many of reasons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525443

cryoshon 8y ago

at the moment, there are telltale signs of deepfakes if you know what to look for. various video editing issues, image glitches (visible in the obama/ahmadinejad photo in the article), lighting inconsistencies, sound oddities, etc. frighteningly, these glitches can be hard enough to detect even when the fakes are made with an amateur's level of attention to detail. this implies that there is already a very widespread use of the technology by people with the capability to edit out these glitches. with the technology of today, i think that state actors or potentially corporate actors could very easily generate nearly undetectable deepfakes if they cared to do so. i expect that they already have, in fact. but probably not where there would be a massive public eye to scrutinize an improbable or a ridiculous forgery. that would be too risky. instead, the state of the art of deepfakes is likely invested in making the realm of the plausible "into reality" in a targeted way for the sake of shifting opinion of small populations rather than 100% forming new opinions or causing an about face of prior opinions. consider, for instance, two allied militant groups in some warzone that the US has an interest in. the default condition for these populations is the fog of war, wherein information is often hard to come by and rumor runs rampant, especially among the combatants themselves. the US doesn't want the alliance of the groups to persist for whatever reason. now, introduce a very convincing deepfake video of the commander from one militant group plotting to do something that the other group -- and perhaps some of the original group's members -- would disagree with. there might be immediate chaos between the groups, but probably not. the most likely result will be that some people from each group see the deepfake and get convinced, then perpetuate the false information to others who haven't seen it. over time, the relations between these two groups will become strained, and their alliance may fray or fall apart altogether. the incentive to be able to cause these kinds of changes is undeniable. especially when populations are compromised in their ability to fact-check information by hard problems like insufficient internet access, deepfakes will be especially effective. the article worries about the total capitulation of reality at home to that of the fabricated image. no, that is not the risk at present. we have too many alternative channels to validate information. in fact, we are likely to evaluate information without even intending to by discussing information learned via one channel -- perhaps a deepfake -- with other people who may have learned about it via a different and contradictory channel. skepticism is becoming built-in. for people who aren't in the deep-information environment, however, deepfakes are already powerful enough to tilt reality to its preference...

WhompingWindows 8y ago

I don't think we're underestimating it at all, but we are simply already overwhelmed by fake text-based news like Twitter and websites/newspapers, as well as TV news shows spouting falsehoods. While fake video is surely going to be coming down the pipeline and will make things worse, the current issues are already terrible. Just looking at the 2016 US election, for instance, it was found that multiple fake stories were able to gain a tremendous amount of traction: whether that's the pope endorsing either candidate, health rumors about HRC, or the swirling controversies of Russia/emails/hacking. The solution has to be that individual citizens become educated, I don't see any silver bullet here.

smofnoopttzzaaa 8y ago
Certain types of elites will fight against education for this very reason. It erodes their control.

creaghpatr 8y ago

I think the risk is inversely proportional to how famous the person is. A political figure or celebrity will likely have the resources and publicly available metadata to show a video is fake beyond a reasonable doubt. I’d be more concerned to see manufactured outrage having some random supporter saying/acting bad to someone on the other team, inciting the Twitter swarms to descend- by the time they dox the individual it’s too late for that person to go back to their normal life.

ethbro 8y ago
You can't disprove a negative. If it's technically indistinguishable, I can't see a valid line of attack against it.
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
This has always been the case for libel and slander and other misinformation. High-profile people have more resources to fight bad information (devoted supporters, real life social networks, money, lawyers), and they're more likely to have detractors who've tested their capabilities already. The risk to them is great, but they have more tools to recover. The ones least equipped to defend against misinformation are people who have suddenly broken into the public sphere but lack the support systems to help their case. Typical sorts of people in this situation are fresh politicians (often local), viral 15-minutes-of-fame celebrities, and internet randoms who are called out online.

Bucephalus355 8y ago

FWIW, all audio/video communication technologies have been some what comically overestimated in their abilities. Two examples: - Henry Ford, believing that since “sight” was the universal language, movies (along with airplanes) would unite all people and places - Many people who believed television was so captivating when it first started to be introduced in the late 20s and early 30s, that it would replace nearly all books and teachers in schools I think people adapt really well to technologies more than we give them credit for. Of course the first few years lots of scams and dangers can arise, but they are figured out somewhat quickly by the powers that be.

Miredly 8y ago
I'm sorry, but your example falls a little flat when you look at how Fox News became the lynchpin of the shit-show the US is sinking in to right now. People adapted to it, sure- but that's the problem.
- Spivak 8y ago
  If a single TV station had the power you describe you would think they might be a little more successful at using it by now. Not saying they have no effect, but if the station never existed I don't think our history would be drastically different.
  - gowld 8y ago
    What's make you think they are unsuccessful? Sure, a TV station can't annoint a President of whatever. The power to destroy is a weaker power than the power to create, but is still an immense power. Rupert Murdoch's lifelong business philosophy is that all information gatekeepers should be destroyed, so that no one's opinion (or facts) are elevated over any other's. It's pure libertarian-democracy of ideas that throws the baby (education and critical thinking) out with the bathwater (suppression of outsider voices). The modern "Internet of Trolls" is the culmination of his philosophy. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/rebekahwade-newsoftheworld https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/reb...
- 8y ago

ryandvm 8y ago

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

ZeroBugBounce 8y ago
So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?
- nawgszy 8y ago
  It seems to me it's the mere fact that humanity's rise was borne on the back of its ruthless drive and selfish greed, and the same things that made us the best hunters also influence society in myriad ways. In my eyes, greed, hierarchy, and limited compassion / an inability to share are the filter, and all society's diseases are the symptoms.
  - thaumaturgy 8y ago
    I'm really disappointed when I hear this kind of thing. It's a sentiment that so many people believe, and want to believe, and choose to believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's almost like a pernicious, psychological cancer, except it can also spread virulently to other susceptible hosts. Humanity's rise is due to lots of factors, especially the countless individuals who have worked to improve the health, well-being, safety, and wealth of the people around them. Greed is but one aspect of humanity, and unbounded greed destroys societies. Yeah, there are problems in 2018, but to sit here today, in the relative comfort of modern society, and say "we only have all this because we're terrible animals" is hugely disrespectful to the work of a lot of people.
    - ccvannorman 8y ago
      Hear, hear. Yes, you can look back at our animal past and at Chimpanzees and say we're a brutal, greedy, what-ever. But that is only a tiny sliver of conscious existence. What makes us human is the constant progression towards humanity - compassion, love, and society-wide safety and abundance. See Hans Rosling for some promising trends rooted in global facts over the past 100 years. Yes, there are still bad things "left over" from being animals, but these are declining over the decades ::across the board::

octosphere 8y ago

We’re also underestimating the mind-warping potential of detecting fake video via carefully trained algorithms.

politician 8y ago
Why not both? Generative Adversarial Networks http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative-adversarial-networks-code-tensorflow/ http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative-adversarial-n...
- PeterisP 8y ago
  The particular videos are designed by this approach (GANs), and thus the generator is highly adapted to generate data that can't be distinguished from a real video with these techniques. If it's built with state-of-art GANs, then you don't be able to reliably detect it with discriminators from these state-of-art GANs. If you manage to build a better automatic discriminator than the authors did, then they could directly use it in the adversarial approach to build a better generator, and your detection approach would again cease functioning. Remember that in the end there's a fundamental asymmetry - in theory, there could be a perfect generator (not that we're close to perfect yet) that generates undistinguishable samples, and thus there can not be a perfect discriminator.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Questioning the authenticity of records (be they second hand accounts of events, paper documents or 1s and 0s) has been the norm since it became common for people other than royals and clergy to be able to read and write. Jefferson and Adams would not find the concept of "fake news" foreign at all. The sophistication of the authentication mechanism for a document usually has to do with the use case. Official letterhead was good enough for most important routine correspondence. Birth certificates get stamped. Money has fairly sophisticated anti-counterfeiting features. We'll remember the late 20th and early 21st century as the exception to the rule because during that time period if there was an audio/video recording of something you could be reasonably assured that it was legit. That won't be the case going forward. Audio and video will become a free for all like every other medium.

denimalpaca 8y ago

A good way to fight this is to cryptographically sign videos/audio. Might be a bit computationally expensive compared to a text message, but for very high-profile people, having a copy of the video/audio and it's cryptographic signature will be absolute proof against fakes. We don't even need AI algorithms to learn how to detect fakes in this case, it just becomes a matter of comparing hashes.

munk-a 8y ago
When there is a binary on the internets available from various mirrors with the primary authority on it distributing a SHA of it's contents then we can use that SHA to verify the contents of the binary... The issue here is that there is no trusted authority on the video, the people distributing the video are the content originators so we can use a signature to verify the video wasn't corrupted in transmission but not that it wasn't edited before it was signed. (this technique would work well if the concern was that videos from some primary source were being edited by a CDN entity helping to stream that video to viewers, which is entirely separate from the article)
- sixothree 8y ago
  Wouldn't the authority have to be the device manufacturers?
  - munk-a 8y ago
    How would they technically accomplish this? Whenever a camcorder or phone or webcam was used would the hash be transmitted to the manufacturer and registered there? Would the device sign the video signature with some secret key? (similar to that big secret number you're not allowed to show) Assuming you got it to work sanely, how would you ensure that all manufacturers properly locked down their devices? Assuming there's a reasonable trust framework and you're able to enforce it... How would you allow legitimate video editing without allowing people to edit video to create misleading images? How would a movie cut between characters and an exploding model in a legitimate and signed manner without allowing someone to splice a politician's speech in with terrorist training videos? There is a lot wrong with this "Tech can fix it" approach.

steego 8y ago

It wasn't long ago that we didn't even have video, before that we didn't even have pictures. You had the option of believing or rejecting one or more accounts. You also had the option of suspending your belief/disbelief until you felt like corroborating evidence swayed you one direction or the other. Personally speaking, I'm often surprised at how certain people are about the information they ingest. It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" where points out that people more likely to read a paper critically if it uses a bad fonts, poor layout and some typos. It's not a ground-breaking conclusion, but the studies also implied that people tended to read papers less critically when they looked good. The idea is the mind has the tendency to substitute out critical thinking with heuristic thinking whenever it can. If a paper superficially resembles serious paper from a well-respected journal, there's a real temptation to ease up on the scrutiny because many other signals are suggesting your enhanced scrutiny is a waste of time and energy. I can't say for sure if our reliance on video and photographs over the last 100 years or so had helped or hurt our critical thinking. It's very easy to argue the hard work of photographers have been critical to bringing important issues and events to our attention. On the other hand, you can argue an over-reliance on images have stripped us from engaging our imagination. I know in a world of fake news, it would seem like the last thing we need is to engage people's imagination. When we hear the word imagination, most of us think about the skill the lets one fabricate novel stories or alternate realities. We don't think about imagination as a tool that people use to try to figure out our reality. A vivid imagination not only knows how to fabricate alternate realities, but it also knows how to incorporate information from the senses, books, articles and information to test and consider different world views. We need people who can absorb information about how the world works, and can project possible realities as well as many possible futures. I know I'm going long on this comment, and I don't want to come off as an optimist, but maybe we can use the advent of fake video to cultivate a culture that stops trusting passive sources of information (video) and begins to engage healthy critical thinking instead. I could be way off the mark and would love to hear someone tell me what I'm missing.

deleted 8y ago
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jokoon 8y ago

Who will the public believe if it is a high profile video? This might just end in court... This will induce peaks of paranoia into the minds of conspiratorial people. The bad side effect is that now, you can call any video a deep fake, and attack the authenticity of any video used against you.

stretchwithme 8y ago

Another potential use of blockchain technology. When an image is first captured, the time and a fingerprint generated from it will be recorded in a public blockchain that can't be tampered with. Then we can disregard images that don't have valid dates that match when the image was supposed to have been recorded.

gowld 8y ago
"We" can, but 99.99% of the public won't.
tCfD 8y ago
All this will do is encourage the proliferation of innumerable bespoke blockchains, created by parties interested in stamping legitimacy on illegitimate content. Each of these blockchains will be presented as equivalent to "the blockchain" with respect to being trustworthy proofs of original untampered content timestamps.

politician 8y ago

My personal belief is that we should be generating vast amounts of deep fake videos and audio clips now that the technology is available. We should intentionally and hastily move to pollute the information streams around us as rapidly as possible in order to force an evolution in how we process information. To attempt to slow down this arms race, or to ignore its implications just puts us at a further disadvantage to those that want to capitalize on the potential it brings them to arbitrage our "default accept" mindset against their fake agenda. For example, China's Great Wall will not protect them from deepfakes and indeed it actually makes the delivery of deepfakes into China more effective. The advantage afforded by weaponizing deepfakes only lasts as long as the audience defaults to trust without verification.

SubiculumCode 8y ago
That's step 1. Step 2 is to provide a product that resolves the issue through crypto/blockchain certification.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  What does this mean? Can you elaborate?
yifanl 8y ago
So a form of targeted accelerationism? That's an interesting thought, but assuming it works as intended, wouldn't the end result of this be a total destruction of trust? A whole society where all non-physical interaction is treated with total suspicion can't be a pleasant one to live in. Maybe that's the end result either way though.
- politician 8y ago
  The idea is to step back from the idea that we can trust media sources without verification. Trust _but verify_. Small groups and towns, places where people live and have a regular continuous presence, are more likely to be places of higher trust. Your typical broadcast media sources or your typical corporate social media sources, places where anyone with any agenda can buy their way onto your screen are not places that deserve high trust without verification. Given what we know now, screens of all kinds should be (and IMO, will become) known as low trust environments. Hastening that is paramount because in the intervening time you have a population that's susceptible to all sorts of manipulation. I'm suggesting nothing new. Be nice to people, and don't believe everything you read.

ikeboy 8y ago

We don't need fake videos when people like James O'Keefe and Sasha Baron Cohen can achieve the same effect using real footage obtained under false pretenses.

laurex 8y ago

What this article is getting at is that memory and "truth" are not really compatible concepts, which I think most neuroscience supports. Research around vision generally shows that even what we see, first hand (not in video) is an assemblage or construction, not a "record." Yet humans in general tend to believe that if they see something, it's either real or "faked" (like magic) rather than suspect because of the natural limitations of our brain system (which are also advantages for survival). We also have an even harder time to distinguish 'reality' when our emotions are involved. "Fake" video does present more of an issue, I think, than past "fake media", because we simply have more emotional response to it than other media.

extralego 8y ago

Are there any libraries for this available yet? What are the solutions we will use to verify authenticity? Will live speaking events become more valuable as a result? Many different angles of video will probably not be of much use alone, but useful for public events. I can imagine events in which the audience is surrounding the speaker, creating difficult-to-replicate-from-multiple-angles background noise. But this is just delaying the inevitable.

threatofrain 8y ago

What are people supposed to do about fake evidence when the main problem is the technological ability to detect? This isn't exactly a legal or social awareness problem. If a video is circulating the web and people don't know if it's real, but it looks real, and experts can't affirm its fakeness, then what are people supposed to do?

CM30 8y ago

Honestly, I have to wonder; is this just really returning back to the way things used to be? Think about it, we haven't had video or photo evidence for all that long relatively speaking, and it's only over time that our ability to 'prove' things became more absolute. First it was just speech and choosing who to believe, then writing came into the picture (along with paintings and drawn art), then over time voice/sound/radio recordings, photography, videos, etc. For most of human history, we haven't had great evidence, and in many ways were in the exact same situation we may end up in after these fake videos hit the mainstream. History is a long line of people attempting to 'prove' things, and fakers gradually getting better at lying in a near endless arms race. We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and we'll survive in that situation again in future.

steego 8y ago
> We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and we'll survive in that situation again in future. Surviving isn't the issue, quality of life is. You made the point that "fakers [have] gradually [gotten] better at lying in a near endless arms race." While I understand that things have a tendency to stay the same, history has also shown trends that have lasted thousands of years can also be punctuated in relatively short periods. Sure, people have lied and faked for thousands of years, but fake videos just might be the critical inflection point that in our timeline that creates a huge asymmetry of power and influence. What sets this apart isn't the technical quality of the lie, it's the agents that are performing the lie: Machines. Not only are machines capable of fabricating evidence, they are incredibly effective at measuring the efficacy. Lies can be cheaply produced, tailored for very specific micro-demographics, and directly sent to their intended recipients. The early 20th century showed us how broadcast radio could be exploited for propaganda warfare. The early 21st century could show us how history rhymes when well financed organizations or nation states can finance disinformation campaigns that leverage machine learning.

flingo 8y ago

Anyone know of technology to invisibly watermark video/audio? This would be great for enforcing copyright on sites like youtube.

criddell 8y ago
The watermarking scheme would have to survive the compression that YouTube applies to video.