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I don't really understand this argument at all. We've been in this "post truth" world for a long time already for every form of media other than video. Text quo

• siffland 7y ago
  Does this mean now we have to coin the phrase "deepfake news" I can just hear people saying it now. Joking aside, and not taking in ANY ethical/unethical misuse considerations this software is capable of, it is really cool tech.
• ceejayoz 7y ago
  > But if the NYTimes does the same thing, it carries a lot more weight. Sure, and that's part of the danger. Convincing deep fakes will be used to delegitimize mainstream news organizations, as with what happened with Dan Rather - a trusted source presented faked documents.
  • ryanwaggoner 7y ago
    But why is this the danger now in a way that it hasn't been previously? You could have presented fake documents for hundreds of years now, but it's not like we don't have any credible news organizations as a result.
    • adrianN 7y ago
      It gets increasingly cheap to manufacture convincing fakes, but it doesn't get any cheaper to do quality journalism. The risk as I see it is that there is such an overwhelming tsunami of manufactured reality that it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction.
      • setr 7y ago
        It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images. And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None of that is new. Overwhelmed by content is/was/will be a problem that is solved very simply: people limit the distribution lanes they consume, and naturally establish "trust networks" and hierarchies. Nyt didn't become "trusted" by accident. People aren't as dumb as you seem to think. Anyways the problem is of distribution, not that a lie can be told. If we can't trust our distribution lanes to actually reflect the institutions we're trusting, then we can't establish our trust networks. And this is a real problem: our distribution lanes are divorced now from our actual information distrubuters; medium, Facebook, Twitter, etc fuck around with our trust networks, randomly injecting their own bullshit into our feeds and messing around with feed-order based on non-trust metrics (eg money paid) such that they've become fairly unreliable. And our classical trustable institutions have become less trustworthy, as they flounder about trying to make sense of the "digital age", and have so far done so in a pathetic fashion
        • deleted 7y ago
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        • adrianN 7y ago
          In the past you had to pay a person to write that fake text. Wait a few more years and you'll see convincing text coming out of some algorithm at the cost of an EC2 instance.
          • setr 7y ago
            That's fine and well, but again, I don't think the existence of it is new; if they generate 1 lie a day, or 1000, or a million, it doesn't change much. It gets resolved by the trust distribution network. When that network breaks down, you only need a single good lie to do the damage.
      • larnmar 7y ago
        The funny part is that Dan Rather and his producers were fooled by a deeply unconvincing fake — a supposedly Vietnam-era typewritten document that was obviously made using Microsoft Word using default settings. Furthermore, many many people continued to defend it as real for a long time after partisans on the other side had thoroughly debunked it. If 2004 news could be fooled by a fake that took a couple of minutes to make, I’m not that worried that today’s news is any better.
  • wayoutthere 7y ago
    The major problem of our time is trust (for both "small t" personal trust and "capital T" trust in a crypto sense). While any feeling of absolute or universal truth is probably beyond our grasp at this point, people will (and largely have) learned which sources are considered 'trusted' within the circles of influence they travel in. The people who care about the 'legitimacy' of a news organization are moderates who are passively engaged and are being rapidly driven to the margins. The 'objective truth' of the matter is less relevant than how it is received. Activist politics is en vogue thanks to the feelings of helplessness brought on by globalization, and if you're not an activist your views are not really an important part of the process anymore. You'll have to pick one of the two options that the activists come up with because they won't show up to vote for a centrist candidate. In either case, a moderate platform cannot win. For the record, I feel the above situation is incredibly dystopian; but we're hardly the first country where pathos supersedes logos and ethos.
  • Clubber 7y ago
    That trusted source didn't bother to vet the faked documents and instead rushed it onto the air. That trusted source continued to push that narrative even going so far as to say, "fake but accurate," destroying all credibility and ultimately retiring. The only difference is today, they don't retire out of shame, they just keep on doing it, keeping viewership via emotional draw rather than rational news. Real news has been dead since that incident in my view. It's mostly state propaganda, regardless of party.
    • ceejayoz 7y ago
      You're mixing up Rather with the trusted source. Rather received documents from what was apparently a long-term, trusted source. CBS certainly screwed the pooch in that incident, but a long-term relationship with a well-placed source is inherently a form of vetting.
      • Clubber 7y ago
        Sorry, I was meaning Dan Rather being the trusted source of news for the populace. He was the successor to Walter Cronkite after all.
  • BickNowstrom 7y ago
    I think it is the other way around: mainstream news organizations will cry fake news to delegitimize bloggers and amateurs. If everything is easily faked, the only ones to trust with the truth, are the entrenched media companies. Powerful people will be the first to benefit from fake media, when they can claim that the video evidence must be fake ("They photoshopped my arm around her waist!").
  • ufmace 7y ago
    The delegitimization didn't come so much from the forged documents themselves. It came more from, after the whole scandal erupted and it became blatantly obvious that they were faked, not only CBS and Rather, but the entire Mainstream Media doubled down on them being real, and the narrative being real. They all still, to this day, insist that they were real. That's what couldn't be engineered or tricked.
    • ceejayoz 7y ago
      > They all still, to this day, insist that they were real. This is, itself, "fake news". I can't find any indication that other mainstream media outlets defend the documents "to this day". The reporting largely seems to be "certainly smells like bullshit, and we can point to specific issues with them that seem to support that". https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/those-discredited-memos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/those-discredited... cites a wide variety of news organizations looking into them and finding problems, stating "When the mainstream press checked the sources mentioned or ignored by '60 Minutes II,' the story came apart." and noting Newsweek specifically calling them "discredited".
• jakear 7y ago
  If you post a ridiculous quote, say it’s from Obama, then provide a link to a video where Obama says that quote, more people believe you. People already believe tabloid journalism. Just because you might exclusively trust NYTimes doesn’t mean easily accessible mechanisms for fabricating evidence aren’t a problem for a massive chunk of the world population. And what about when this happens at a state-sponsored level (This is absolutely already in development, if it hasn’t happened already...). “Did you see that Fox News exclusive video leaked from the Bernie Sanders campaign? Yeah he was holding a private dinner for a bunch of Billionaires. They say they got it from some Russian oligarch he invited. So much for grass roots change, I think I’ll just stay home this Election Day.” Or the corollary: “That smoking-gun tape the Do-Nothing Dems have of me at Putin’s personal sex trafficking center, where the two of us are laughing about having Epstein take the hit? Fake news! They’re called deepfakes, and they make these just absolutely incredible fake videos. Not real at all though. Only trust what the Government-sanctioned media says!” As per your other point, given the GANs that are used to make these are precisely a deep fake AI fooling a deep fake detection AI, aren’t we already there? Further, when the government is making the generator, a privately trained discriminator has no chance. How would you even train that? Get the government to give you a bunch of generated fake media so that you can develop a really spot-on model? I don’t think so. Two predictions: Deepfakes will play a roll in the 2020 election. Deepfakes will play a roll in every election thereafter. If this doesn’t concern you, I don’t know what would. The thing with the “post-truth world” is that once people think we’re in it, we are.
  • Gunax 7y ago
    I don't think the argument is that deepfakes won't matter. It's that they don't represent a new paradigm, but are instead just an additional medium (video) which must be more scrutinized than before. Long have documents and news been the subject of fraud. And for a few decades photo alterations have been common. Now we are adding video to the list. But there is nothing new about the faking of libelous material (eg Killian documents 2004)
    • jakear 7y ago
      Video is massively different for swaying public opinion. There’s a reason most news on Facebook/Instagram is in the form of 15-60 second video montages. People can tune in quickly, get information passively, and leave. Video isn’t just “another item on the list”. It’s the most powerful means of sharing information we have. How many people do you think actually read those “Killian documents”? How many people do you think a state-sponsored social media campaign built on the most accessible media would reach?
• jotm 7y ago
  Richard Stallman himself said: "With software there are only two outcomes: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program is not under user control, and the developer controls everything, then the program is an instrument of unjust power, applied by the powers that be." Deepfakes are just a continuation of "fake news" (formerly known as propaganda), and the end outcome is we either succumb to those who use it, or adapt - filtering out the bs isn't easy, but it's not an insurmountable task, either.
• jml7c5 7y ago
  I don't think it's so much that people will be fooled by fake video, as that people can no longer rely on video as evidence. Up until now, video has been the gold standard of "proof" that an event happened. Quotes, photos, and (to an extent) audio have been fakeable for a long time, and they are mistrusted accordingly. And while CGI has slowly made it harder to spot fake events, videos of speech remained mostly safe. It's won't upend the world, but we are losing a hugely helpful tool that has been relied upon for 60 years.
  • mrec 7y ago
    It'll certainly be weakened, but I don't think it'll necessarily have to be discarded altogether. The need now will be for processes and tools to guarantee the provenance of a video. The technology to fake paper ballots is trivial, but they still (mostly) work fine for elections, because we've developed strict rules for how they need to be handled in order to retain credibility.
    • PavlovsCat 7y ago
      > The need now will be for processes and tools to guarantee the provenance of a video. Having a vague description of a need is not the same as having a workable solution, it doesn't even mean being on the way to it.
• krick 7y ago
  I was saying something like that for a long time now, but recently I started thinking that it's even more on an non-issue than I thought. I mean, what I was saying is that "yeah, this is all new and weird, but when everybody started using Photohop it was also weird, and yet we are moving on". But recently I read "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and I thought that the point Borges was making could be easily described as critique of "fake-news post-realism of today", except it was 80 years ago. And while the notion of this problem not being new at first seemed weird to me, eventually I figured this is pretty natural: while 80 (or 800 for that matter) years ago there wasn't any such tools to manipulate information on that scale, nobody had the access to information on that scale in the first place. So anyone could be fooled by more powerful actor anyway. Offensive tools of any time are roughly the same as the defensive tools. It's just that these 20 years at the turn of the century were somewhat the sweet spot, when we had this "Internet for people like us", so it was us who was fooling the less knowledgeable people, while keeping the belief that we are relatively safe from being maleficently disinformed by somebody else. And now we can clearly see it's not necessarily the case anymore, ao it feels like something new. But it really isn't. As always.
• aianus 7y ago
  > How good will your deep fake have to be in order to fool a deep fake detection AI? The best generator and the best detector are actually part of the same model! If you create a better detector, you are making the generator better at the same time so you have not accomplished anything. "GANs are a clever way of training a generative model by framing the problem as a supervised learning problem with two sub-models: the generator model that we train to generate new examples, and the discriminator model that tries to classify examples as either real (from the domain) or fake (generated). The two models are trained together in a zero-sum game, adversarial, until the discriminator model is fooled about half the time, meaning the generator model is generating plausible examples." https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-are-generative-adversarial-networks-gans/ https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-are-generative-adver...
  • muttled 7y ago
    Is the generator always assumed to be able to keep up when the discriminator is improved algorithmically? I've always wondered that when I hear this counter-argument.
    • PeterisP 7y ago
      Well, from the pure GAN theory perspective, it is theoretically possible for a perfect generator to exist which generates samples that perfectly match the 'source data distribution' (the only question is how do we obtain one or close to it), and thus a perfect discriminator can't exist - a fake image could be realistic and indistinguishable in all aspects. And it does seem that the human-visible weaknesses of many currently published deepfake examples are those that would be hard for the current discriminator architectures to detect, not those which would be harder to generate than any other part of the fake.
• xamuel 7y ago
  >We've been in this "post truth" world for a long time already for every form of media other than video The film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" came out in 1939. It should be mandatory viewing.
• ojosilva 7y ago
  The problem of fake news is not actually that you (a rhetoric "you"), with a presumably above average intelligence, is able select or be skeptical about your sources of truth, but: 1) The researched human behavior where "1000 lies must be equal to 1 truth". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256486791_Credibility_of_repeated_statements_Memory_for_trivia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256486791_Credibili... 2) Monopolizing the information stream: the attention grabbing effectiveness of deepfake videos to convey fake messages and its novelty incentive to share them on social media, added to the fear-of-missing-out they generate on viewers and the fact that "the effort required to refute b* is 10 times greater than the effort required to produce it": https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/social-media-fatigue-and-fear-of-missing-out-drive-fake-news-forward-says-study/cid/1693562 https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/social-media-fatigue-an... 3) voter apathy caused by news fatigue due to the sheer volume of fake news, to which deepfake adds a new vector: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/polls-media-fake-news.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/polls-media-fake-news...., https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2019/07/04/chronicle-fatigue-syndrome-why-news-saturation-is-more-dangerous-than-fake-news/ https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2019/07/04/chronicle-fati... 4) A majority of youngsters can't really spot (or care) about fake anymore: https://qz.com/1750839/most-young-2020-us-election-voters-cant-spot-fake-news/ https://qz.com/1750839/most-young-2020-us-election-voters-ca...