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The problem will increasingly be "whose algorithm do we believe". Internet has revealed that people believe mostly what they want to. We have seen that a large

The problem will increasingly be "whose algorithm do we believe". Internet has revealed that people believe mostly what they want to. We have seen that a large subset of people are believing Bill Gates is behind the pandemic. Why would masses somehow be more rational in picking the most rigorous and objective neural network to recognize deepfakes, than they are in making sense of the world in general? In the end we will have multiple competing entities claiming to have the best deepfake recognition, all with their own agenda

ericlewis 6y ago
I think religion might have proved that people will believe whatever they want to first. The book Sapiens really opened my eyes to people.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Well it took me 35 years but I escaped religion despite being indoctrinated from a young age. And leaving was a difficult choice but education and evidence were the keys that freed me. Piercing cognitive biases is hard, maybe harder if those most in need feel forced.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Be kind to yourself and know that a fair swathe of the early years of life are necessarily of low agency.
  - ericlewis 6y ago
    I could have clarified more- I’m saying that even with these sort of deep fakes that breaking people out might be just as hard. Especially if objective proof becomes “malleable” similar to how religion can lack objective proof, manipulating people in a new way means we need methods.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Your point seemed clear enough to me. Perhaps my response drifted too far. I see education as a common solution to the "it's all relative" and "no one can know for sure" shortcuts some people take to hold on to what's more comfortable to believe. And just as religion may often teach people to turn off their critical thinking skills they can be taught to use them again. And human brains evolved to recognize unhealthy or unnatural facial imagery for millennium. So unmasking the more successful techniques may be enough to break us out of the "anything can be fake" malaise.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    > Piercing cognitive biases is hard, maybe harder if those most in need feel forced. I think about this article (post?) called “How to Change a Mind”[1] a lot. It’s about a woman whose husband was in a religious cult and how he finally realized it. [1]https://forge.medium.com/how-to-change-a-mind-1774681b9369 https://forge.medium.com/how-to-change-a-mind-1774681b9369
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      From some of the terminology used, I'm pretty sure the cult in question are the Jehovah's Witnesses. Thankfully that one seems to be dying off. Their membership is in decline, the internet has made it more and more likely that any potential convert has already heard the horror stories.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  This is on point, but we need to be clear on the direction of causality, which I believe you have correct, though I'll try to state it more clearly: The human mind and body is predisposed for social cohesion through shared narrative, and this exposed a weakness in our psychology: we are, as groups, extraordinarily gullible. As a result we have religion, conspiracy theories, politics, and crime. It remains to be seen whether this is an evolutionarily fit strategy.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  This is a very low-resolution understanding of what a religion is. It has much more depth to it. (The writer of Sapiens actively tries to ignore this by reducing every single belief humans have (including religions) to random meme propagation.)
  - lolc 6y ago
    That religions are just mind-parasites has become a meme on its own. To me, the book "Darwin's Cathedral" made a very good case that we should look at religions as adaptations that allowed creating larger societies. And so I finally came to peace with religion. Will stay atheist, thank you for asking.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      Another very thorough analysis I can recommend is Jordan Peterson's youtube series called "Psychological significance of biblical stories". There are about 10 2-3 hour lectures, but they are packed with great content and original thoughts. People think JP is some political activist because of his media portrayal, but in his core he is a student of a much more substantial content that has little to do with politics.
- justforyou 6y ago
  >> people will believe whatever they want to first. Including Harari. There's more wrong in that book than there is right, aside from basic facts that people should already know. Chriatopher Ryan (Civilized to Death & Sex at Dawn) explores the few compelling points made by Sapiens in depth and without all of the disingenuity and naive philosphy present in Sapiens.
fny 6y ago
Because YouTube, Facebook will flag these videos before they become too widespread.
- pornel 6y ago
  You're missing a sarcasm mark. But seriously: at best it's going to be a big "maybe, it depends". These services bounce between PR disasters of "complicit purveyors of propaganda" and "oppressive algorithms destroying free speech", so you can't rely on them to be on either side. As deepfakes get better, the algorithms will have worse detection rate, so it'll end with Zuck testifying to congress that Facebook doesn't want to decide what is real, so everyone can post deepfakes all day long.
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    > You're missing a sarcasm mark. I don’t see any sarcasm there.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Perhaps the wild zigzag is a hint that the people casting accusations are utterly full of shit and just want them to bend the knee to their unpleasable whims?
- puranjay 6y ago
  A video being taken down just corroborates their belief that there is some deep conspiracy behind X event
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  "I trust Google and FB, and I would like them to decide what is true or not for me instead of deciding myself"
  - 6y ago
xiphias2 6y ago
Aren't digital signatures the best solution we have for this problem? Commercial entities want to have the priviledge of being able to modify the content submitted by content creators, but the culture of trusting i.e. Twitter over client verification needs to change.
- korla 6y ago
  If the technology is too hard to understand for the masses it's unlikely to provide much resistance to desinformation campaigns.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    The technology isn't hard to understand, but even if it were so what? How many people who watch a streaming video know... anything at all about how that content is delivered, at all, at any layer. The problem is, as OP noted, the existing gate keeps profit from being able to manipulate us, so convincing them to deliver signed content is extraordinarily unlikely.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- gruez 6y ago
  Digital signatures would only match of the contents match bit for bit. This means that you can't recompress/remux/resize the video. This will probably provide a very poor ux for mobile or other bandwidth limited users. Also, if the video was used as part of another video (eg. TV broadcast), you'd either have to splice the digitally signed video into your existing stream (not modifying the bits at all), or provide the digitally signed original as an appendix. In either case, you'll need tooling to make verification easy, which doesn't exist today.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Fingerprinting can take care of the recompression problems. Remuxing is a hard problem, as it can easily take people out of context, at the same time it's very important to summarize the videos, as people have limited time. Right now what I see though is that Facebook/Google/Twitter aren't even trying to do the bare minimum end-to-end authentication that Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal already does (create a private key on the end devices, and sign the content to verify the authenticity of the publisher). Requiring HTTPS was a great first step for tech companies to protect people and from ISPs. But they do nothing to protect people from themselves being compromised (the Twitter incident was a great proof for this).
biophysboy 6y ago
This is absolutely right. I've become frustrated with people trying to fight misinformation by just telling anonymous strangers "facts". Algorithms are not going to help win the argument. There are a lot of people who hate those who they perceive to be "elite technocrats". And its not completely unwarranted! Its a really tricky challenge. The "steady state" of conversations online is mutual distrust. Unless we handle this underlying issue, clever algorithms like this will be ignored.
- slg 6y ago
  I'm reminded of the Jonathan Swift quote: >Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired The problem that specifically deepfakes and generally fake news highlights is that the general public does not have the aptitude, knowledge, time, or motivation to be a true arbiter of facts. We have traditionally outsourced that role to journalists. As a society we have lost faith in journalistic institutions so the onus is now back on the individual. We need a way to offload that truth-finding responsibility back onto a third party that can be trusted. Any system which requires more aptitude, knowledge, time, or motivation from the general public is unlikely to work because lacking those is exactly what got us into this mess.
  - biophysboy 6y ago
    The key part of your sentence being "a third party that can be trusted." A trustworthy third party is NOT the group that is "the most smart". People trust locals that they relate to. If we are going to offload responsibility, I personally think it needs to be in the old fashioned democratic pluralism style that we had half a century ago. Local leaders know the people in the area better, and they have the time and motivation to hear the interests of more people.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > trying to fight misinformation by just telling anonymous strangers "facts" It’s even worse when you realize that most mistruths are factual. You can very easily lie with facts. The texas sharpshooter falaft is a great example. You get 500 samples, take 10 good samples, and say “Look! An objective truth in 10 samples we have success!”. You omit the other 490 You never said a lie, facts only, but the interpretation you lead people towards is a lie. Or a more common example: Thing Y increases your risk of X by up to ten times!!! Risk goes from 0.0001% to 0.001%. It’s completely irrelevant and you got a nice scary clickbait with objective facts.
nothis 6y ago
For me, one reason not to freak out about this is Photoshop. It's been around for decades. Perfect photographic fakes (literally called "photoshops") are possible. Yet is there a great crisis of fake photographs taking over the news? Not really. The actual "fake news" barely even bother with photoshop (and those for whom it works, don't care about the quality). It's somehow still fairly easy to get context and at some point, you just have to trust a news outlet, just like you had to trust them for text-based news. All we see is a trend of making it easier for people to subscribe to a bubble of "news" that fits their world view. The quality of the fakeness barely factors into this.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The other reason not to freak out about this is that we're already far down the path the people think deep fakes are creating. Reddit and Twitter and the internet prove that people will react to an image of text by the tens of thousands, going straight into their brain. All of us have been guilty of this at some point. To me it's naive to freak out about Photoshop and video deepfakes because it reveals that you're completely unaware of the degree of "shallowfaking". A screenshot of a headline or tweet spreads in a way that a deepfaked video can't, and it apparently goes right past our bullshit detector in a way that video can't.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    The issue with deepfakes is this: at least in the other cases you outline, it's possible to be skeptical and weigh evidence-- including direct photographic and video evidence that is unlikely to be safe (while it may have been possible to fake before, it's been labor intensive and presents more risk that it'd have been messed up). In turn, we can evaluate the credibility of media sources based on how they agree with other evidence that we have directly evaluated. As it becomes possible to fake more and more stuff, we're going to lose that. Different silos are going to have different, meticulously supported versions of the facts with an equivalent degree of direct-evidential and reputational support. And it's not clear to me as an individual one ever disentangles this.
    - 6y ago
tomrod 6y ago
This is by design. Reflexive Control Theory: https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/07/how-you-can-fight-russias-plans-to-troll-americans.html https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/07/how-you-can-fight-russias-...

ericlewis 6y ago

I think religion might have proved that people will believe whatever they want to first. The book Sapiens really opened my eyes to people.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Well it took me 35 years but I escaped religion despite being indoctrinated from a young age. And leaving was a difficult choice but education and evidence were the keys that freed me. Piercing cognitive biases is hard, maybe harder if those most in need feel forced.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Be kind to yourself and know that a fair swathe of the early years of life are necessarily of low agency.
- ericlewis 6y ago
  I could have clarified more- I’m saying that even with these sort of deep fakes that breaking people out might be just as hard. Especially if objective proof becomes “malleable” similar to how religion can lack objective proof, manipulating people in a new way means we need methods.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Your point seemed clear enough to me. Perhaps my response drifted too far. I see education as a common solution to the "it's all relative" and "no one can know for sure" shortcuts some people take to hold on to what's more comfortable to believe. And just as religion may often teach people to turn off their critical thinking skills they can be taught to use them again. And human brains evolved to recognize unhealthy or unnatural facial imagery for millennium. So unmasking the more successful techniques may be enough to break us out of the "anything can be fake" malaise.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  > Piercing cognitive biases is hard, maybe harder if those most in need feel forced. I think about this article (post?) called “How to Change a Mind”[1] a lot. It’s about a woman whose husband was in a religious cult and how he finally realized it. [1]https://forge.medium.com/how-to-change-a-mind-1774681b9369 https://forge.medium.com/how-to-change-a-mind-1774681b9369
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    From some of the terminology used, I'm pretty sure the cult in question are the Jehovah's Witnesses. Thankfully that one seems to be dying off. Their membership is in decline, the internet has made it more and more likely that any potential convert has already heard the horror stories.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
This is on point, but we need to be clear on the direction of causality, which I believe you have correct, though I'll try to state it more clearly: The human mind and body is predisposed for social cohesion through shared narrative, and this exposed a weakness in our psychology: we are, as groups, extraordinarily gullible. As a result we have religion, conspiracy theories, politics, and crime. It remains to be seen whether this is an evolutionarily fit strategy.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
This is a very low-resolution understanding of what a religion is. It has much more depth to it. (The writer of Sapiens actively tries to ignore this by reducing every single belief humans have (including religions) to random meme propagation.)
- lolc 6y ago
  That religions are just mind-parasites has become a meme on its own. To me, the book "Darwin's Cathedral" made a very good case that we should look at religions as adaptations that allowed creating larger societies. And so I finally came to peace with religion. Will stay atheist, thank you for asking.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Another very thorough analysis I can recommend is Jordan Peterson's youtube series called "Psychological significance of biblical stories". There are about 10 2-3 hour lectures, but they are packed with great content and original thoughts. People think JP is some political activist because of his media portrayal, but in his core he is a student of a much more substantial content that has little to do with politics.
justforyou 6y ago
>> people will believe whatever they want to first. Including Harari. There's more wrong in that book than there is right, aside from basic facts that people should already know. Chriatopher Ryan (Civilized to Death & Sex at Dawn) explores the few compelling points made by Sapiens in depth and without all of the disingenuity and naive philosphy present in Sapiens.

fny 6y ago

Because YouTube, Facebook will flag these videos before they become too widespread.

pornel 6y ago
You're missing a sarcasm mark. But seriously: at best it's going to be a big "maybe, it depends". These services bounce between PR disasters of "complicit purveyors of propaganda" and "oppressive algorithms destroying free speech", so you can't rely on them to be on either side. As deepfakes get better, the algorithms will have worse detection rate, so it'll end with Zuck testifying to congress that Facebook doesn't want to decide what is real, so everyone can post deepfakes all day long.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  > You're missing a sarcasm mark. I don’t see any sarcasm there.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Perhaps the wild zigzag is a hint that the people casting accusations are utterly full of shit and just want them to bend the knee to their unpleasable whims?
puranjay 6y ago
A video being taken down just corroborates their belief that there is some deep conspiracy behind X event
travisoneill1 6y ago
"I trust Google and FB, and I would like them to decide what is true or not for me instead of deciding myself"
- 6y ago

xiphias2 6y ago

Aren't digital signatures the best solution we have for this problem? Commercial entities want to have the priviledge of being able to modify the content submitted by content creators, but the culture of trusting i.e. Twitter over client verification needs to change.

korla 6y ago
If the technology is too hard to understand for the masses it's unlikely to provide much resistance to desinformation campaigns.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  The technology isn't hard to understand, but even if it were so what? How many people who watch a streaming video know... anything at all about how that content is delivered, at all, at any layer. The problem is, as OP noted, the existing gate keeps profit from being able to manipulate us, so convincing them to deliver signed content is extraordinarily unlikely.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
gruez 6y ago
Digital signatures would only match of the contents match bit for bit. This means that you can't recompress/remux/resize the video. This will probably provide a very poor ux for mobile or other bandwidth limited users. Also, if the video was used as part of another video (eg. TV broadcast), you'd either have to splice the digitally signed video into your existing stream (not modifying the bits at all), or provide the digitally signed original as an appendix. In either case, you'll need tooling to make verification easy, which doesn't exist today.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Fingerprinting can take care of the recompression problems. Remuxing is a hard problem, as it can easily take people out of context, at the same time it's very important to summarize the videos, as people have limited time. Right now what I see though is that Facebook/Google/Twitter aren't even trying to do the bare minimum end-to-end authentication that Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal already does (create a private key on the end devices, and sign the content to verify the authenticity of the publisher). Requiring HTTPS was a great first step for tech companies to protect people and from ISPs. But they do nothing to protect people from themselves being compromised (the Twitter incident was a great proof for this).

biophysboy 6y ago

This is absolutely right. I've become frustrated with people trying to fight misinformation by just telling anonymous strangers "facts". Algorithms are not going to help win the argument. There are a lot of people who hate those who they perceive to be "elite technocrats". And its not completely unwarranted! Its a really tricky challenge. The "steady state" of conversations online is mutual distrust. Unless we handle this underlying issue, clever algorithms like this will be ignored.

slg 6y ago
I'm reminded of the Jonathan Swift quote: >Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired The problem that specifically deepfakes and generally fake news highlights is that the general public does not have the aptitude, knowledge, time, or motivation to be a true arbiter of facts. We have traditionally outsourced that role to journalists. As a society we have lost faith in journalistic institutions so the onus is now back on the individual. We need a way to offload that truth-finding responsibility back onto a third party that can be trusted. Any system which requires more aptitude, knowledge, time, or motivation from the general public is unlikely to work because lacking those is exactly what got us into this mess.
- biophysboy 6y ago
  The key part of your sentence being "a third party that can be trusted." A trustworthy third party is NOT the group that is "the most smart". People trust locals that they relate to. If we are going to offload responsibility, I personally think it needs to be in the old fashioned democratic pluralism style that we had half a century ago. Local leaders know the people in the area better, and they have the time and motivation to hear the interests of more people.
Swizec 6y ago
> trying to fight misinformation by just telling anonymous strangers "facts" It’s even worse when you realize that most mistruths are factual. You can very easily lie with facts. The texas sharpshooter falaft is a great example. You get 500 samples, take 10 good samples, and say “Look! An objective truth in 10 samples we have success!”. You omit the other 490 You never said a lie, facts only, but the interpretation you lead people towards is a lie. Or a more common example: Thing Y increases your risk of X by up to ten times!!! Risk goes from 0.0001% to 0.001%. It’s completely irrelevant and you got a nice scary clickbait with objective facts.

nothis 6y ago

For me, one reason not to freak out about this is Photoshop. It's been around for decades. Perfect photographic fakes (literally called "photoshops") are possible. Yet is there a great crisis of fake photographs taking over the news? Not really. The actual "fake news" barely even bother with photoshop (and those for whom it works, don't care about the quality). It's somehow still fairly easy to get context and at some point, you just have to trust a news outlet, just like you had to trust them for text-based news. All we see is a trend of making it easier for people to subscribe to a bubble of "news" that fits their world view. The quality of the fakeness barely factors into this.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
The other reason not to freak out about this is that we're already far down the path the people think deep fakes are creating. Reddit and Twitter and the internet prove that people will react to an image of text by the tens of thousands, going straight into their brain. All of us have been guilty of this at some point. To me it's naive to freak out about Photoshop and video deepfakes because it reveals that you're completely unaware of the degree of "shallowfaking". A screenshot of a headline or tweet spreads in a way that a deepfaked video can't, and it apparently goes right past our bullshit detector in a way that video can't.
- mlyle 6y ago
  The issue with deepfakes is this: at least in the other cases you outline, it's possible to be skeptical and weigh evidence-- including direct photographic and video evidence that is unlikely to be safe (while it may have been possible to fake before, it's been labor intensive and presents more risk that it'd have been messed up). In turn, we can evaluate the credibility of media sources based on how they agree with other evidence that we have directly evaluated. As it becomes possible to fake more and more stuff, we're going to lose that. Different silos are going to have different, meticulously supported versions of the facts with an equivalent degree of direct-evidential and reputational support. And it's not clear to me as an individual one ever disentangles this.
  - 6y ago

tomrod 6y ago

This is by design. Reflexive Control Theory: https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/07/how-you-can-fight-russias-plans-to-troll-americans.html https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/07/how-you-can-fight-russias-...