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Algorithm allows video editors to modify talking-head videos as if editing text
- linux_devil 7y agoJust imagine people using this tool to spread false claims and propaganda. Can we also determine if the video was actually edited or forged?
- quocble 7y agoMy thoughts exactly.
- Datenstrom 7y ago> Just imagine people using this tool to spread false claims and propaganda. That was done in The Expanse novels, I wonder if that is where people get the ideas to create things like this from. > Can we also determine if the video was actually edited or forged? Detecting fake videos is actively being researched and there are working methods available, governments are very much aware of the danger.
- mathieuh 7y agoThere will still be some lag between initial release and govt response. C.f. The War of the Worlds broadcast
- manifestsilence 7y agoYikes, yeah. The War of the Worlds broadcast panic was an accident, too. Imagine an engineered panic on that scale. Especially if it was released through a trusted news source, by either hackery or social engineering.
- underwater 7y agoIronically, the current belief is that The War of the Worlds panic was greatly exaggerated: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/war-of-the-worlds/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/war-of-the-worlds/
- DonHopkins 7y agoRunning m-x dissociated-press on a Trump speech makes it still sound like a Trump speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press
- ceejayoz 7y agoIt'll be used to debunk true claims, too.
- RandallBrown 7y agoTheir mouth movement wasn't particularly natural in the parts where the speech was edited. It's good enough that it will fool some people on Facebook/Twitter, but it's pretty far from being able to stand up to any scrutiny.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoIsn't that all it takes to spread propaganda? We're living in an age where if it feels right, it is, even if it's blatantly false.
- latexr 7y agoI agree that their mouth movement wasn’t particularly natural, but I disagree that it isn’t enough to fool most of us if we’re unaware. We’re not fixing our eyes on a person’s mouth while they talk. Think of the scenario where someone edits a few seconds of a 30-minute interview. They make the interviewee go from saying they hate drugs to saying they love drugs. Even if you weren’t expecting that claim from that person, would you go back and recheck their mouth movement, to be certain if it was edited or not? Unlikely. Even if you would, I’d wager most wouldn’t, including most of us that could detect it.
- RandallBrown 7y agoFor propaganda, this will be great. The thing is, you don't even need convincing videos for propaganda to work. For truly scary things, like falsifying evidence, I think it will be awhile before this will get past expert analysis, or even a group of people on Reddit trying to prove it wrong. In the long term, video will simply be treated like photos are now. With disbelief.
- creaghpatr 7y agoIt can also be used to 'ratfuck', if a video is released with a politician saying a gaffe, they can release a bunch of similar but fake videos and then claim that 'all of them' are fake. The confusion would sow doubt- the technique could be used offensively as well as defensively.
- r00fus 7y agoHow do we know it's not already in the wild? Ethical release of this would focus also on some way for easier forensic telltales that are hard to avoid. Also, rule34 implications.
- iamnothere 7y agoGANs can be used to detect this sort of thing if trained well enough. Any manipulation tool is going to leave some kind of signature. Eventually you'll end up in an algorithmic arms race, and you'll be able to fool some people, some of the time. (Pretty much the same as things have been since the Spanish-American War.) Smaller economies are going to get screwed by this, though, as they won't have the resources to fight yet another technological battle.
- jalgos_eminator 7y agoYou know, I thought that deepfake videos would be politically weaponized when I first heard about them. However, after doing more thinking on this, we have had photoshop for 30 years already! We see photoshopped images all the time and while some people can be fooled, many others remain skeptical of an image then try to verify it hasn't been altered. I don't think photoshopping has really been a big problem yet, which makes me think that deepfakes won't be one either because it is fundamentally the same kind of deception but in video form.
- loceng 7y agoAudio-video is much more stimulating and convincing because it mimics real life more than still images.
- cwkoss 7y agoI feel like we just need some comedians to make a bunch of entertaining, realistic but labelled-fake content with deepfakes. Production cost of making a show where each actor is deepfaked into a world leader or dead historical figure or whatnot is not a significant hurdle.
- shearskill 7y agoThere is The Fakening channel on YouTube that does this - clearly labeled fake: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC5D-8hVVwLB0DNrcSBqoVxg https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC5D-8hVVwLB0DNrcSBqoVxg
- dillonmckay 7y agoLike this Jordan Peele / Obama PSA? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0
- cwkoss 7y agoThat was a good start!
- mendelbot 7y agoThe "Ethical concerns" section in the article feels like a punt. The author quoting "this technology is really about better storytelling" is aspirational -- the technology's story will be written by those who use it, and you can bet people will use this maliciously.
- vernie 7y agoAnd that's loads more self-aware than other researchers' I've seen completely blindsided by obvious ethical questions at end of their paper talks.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- notaboutdave 7y agoSee this? This hand grenade I'm leaving in the schoolyard? This is about better games of hot potato.
- okrad 7y ago"Fixed film dialog without reshoots" and "better story telling" seemed rather compelling to me. Perhaps the malicious use cases are more obvious due to how trustworthy a video can appear.
- eatbitseveryday 7y agoI had this idea that devices which record content like images or video should have an unforgeable key internal to their hardware, like we have with PGP / GPG. Content that comes from the device would be signed, and allow users to validate whether it originated unmodified from the hardware source. Granted, derived content will fail validation, but it will motivate tracking down the original, until validation can be performed. Maybe you can take pictures of fake imagery printed onto large high-def paper, but at least you eliminate one stage in the process... Honestly, we should not trust digital content these days.
- dooglius 7y ago> unforgeable key internal to their hardware, like we have with PGP / GPG PGP involves a private key, and if you have the private key you can "forge" any message. If you put the key in hardware, it can be read by an adversary with access to a powerful microscope.
- thefreeman 7y agoI mean how is this any different than the "secure enclave" on iphones or other forms of hardware security modules. Yes a sufficiently advanced adversary with an electron microscope could possibly extract the key but it still greatly raises the bar for 99% of other would be abusers.
- dooglius 7y agoBecause the sort of actors who would try to forge videos are precisely the sort of actors who would have such advanced technology. The secure enclave on an iphone protects against say someone trying to convert a stolen phone into a stolen identity, not against nation-states.
- DoctorOetker 7y agowhat if the camera is connected to the internet, generates its own random key every 10 seconds, signs the new public key with the previous key, and a quorum of receiver citizens selected by sortition send their public keys, and the camera uses threshold cryptography to send each receiver their share of the secret frames for ~10 seconds. The adversary would have to extract the key within 10 seconds without damaging the security envellope of the device, which can't be powered down. If such a camera is powered down, a replacement camera would need to be manufactured and sent and isntalled (again by citizens selected through sortition) at the place the malfunctioning / perturbed camera was. If the cameras cover each other (say cameras along both sides of a street such that a camera sees 2 or more other cameras) the perturber can be tracked, both where he came from, as well as where he went to...
- hanniabu 7y agoWhere is the audio coming from? If that was computer manufactured that was pretty good because it sounded very natural
- chefandy 7y agoThe video mentions that the audio was recorded separately, and shows a few other options like text-to-speech (which obviously doesn't match the voice) and some smarter voice matching audio generation (VoCo) which could pass for the original voice sent over heavily compressed, low-bandwidth video conferencing or something like that. I'm guessing that if this is used for actual disinformation, finding a voice actor/audio engineer to try and match the speech would be most effective.
- jakob223 7y agoMost of the examples in the video they had the subject record the audio separately from the generated video. In one or two of them they cite some audio-generating thing.
- devin 7y agopeople choose to believe things. The kind of people who will be duped want to be duped as it serves their own ideology. You can’t change that.
- aaron695 7y agoI really don't get how people don't see this is the most revolutionary idea that will change the internet and learning forever. The is absolutely a game changer. It turns learning videos from hard that are inaccurate and become old and boring to instantly updateably and workable by multiple people. This is a game changer. It's a paradigm shift texhnology. It should be one of the top priorities for internet and human growth.
- mopsi 7y agoEveryone seems to think of nefarious uses, but I can't wait for this tech to appear in video calls, combined with translation. This could enable two people without a common language to have a conversation while appearing to each other as native speakers of their respective languages.
- castis 7y agoWow, that would be something else. I assume whoever gets that to market first would make a killing.
- html5web 7y agoS*. It’s scary
- hkon 7y agoLooking forward to the autogenerated youtube videos about various topics. Perhaps they would be interesting to watch rather than a few images and a robotic voice.
- scott_s 7y agoI imagine the most above-board use for something like this would be in scripted tv and movies. Basically an enhanced form of ADR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#ADR/post-sync https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#ADR/post-...). Of course, I anticipate plenty of nefarious uses. A place where I don't think it will be used much is actual facing-the-camera-talking-head content. Something we have learned from YouTubers is that audiences don't care if there are discontinuous cuts during a monologue. YouTubers don't try to pretend they did it all in one take, and will happily edit their video as if editing text. The cuts are obvious in both the audio and video. And still it works.
- keiru 7y agoThe danger is not in false positives, but false negatives. The very existence of this kind of things erode trust and sow paranoia. A simple morph cut in a John Pilger interview of Assange made a sizeable portion of nutjobs believe Assange has been long dead. Don't think this kind of behaviour can't eventually extend to the mainstream.
- astrodust 7y agoIt's the slow erosion of video evidence being trustworthy.
- anigbrowl 7y agoCryptographic signing of video footage is a useful blockchain application, but it will presumably be subject to the same flaws as domain security certificates.
- NullPrefix 7y agoIf you can sign a video then you can sign a doctored video. If it's only your camera that can sign the video, not you directly, don't be fooled that it will be possible to protect the private keys in the camera from extraction.
- tyrust 7y ago>If you can sign a video then you can sign a doctored video. I don't understand your point, you wouldn't sign a doctored video unless you wanted to do so. It's entirely possible to apply the principles of PGP to video. >If it's only your camera that can sign the video, not you directly, don't be fooled that it will be possible to protect the private keys in the camera from extraction. I doubt this would be the solution on which the world settles.
- astrodust 7y agoIf you can sign anything then what purpose does a signature serve?
- falcolas 7y agoForget deepfakes and such for a moment... Think of the impact of this on dubbing movies between languages. This seems like an incredible tool. Of course, we can’t just forget about deepfakes and such, but this particular usecase kind of excites me.
- guelo 7y agoI've watched many dubbed movies and tv shows and the slightly-off lip movement never bothered me, you stop noticing it after a bit. It wouldn't be that big of an improvement.
- bradlys 7y agoWell, it bothered me. I never watch dubs - if possible. I watch subs instead.
- osdiab 7y agoI prefer the subs tho mainly because the voice acting in different languages is usually not great - movies’ original languages usually sound much more natural.
- babyloneleven 7y agoWell, it is if you are deaf.
- drilldrive 7y agoWhat would we call such a category of movies? Vubs?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jonplackett 7y agoAt least they can’t synthesise the voice automatically. But pair this with Lyrebird.ai and you can basically just stop trusting all video right now.
- lopmotr 7y agoYou can go to the official website of whoever is supposed to have said it, or a trusted news organization who recorded it and see if they publish the same video. Internet commenters will be quick to point out problems like that. In case it was recorded secretly or it's a crime occurring or whatever, then you should never have trusted it anyway because you don't know the context. Taking things out of context is routinely used by the news to fool people already. Stop uncritically believing whatever appears on your screen if you're concerned about what's true.
- fooey 7y agoAdobe was showing off some amazing tech for editing voices several years ago, called Adobe Voco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw
- doctoboggan 7y agoScience Fiction author Greg Egan wrote a novel called Distress[0] where the main character is a science journalist who makes documentaries. He uses software exactly like this. The book was published in 1995. It's a very good book and I highly recommended it and basically any other book written by Egan. (My personal favorite is probably "Diaspora" followed closely by "Permutation City".) [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19328253-distress https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19328253-distress
- lainon 7y agoProject page: https://www.ohadf.com/projects/text-based-editing/ https://www.ohadf.com/projects/text-based-editing/
- imgabe 7y agoI suspect in the not too distant future we'll need a way to produce provably true videos. I'm thinking something like the subject, a politician giving a press conference for example, carries something that emits a signal that the cameras encode into the video in a way that any alterations could be detected, something like a cryptographic signature. I don't really know enough about cryptography time be sure how / if it would work.
- underwater 7y agoMore likely that trusted sources become more important. A politician can share their own stream of a speech.
- britch 7y agoRight... What about when someone posts a video of them saying a racial slur backstage. The politician says it was doctored. The poster says it is unedited. How do you verify who is telling the truth.
- lopmotr 7y agoMultiple adversarial journalists recording it, like we currently have, would protect against that.
- slimsag 7y agonews agencies could just use an encrypted video stream, since only they have the private key you'd know it came from them and could be trusted as from them.
- hoekit 7y agoOr perhaps a return to analog, non-digital, older media such as paper film and video rolls will serve as "probably true".
- yokohummer7 7y agoI believe you already know this, hence the "probably" part, but such analog media can easily be produced from (modified) digital media, thus no credibility.
- polygot 7y agoReality TV is probably going to have a hay-day with this
- dpau 7y agoInterested to see if counter-measures begin to be deployed in order to make a deep fake more difficult and buy time. Incorporating dynamic backgrounds and body gestures like touching one's face while talking.
- nickjj 7y agoSeems really cool but I wonder how well it will handle a case where you want to swap a phrase for a phrase, but have the new phrase have a "human specific" emphasis or variant to it. Example: "That was a short trip" vs "That was a reaaaaaalllly long trip". Language is so much more than words. When you deliver the variant message, your whole facial expression might change. So much would get lost if that doesn't carry over. Your facial expression and tone in that context also completely changes the meaning from you enjoyed the long trip to not enjoying it, but how can a machine know which one to pick.
- ionwake 7y agoIs there any open source software like this available anywhere ?
- readingnews 7y ago“Unfortunately, technologies like this will always attract bad actors,” --- uhmmm, what is the "good actors"?? I want to take video, and delete what you said and make you say something else. uhmmm, can't actually see the "good actor" point of that.
- pault 7y agoMaking edits to scenes in movies during post production, cutting out mistakes in broadcasts... I'm sure video production professionals could easily come up with dozens of use cases.
- aidanlister 7y agoRead the article?
- jldugger 7y agoWell, now that scene in movies where the newscaster narrates the aftermath of an event can be done realistically without having to hire actors?
- w-ll 7y agoIt could be used to bleep movies for tv so that the reading the lips of the actor match the dubbed audio. You can easily tell what curses people are saying.
- sabujp 7y agoyoutube and other video sites need a framework for content verifying videos that haven't been digitally produced using steganography or keys injected into every frame. This could software could be embedded in video recording devices (keys could be updated OTA so hard hacks don't matter). If videos haven't been "reality" verified then people can just enjoy them as fake/fiction works. Video editing/compression software would need to be aware of the location of the key bits and maintain them within each frame.
- MichaelEstes 7y agoIt's strange to me that people are so concerned about these deep fakes when the National Enquirer has been around for so long. It's been easy to lie to people in mass for awhile now. I don't think this changes the number of people that are open to these suggestions, I think people in general are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for.
- meribold 7y agoOn the flip side, it may become harder to convince people of the truth when there is such a convenient way to reject unwelcome video evidence. This could amplify echo chambers.
- visarga 7y agoNow we need cameras that watermark (using steganography) original videos so they can be authenticated and a blockchain solution for registering originals. Video sharing sites will need to process all their uploads to check for modifications and serve the original file (not re-encoded) as well, for third party checking.
- hasahmed 7y agoIn regards to all the talk of not being able to verify your video source; perhaps we'll go back to film for things that need to be probably legitimate. Though perhaps that has the same issues.
- ollifi 7y agoI find it worrying that only now people start to be sceptical about visual information. There is a huge difference between real world and the framed and curated view photographer or documentarist gives you. If you go to school to learn about this stuff it's mostly about how to convey your view through these tools and the ethical implications of it. I think people vastly underestimate how much editing and framing change the perceived truth of what happened. It is more subtle than manipulating the contents of video, but I think it can be in many ways more effective as most of this stuff bypasses your cognition and is not straight up lying. It feels the same as in written news changing the quote vs. changing text around the quote. I think we would be better of looking at video like it was picture drawn or text written by someone. It's an artistic rendition of the events.
- _Codemonkeyism 7y agoEvery news is to some degree manipulated. Together with a friend I was one of the geocaching and confluencing pioneers in Germany. Some large papers and TV stations reported about this "phenomenon" and wanted to make an article/ documentation about us. Every one of them came with a story in their head which we had to fill with our pictures and quotes. No one was interested in "reality". For a news clip we had to shoot situations several times, I remember leaving a house 5 times until they shot was done. Up until then I thought news would be unstaged.
- DoctorOetker 7y agothe moment they essentially ask you to cooperate in staging a scene, why would you cooperate?
- _Codemonkeyism 7y agoI was young and needed the money ;-)
- drawnwren 7y agoI completely agree. The hardest part of returning from military operations overseas was that Americans inevitably had their views shaped by one of two prevailing video viewpoints. Trying to discuss what happens over there in any meaningful way with someone who hasn't been inevitably devolves into an emotional reaction (usually roughly pro or against) instead of a conversation.
- kingkawn 7y agoThis tech allows the state or corporations to quietly adjust the historical record of their representatives words and statements to fit their ambitions at any given point.
- vinayms 7y agoI actually love this ongoing cat and mouse game. I don't follow the events in this field keenly so I don't know if it exists, but the challenge is to find antidote to this concoction, created by mad scientists just for sake of science, that will be weaponized anytime now.
- ozychhi 7y agoWas I only one who thought of Jim Carrey in God almighty?
- mnw21cam 7y agoBruce almighty?
- sbhn 7y agoThe algorythm demonstrated in this video, that moves the cats mouth in real time to the naration, was written in javascript and html5 audio. https://youtu.be/qdN__7C5kl4 https://youtu.be/qdN__7C5kl4
- apsharma 7y agoThis is gonna revolutionize the animation industry.
- program_whiz 7y agoAll human evidence rests upon the shaky foundation of "because I believe its true", at the bottom of which rests the shaky foundation of your personal experiences. Don't believe me? Just ask a schizophrenic how hard it is to disbelieve your own experience. Reminds me of the HP Lovecraft novel "The Call of Cthulu" Page 1, Paragraph 1: > The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
- mzs 7y agolead author's page with links to other researchers' pages, the paper itself, and nearly 200MB of supplementary materials: https://www.ohadf.com/projects/text-based-editing/ https://www.ohadf.com/projects/text-based-editing/