10 ms·

Everybody Can Make DeepFakes Now [video]

184 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

xrd 7y ago
I see this kind of thing, and I think, how will a whistleblower survive the slander? Snowden and Assange both were subject to information warfare (lies is a better word) that facts don't refute. As they say "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on." I bet a large number of people still remember that Clinton was involved in pornography distributed from a pizza shop. Except it was not true at all. But the hatred of her lingered. What's to happen when a normal person attempts to reveal something and then video of them surfaces showing them saying all kinds of horrible things. The scariest thing about this is you could take a picture of them from their college years and make them out to be a pedophile, and if it gets repeated enough, it will become the truth. If I admit that I had a drinking problem twenty years ago, it will "all add up." That kind of imagery is impossible for our brains to fight.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I don't really buy it, the general public is more clever than they're often given credit for. Editing photographs became widespread due to Photoshop and now people are correctly skeptical of photographs. It's mainstream to wonder if outlandish or startling photographs have been manipulated. Sure some people will believe the bullshit, but I think "want to believe" is a big part of that. The sort of people who think Hillary Clinton eats babies believe it because they hate her, rather than hating her because they believe it.
  - xrd 7y ago
    Yeah, those are all good points, and that makes me feel less concerned after my initial reaction. It does seem like you could influence a small set of people, clearly there are people that believe and don't attempt to verify outlandish things. It seems like it might work on a small scale and that could add up.
  - apocalypstyx 7y ago
    The problem may not be that manipulated images are used to convince people that X is real or Y did Z, but that anything inconvenient can be written off, something that would require an order of magnitude less effort than employing the technology itself. This issue, of course, has always existed, to a degree, but now we exist in a state that is an unprecedented, in my opinion, acceleration of such tendencies. In a few decades, will it still be possible for there to be a reaction like that which came about from the video of the beating of Rodney King?
  - strken 7y ago
    The general public becomes sceptical after it gets burnt. It's usually reactive, rarely proactive.
  - frequentnapper 7y ago
    but the flipside of the issue is that truths can be easily dismissed as well. For example, videos of Trump lying or acting stupid can easily now be dismissed as "fake".
  - titzer 7y ago
    And yet, tens of millions will suck down propaganda from one cable news TV channel and integrate it unquestioned into their worldview. (All while claiming they don't).
  - xfitm3 7y ago
    Incredibly naive viewpoint. The mob / herd mentality is real, and often invoke reactions based on emotion and not facts or practicality. I can think of 10s of stories where lives have been ruined over misrepresentation of facts in the past 5-6 years. The most prominent example of this in my mind is when a reddit ps battle faked a cheerleader having diarrhea at a game. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cheerleader-accident/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cheerleader-accident/ She appeared on TV claiming this ruined her life. It was a single well edited photo. What can a video do? The general public still thinks faking video is outside of normal capability. The real problem is SWGIT will take years to catch up to deepfakes. If you include case law it will likely be decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Working_Group_%E2%80%93_Imaging_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Working_Group_%E2%8... Worst case: You could probably go to jail if being placed at a crime, but more likely it will just ruin your life and/or your reputation with friends and your employer.
  - som33 7y ago
    No, the public is dumb. The last 20 years the entire continent allowed PC software to be stolen and made client server, now every piece of software is spying on us because of mass computer illiteracy. 20 years ago hackers and nerds on slashdot feared Microsofts and the industries move towards hardware and software drm when the internet was just reaching the masses. The last 20 years has been the public buying client-server drm infected software en masse. Everything that used to be a local PC app is being pushed client-server, in such a world on privacy can exist and the public rewarded Ultima online, Everquest and world of warcraft. For those of you who don't know, two or more PC's in a network behave as a single machine, that means whoever programs the machines in the network LITERALLY OWNS THE ENTIRE NETWORK. AKa it's the ability to rewrite the laws of every computing device on the planet and the speed of light is fast enough to take over every machine on the planet. It's no longer merely "programming apps". It's literally stealing software en masse from the public. AKA to program now is "issuing commands", so now software can be infected with commands that take over your PC and remove your control and ownership. This is what windows 10 is about. Some of you make complain that software was always "licensed" and I'd tell you that those laws were bribed into being by corporate lobbyists because Capitalist governments have always been ruled by corporate elites that have rubber stamped their own laws, if in doubt see the last 200 years of IP law. The public interest lost every time, that is a blow out of the public interest never winning once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/... The fact that so many are gung-ho about "software as a service" here not grasping the huge political implications, you can't possibly audit all the software apps on google play, mobile, or steam, uplay, origin, etc. So these companies can do whatever they want and since our mind did not evolve to respond to these threats, many of the public just shrug their shoulders, because the human mind did not evolve in a technocratic society, so won't perceive nor act upon the danger. So no, the push towards locked down filesystems you can't access in windows 10, encrypted binaries and vm's, UWP, is the big push to put bombs in honest binary blobs to make software unpreservable. All these incentives exist because they know the public is dumb, the fortnites of the world and TF2's hat economy, told valve and big tech companies to keep pushing because the public will eat endless amounts of shit because they most of them don't care. Imagine it's the 90's and you're buying your first PC and microsoft sells you windows, except it requires an internet connection (aka the hardware dongle) and parts of windows files and functions are held hostage on remote servers in microsofts office, most hackers of the day would not buy those PC's. That's what "software as a service" is for many of the dolts on hackernews, its hardware dongle enabled software by way of internet and splitting all of what used to be local applications into two pieces. It's the end of local applications on our PC's and mobile devices and most of you don't seem to be alarmed, it's the end of privacy permanently. Because we didn't get any property rights to own our software outright with source-code, this is why steam, world of warcraft, and all new PC games like quake champions, overwatch, exist. The end game from the early 90's was this dystopian state where all PC's on the planet are turned into dumb clients and the entire society moves to a mainframe model where no one owns their devices. Without software ownership, our devices our useless and given the criminal way in which IP law was written for software, privacy is not coming back. So to say the public is bright when it handed everything the nerds feared to the corporate world on a platter is bullshit. The entire silicon valley industry is having a part at how dumb the public is, the "client to cloud" revolution is LITERALLY, stealing local apps and trapping them on company servers so they can finally turn software into property and kill the "local file" loophole on PC's to "kill piracy" by way of software as a service, the public has no idea what NTFS is. Microsoft is now testing remote control of your file system and PC via gamepass, where companies can now set permissions to files on your PC via remote. This is what the nerds feared in the 90's on slashdot and it has come true. The fact that hackernews is basically pro "cloud" is disturbing enough on its own. Here's the industry celebrating the death of local user control of PC's. https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...
- meowface 7y ago
  Assange also engaged in information warfare himself, for what it's worth. Including spreading fear about the Pizzagate (Clinton child molestation in pizza shop) conspiracy theory. https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/821595404500430848 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/821595404500430848 I recall at least one other tweet where they did this, but can't seem to find it right now.
  - xrd 7y ago
    That's fascinating and adds much to my understanding. Interesting.
    - meowface 7y ago
      I have mixed feelings about him and WikiLeaks. I do think he's being unfairly persecuted by global governments (though surely he knew this was a likely risk from the start), and they have released information that was in the public interest, but at the same time, the CIA director calling them a "hostile intelligence service" doesn't seem wrong. [0] In their leaked group chat logs (https://emma.best/2018/07/29/11000-messages-from-private-wikileaks-chat-released/ https://emma.best/2018/07/29/11000-messages-from-private-wik...), they behave exactly like a "para-intelligence agency" ("para" as in "paramilitary"). They happily use deceit, trickery, sockpuppetry, trolls, propaganda, and spreading of fear, doubt, and conspiracy theories to achieve their end goals, and their end goals seem to be to push things in a certain direction to achieve particular geopolitical results. Whether or not you agree with Assange's goals, he appears to have a strong "ends justify the means" mentality, much like the militaries and intelligence agencies he's opposing. Their tactics really seem identical to any intelligence agency's, at least from an information and non-kinetic perspective. And note this was a semi-private group just to talk to their supporters. One can only imagine what their internal, top secret-classified chats and phone calls are like. I suspect those would make them look even worse than they already do, and, again, I bet they would look very similar to the most secretive of CIA meetings. Maybe it's one of those "die or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" situations, or maybe Assange was always like this. I don't know. But they're very far from a journalistic organization, or a "Wiki", or a disinterested distributor of leaked information. They are highly political. Ironically, if they had more power or national backing [1], there would probably be a "WikiLeaks" trying to inform people about them. This sort of thing seems to be a phenomenon that repeats itself over and over again in history. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/14/cia-director-brands-wikileaks-a-hostile-intelligence-service https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/14/cia-director... [1] Some claim they work with Russian intelligence or are even backed by Russia, but I think it's more that Russian intelligence just saw them as a useful tool for a particular operation. I don't think any nation backs them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
leoh 7y ago
We need software to detect deep fakes
- EGreg 7y ago
  That’s just an adversarial network. The deepfakes will become so good that we won’t be able to tell anyway. It’s like AlphaZero playing against itself and you hoping that the “defensive” AlphaZero is able to win the game every time. In reality, each side will win sometimes but will have absolutely no way of explaining why or how. So we will have no idea anymore what is fake or not, just whether the detector said it was for some reason that time. Basically, it’s game over very soon after you do this arms race. See CAPTCHAs being solved etc.
  - Too 7y ago
    So we are back to the polygraph, we don't know it's accuracy so there is no way to tell if a human is lying or not. Taking it to the extreme, video evidence falls back to being no more valuable than eye witnesses.
- neuralzen 7y ago
  The problem here is it is a cat and mouse game. Software algorithms that can detect deep fakes can also be used to patch detectable flaws in deep fakes to evade detection, at least until new detection approaches get better but the cycle repeats on future generated content.
- kfuwbi2640 7y ago
  I’ve seen a number of attempts to identify deepfakes and other forms of manipulated images using AI. This seems like a fool’s errand since it becomes a never ending adversarial AI arms race. Instead, I haven’t seen a proposal for a system I think could work well. Camera and phone manufacturers could have their devices cryptographically sign each photo or video taken. And that’s it. From that starting place, you can build a system on top of it to verify that the image on the site you’re reading is authentic. What am I missing that makes this an invalid approach? I do understand that this would require manufacturers to implement, but it seems achievable to get them onboard. I even think you get one company like Apple to do this and it’s enough traction for the rest of the industry to have to follow suit.
legionof7 7y ago
I wonder if it'll ever become a good idea to preemptively deep fake yourself saying outrageous things and release them. Saw something like this in a Neal Stephenson book I believe.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yes, that was in Fall.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mirimir 7y ago
The faces are too wooden.
zxcvbn4038 7y ago
How long until someone uses this to make a new Bogart film? Or a new home alone movie with young Macaulay Culkin? I see a lot of great possibilities there.
- ludwigschubert 7y ago
  Have you seen the YouTube channel Ctrl Shift Face? https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g/videos https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g/video... Here’s a pretty well done one in which Bill Hader does impressions, during which his face is replaced with the one of the people he’s doing an impression of: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjI-JaRWG7s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjI-JaRWG7s
symplee 7y ago
If wonder if we're getting closer to our brain's "algorithm" which takes reference images from the real world and generates newly imagined scenes when we're dreaming.
bawana 7y ago
Will this be the 'spam' that destroys our civilized world? When we cannot believe our own senses, then our only refuge will be a construct that WE made so we know we can trust it? Will we voluntarily enter the matrix to escape the chaos that we have corrupted our reality into?
- andarleen 7y ago
  Scary thought - but a practical question is how will deep fakes influence video as courtroom evidence? Some countries have laws that only approved recording devices are acceptable for recording such evidence, but is this the end of phone recorded evidence?
  - lucasmullens 7y ago
    Did photo evidence end because of Photoshop? Honestly asking, I don't know. DeepFakes just seem to be adding video to the list of fakeable things, which already included photos and audio.
    - throwaway17_17 7y ago
      There was a marked decline in attorney’s ability to utilize private detectives to spy on opposing parties or to present still shots as alabi’s that started (at least in my area of the US) somewhere around 2005. I’d say it took a while for the distrust of stills due to the possibility of generic ‘photoshopping’, but actual and test juries are less likely to definitively base decisions on stills if the opposing lawyer can in any conceivably reasonable way claim it’s edited. As a side note, I am less concerned with the use of deep fakes to frame (civil or criminal) a person, it is more the potential for an attorney to put big wholes in a jury’s trust of video evidence by showing a faked image as counterproof and then flat out telling jurors that one is fake and therefore the other side can’t prove it’s case. Caveat -> this doesn’t apply to police generated evidence, because a majority of jurors, to a statistical certainty barring exceptional circumstances, ALWAYS believe cops.
  - whatl3y 7y ago
badrabbit 7y ago
Crypto to the rescue! I predict, Deepfakes won't cause as much issues as people think.
- mschuetz 7y ago
  How would crypto solve deep fake? You're generating new fake content, nothing to crypt here.
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    You're looking at the problem the wrong direction ;)
    - mschuetz 7y ago
      Point me in the right direction.
      - parksy 7y ago
        Not that guy, but at a basic level one possible approach is that everyone will have a digital signature, everything posted can be verified against the signature. A faker could create new content but they won't be able to sign it correctly. The tools for digital signing already exist and are used in niche industries but not really something everyday people are concerned about. It's more a social awareness problem and this will come with better tools, integrated with the apps and channels ordinary people use daily so that it is something that happens in the background. In addition to digital signing, public distributed ledgers can establish provenance or a chain of ownership for signed content, so digital content that is altered and redistributed can be sourced back to its origin more accurately. Ordinary people with the right tools built into their devices will be able to see very easily "Is it in the chain?" based on a simple enquiry to the ledger, and if the answer is no, then it's untrustworthy. If the answer is yes, then they will ask "Does trace to the origin?" and if it does not, or the origin isn't signed by the alleged owner, then it is untrustworthy. That's one possible way crypto can help defeat disinformation / fake news content. The underlying techniques exist but there is a lot of work to do to bind it to everyday use.
danbolt 7y ago
I’m not ready for advertising on the internet to be mining social media for producing targeted deepfakes.
geophertz 7y ago
In a certain way, I find the fact that everybody can make deepfakes positive for society. Because we will finally stop trusting videos and images as a reliable proof, when they clearly aren't all the time.
- jimmySixDOF 7y ago
  I'll bet someone is already working on footage of a certain US President in a certain Russian hotel room .....
- krapp 7y ago
  No, we won't. People already know videos and images can be faked, but they still trust whatever they want to be true as a post-hoc validation of their existing prejudice, not as the result of a rational attempt to judge evidence on its own merits. Just look on Youtube for various "paranormal" videos, things like "real proof" of reptilians, ghosts, aliens, etc. Most of those videos are laughably fake looking, but people who already believe in these things take them as gospel, anyway. Politically speaking, look at Pizzagate as another example. Whether or not you believe the "evidence" tends to depend on what you already believe about Democrats/progressives/leftists/the Clintons.
delusional 7y ago
I wonder when the first ad-network based solely on getting celebrity deepfakes to endorse products for cheap will pop up. is it even illegal? even if it is, could we do anything if they operated out of Russia or the middle East?
- krapp 7y ago
  That's already basically very much a thing[0,1]. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/12/the-branding-of-dead-celebrities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/12/the-bra... [1]https://www.wired.com/story/messy-legal-fight-to-bring-celebrities-back-from-the-dead/ https://www.wired.com/story/messy-legal-fight-to-bring-celeb...
- hhjinks 7y ago
  Not even just celebrities. Does anyone have a copyright on their own appearance?
pikseladam 7y ago
Think about that. You open a page in web and you SEE YOUR FACE telling you that you liked this product and how it changed your life! Scary times ahead.
- anonytrary 7y ago
  No. You will just see a person who does not exist. People that do not exist do not demand pay.

184 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

xrd 7y ago

I see this kind of thing, and I think, how will a whistleblower survive the slander? Snowden and Assange both were subject to information warfare (lies is a better word) that facts don't refute. As they say "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on." I bet a large number of people still remember that Clinton was involved in pornography distributed from a pizza shop. Except it was not true at all. But the hatred of her lingered. What's to happen when a normal person attempts to reveal something and then video of them surfaces showing them saying all kinds of horrible things. The scariest thing about this is you could take a picture of them from their college years and make them out to be a pedophile, and if it gets repeated enough, it will become the truth. If I admit that I had a drinking problem twenty years ago, it will "all add up." That kind of imagery is impossible for our brains to fight.

catalogia 7y ago
I don't really buy it, the general public is more clever than they're often given credit for. Editing photographs became widespread due to Photoshop and now people are correctly skeptical of photographs. It's mainstream to wonder if outlandish or startling photographs have been manipulated. Sure some people will believe the bullshit, but I think "want to believe" is a big part of that. The sort of people who think Hillary Clinton eats babies believe it because they hate her, rather than hating her because they believe it.
- xrd 7y ago
  Yeah, those are all good points, and that makes me feel less concerned after my initial reaction. It does seem like you could influence a small set of people, clearly there are people that believe and don't attempt to verify outlandish things. It seems like it might work on a small scale and that could add up.
- apocalypstyx 7y ago
  The problem may not be that manipulated images are used to convince people that X is real or Y did Z, but that anything inconvenient can be written off, something that would require an order of magnitude less effort than employing the technology itself. This issue, of course, has always existed, to a degree, but now we exist in a state that is an unprecedented, in my opinion, acceleration of such tendencies. In a few decades, will it still be possible for there to be a reaction like that which came about from the video of the beating of Rodney King?
- strken 7y ago
  The general public becomes sceptical after it gets burnt. It's usually reactive, rarely proactive.
- frequentnapper 7y ago
  but the flipside of the issue is that truths can be easily dismissed as well. For example, videos of Trump lying or acting stupid can easily now be dismissed as "fake".
- titzer 7y ago
  And yet, tens of millions will suck down propaganda from one cable news TV channel and integrate it unquestioned into their worldview. (All while claiming they don't).
- xfitm3 7y ago
  Incredibly naive viewpoint. The mob / herd mentality is real, and often invoke reactions based on emotion and not facts or practicality. I can think of 10s of stories where lives have been ruined over misrepresentation of facts in the past 5-6 years. The most prominent example of this in my mind is when a reddit ps battle faked a cheerleader having diarrhea at a game. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cheerleader-accident/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cheerleader-accident/ She appeared on TV claiming this ruined her life. It was a single well edited photo. What can a video do? The general public still thinks faking video is outside of normal capability. The real problem is SWGIT will take years to catch up to deepfakes. If you include case law it will likely be decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Working_Group_%E2%80%93_Imaging_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Working_Group_%E2%8... Worst case: You could probably go to jail if being placed at a crime, but more likely it will just ruin your life and/or your reputation with friends and your employer.
- som33 7y ago
  No, the public is dumb. The last 20 years the entire continent allowed PC software to be stolen and made client server, now every piece of software is spying on us because of mass computer illiteracy. 20 years ago hackers and nerds on slashdot feared Microsofts and the industries move towards hardware and software drm when the internet was just reaching the masses. The last 20 years has been the public buying client-server drm infected software en masse. Everything that used to be a local PC app is being pushed client-server, in such a world on privacy can exist and the public rewarded Ultima online, Everquest and world of warcraft. For those of you who don't know, two or more PC's in a network behave as a single machine, that means whoever programs the machines in the network LITERALLY OWNS THE ENTIRE NETWORK. AKa it's the ability to rewrite the laws of every computing device on the planet and the speed of light is fast enough to take over every machine on the planet. It's no longer merely "programming apps". It's literally stealing software en masse from the public. AKA to program now is "issuing commands", so now software can be infected with commands that take over your PC and remove your control and ownership. This is what windows 10 is about. Some of you make complain that software was always "licensed" and I'd tell you that those laws were bribed into being by corporate lobbyists because Capitalist governments have always been ruled by corporate elites that have rubber stamped their own laws, if in doubt see the last 200 years of IP law. The public interest lost every time, that is a blow out of the public interest never winning once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/... The fact that so many are gung-ho about "software as a service" here not grasping the huge political implications, you can't possibly audit all the software apps on google play, mobile, or steam, uplay, origin, etc. So these companies can do whatever they want and since our mind did not evolve to respond to these threats, many of the public just shrug their shoulders, because the human mind did not evolve in a technocratic society, so won't perceive nor act upon the danger. So no, the push towards locked down filesystems you can't access in windows 10, encrypted binaries and vm's, UWP, is the big push to put bombs in honest binary blobs to make software unpreservable. All these incentives exist because they know the public is dumb, the fortnites of the world and TF2's hat economy, told valve and big tech companies to keep pushing because the public will eat endless amounts of shit because they most of them don't care. Imagine it's the 90's and you're buying your first PC and microsoft sells you windows, except it requires an internet connection (aka the hardware dongle) and parts of windows files and functions are held hostage on remote servers in microsofts office, most hackers of the day would not buy those PC's. That's what "software as a service" is for many of the dolts on hackernews, its hardware dongle enabled software by way of internet and splitting all of what used to be local applications into two pieces. It's the end of local applications on our PC's and mobile devices and most of you don't seem to be alarmed, it's the end of privacy permanently. Because we didn't get any property rights to own our software outright with source-code, this is why steam, world of warcraft, and all new PC games like quake champions, overwatch, exist. The end game from the early 90's was this dystopian state where all PC's on the planet are turned into dumb clients and the entire society moves to a mainframe model where no one owns their devices. Without software ownership, our devices our useless and given the criminal way in which IP law was written for software, privacy is not coming back. So to say the public is bright when it handed everything the nerds feared to the corporate world on a platter is bullshit. The entire silicon valley industry is having a part at how dumb the public is, the "client to cloud" revolution is LITERALLY, stealing local apps and trapping them on company servers so they can finally turn software into property and kill the "local file" loophole on PC's to "kill piracy" by way of software as a service, the public has no idea what NTFS is. Microsoft is now testing remote control of your file system and PC via gamepass, where companies can now set permissions to files on your PC via remote. This is what the nerds feared in the 90's on slashdot and it has come true. The fact that hackernews is basically pro "cloud" is disturbing enough on its own. Here's the industry celebrating the death of local user control of PC's. https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...
meowface 7y ago
Assange also engaged in information warfare himself, for what it's worth. Including spreading fear about the Pizzagate (Clinton child molestation in pizza shop) conspiracy theory. https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/821595404500430848 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/821595404500430848 I recall at least one other tweet where they did this, but can't seem to find it right now.
- xrd 7y ago
  That's fascinating and adds much to my understanding. Interesting.
  - meowface 7y ago
    I have mixed feelings about him and WikiLeaks. I do think he's being unfairly persecuted by global governments (though surely he knew this was a likely risk from the start), and they have released information that was in the public interest, but at the same time, the CIA director calling them a "hostile intelligence service" doesn't seem wrong. [0] In their leaked group chat logs (https://emma.best/2018/07/29/11000-messages-from-private-wikileaks-chat-released/ https://emma.best/2018/07/29/11000-messages-from-private-wik...), they behave exactly like a "para-intelligence agency" ("para" as in "paramilitary"). They happily use deceit, trickery, sockpuppetry, trolls, propaganda, and spreading of fear, doubt, and conspiracy theories to achieve their end goals, and their end goals seem to be to push things in a certain direction to achieve particular geopolitical results. Whether or not you agree with Assange's goals, he appears to have a strong "ends justify the means" mentality, much like the militaries and intelligence agencies he's opposing. Their tactics really seem identical to any intelligence agency's, at least from an information and non-kinetic perspective. And note this was a semi-private group just to talk to their supporters. One can only imagine what their internal, top secret-classified chats and phone calls are like. I suspect those would make them look even worse than they already do, and, again, I bet they would look very similar to the most secretive of CIA meetings. Maybe it's one of those "die or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" situations, or maybe Assange was always like this. I don't know. But they're very far from a journalistic organization, or a "Wiki", or a disinterested distributor of leaked information. They are highly political. Ironically, if they had more power or national backing [1], there would probably be a "WikiLeaks" trying to inform people about them. This sort of thing seems to be a phenomenon that repeats itself over and over again in history. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/14/cia-director-brands-wikileaks-a-hostile-intelligence-service https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/14/cia-director... [1] Some claim they work with Russian intelligence or are even backed by Russia, but I think it's more that Russian intelligence just saw them as a useful tool for a particular operation. I don't think any nation backs them.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

leoh 7y ago

We need software to detect deep fakes

EGreg 7y ago
That’s just an adversarial network. The deepfakes will become so good that we won’t be able to tell anyway. It’s like AlphaZero playing against itself and you hoping that the “defensive” AlphaZero is able to win the game every time. In reality, each side will win sometimes but will have absolutely no way of explaining why or how. So we will have no idea anymore what is fake or not, just whether the detector said it was for some reason that time. Basically, it’s game over very soon after you do this arms race. See CAPTCHAs being solved etc.
- Too 7y ago
  So we are back to the polygraph, we don't know it's accuracy so there is no way to tell if a human is lying or not. Taking it to the extreme, video evidence falls back to being no more valuable than eye witnesses.
neuralzen 7y ago
The problem here is it is a cat and mouse game. Software algorithms that can detect deep fakes can also be used to patch detectable flaws in deep fakes to evade detection, at least until new detection approaches get better but the cycle repeats on future generated content.
kfuwbi2640 7y ago
I’ve seen a number of attempts to identify deepfakes and other forms of manipulated images using AI. This seems like a fool’s errand since it becomes a never ending adversarial AI arms race. Instead, I haven’t seen a proposal for a system I think could work well. Camera and phone manufacturers could have their devices cryptographically sign each photo or video taken. And that’s it. From that starting place, you can build a system on top of it to verify that the image on the site you’re reading is authentic. What am I missing that makes this an invalid approach? I do understand that this would require manufacturers to implement, but it seems achievable to get them onboard. I even think you get one company like Apple to do this and it’s enough traction for the rest of the industry to have to follow suit.

legionof7 7y ago

I wonder if it'll ever become a good idea to preemptively deep fake yourself saying outrageous things and release them. Saw something like this in a Neal Stephenson book I believe.

mirimir 7y ago
Yes, that was in Fall.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mirimir 7y ago

The faces are too wooden.

zxcvbn4038 7y ago

How long until someone uses this to make a new Bogart film? Or a new home alone movie with young Macaulay Culkin? I see a lot of great possibilities there.

ludwigschubert 7y ago
Have you seen the YouTube channel Ctrl Shift Face? https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g/videos https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g/video... Here’s a pretty well done one in which Bill Hader does impressions, during which his face is replaced with the one of the people he’s doing an impression of: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjI-JaRWG7s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjI-JaRWG7s

symplee 7y ago

If wonder if we're getting closer to our brain's "algorithm" which takes reference images from the real world and generates newly imagined scenes when we're dreaming.

bawana 7y ago

Will this be the 'spam' that destroys our civilized world? When we cannot believe our own senses, then our only refuge will be a construct that WE made so we know we can trust it? Will we voluntarily enter the matrix to escape the chaos that we have corrupted our reality into?

andarleen 7y ago
Scary thought - but a practical question is how will deep fakes influence video as courtroom evidence? Some countries have laws that only approved recording devices are acceptable for recording such evidence, but is this the end of phone recorded evidence?
- lucasmullens 7y ago
  Did photo evidence end because of Photoshop? Honestly asking, I don't know. DeepFakes just seem to be adding video to the list of fakeable things, which already included photos and audio.
  - throwaway17_17 7y ago
    There was a marked decline in attorney’s ability to utilize private detectives to spy on opposing parties or to present still shots as alabi’s that started (at least in my area of the US) somewhere around 2005. I’d say it took a while for the distrust of stills due to the possibility of generic ‘photoshopping’, but actual and test juries are less likely to definitively base decisions on stills if the opposing lawyer can in any conceivably reasonable way claim it’s edited. As a side note, I am less concerned with the use of deep fakes to frame (civil or criminal) a person, it is more the potential for an attorney to put big wholes in a jury’s trust of video evidence by showing a faked image as counterproof and then flat out telling jurors that one is fake and therefore the other side can’t prove it’s case. Caveat -> this doesn’t apply to police generated evidence, because a majority of jurors, to a statistical certainty barring exceptional circumstances, ALWAYS believe cops.
- whatl3y 7y ago

badrabbit 7y ago

Crypto to the rescue! I predict, Deepfakes won't cause as much issues as people think.

mschuetz 7y ago
How would crypto solve deep fake? You're generating new fake content, nothing to crypt here.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  You're looking at the problem the wrong direction ;)
  - mschuetz 7y ago
    Point me in the right direction.
    - parksy 7y ago
      Not that guy, but at a basic level one possible approach is that everyone will have a digital signature, everything posted can be verified against the signature. A faker could create new content but they won't be able to sign it correctly. The tools for digital signing already exist and are used in niche industries but not really something everyday people are concerned about. It's more a social awareness problem and this will come with better tools, integrated with the apps and channels ordinary people use daily so that it is something that happens in the background. In addition to digital signing, public distributed ledgers can establish provenance or a chain of ownership for signed content, so digital content that is altered and redistributed can be sourced back to its origin more accurately. Ordinary people with the right tools built into their devices will be able to see very easily "Is it in the chain?" based on a simple enquiry to the ledger, and if the answer is no, then it's untrustworthy. If the answer is yes, then they will ask "Does trace to the origin?" and if it does not, or the origin isn't signed by the alleged owner, then it is untrustworthy. That's one possible way crypto can help defeat disinformation / fake news content. The underlying techniques exist but there is a lot of work to do to bind it to everyday use.

danbolt 7y ago

I’m not ready for advertising on the internet to be mining social media for producing targeted deepfakes.

geophertz 7y ago

In a certain way, I find the fact that everybody can make deepfakes positive for society. Because we will finally stop trusting videos and images as a reliable proof, when they clearly aren't all the time.

jimmySixDOF 7y ago
I'll bet someone is already working on footage of a certain US President in a certain Russian hotel room .....
krapp 7y ago
No, we won't. People already know videos and images can be faked, but they still trust whatever they want to be true as a post-hoc validation of their existing prejudice, not as the result of a rational attempt to judge evidence on its own merits. Just look on Youtube for various "paranormal" videos, things like "real proof" of reptilians, ghosts, aliens, etc. Most of those videos are laughably fake looking, but people who already believe in these things take them as gospel, anyway. Politically speaking, look at Pizzagate as another example. Whether or not you believe the "evidence" tends to depend on what you already believe about Democrats/progressives/leftists/the Clintons.

delusional 7y ago

I wonder when the first ad-network based solely on getting celebrity deepfakes to endorse products for cheap will pop up. is it even illegal? even if it is, could we do anything if they operated out of Russia or the middle East?

krapp 7y ago
That's already basically very much a thing[0,1]. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/12/the-branding-of-dead-celebrities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/12/the-bra... [1]https://www.wired.com/story/messy-legal-fight-to-bring-celebrities-back-from-the-dead/ https://www.wired.com/story/messy-legal-fight-to-bring-celeb...
hhjinks 7y ago
Not even just celebrities. Does anyone have a copyright on their own appearance?

pikseladam 7y ago

Think about that. You open a page in web and you SEE YOUR FACE telling you that you liked this product and how it changed your life! Scary times ahead.

anonytrary 7y ago
No. You will just see a person who does not exist. People that do not exist do not demand pay.