8 ms·

This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not. It’s going to get to the point where you

This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not. It’s going to get to the point where you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true. At the same time it will add additional fake situations to the conversation. Worst part is that eventually even the AI-powered counter measures are going to fail eventually. The moment a computer knows what gives away a hint that it is a deepfakes and not real, a computer can solve to not present that give away. The “good guys” and “bad guys” will iterate with each other until it is perfected.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
But you can say "we have emails where he admits to doing this" in a court room, even though emails can be trivially faked. You just have to provide information about how you got the emails and how you know they're authentic. Is there a reason to expect video will be more problematic as it becomes easier to fake?
- harrisonjackson 6y ago
  Chain of custody is a good argument for protections within a court room but court of public opinion is where the deep fakes will really run wild.
conception 6y ago
Maybe... photoshop detection hasn’t gone down that path as far as I know. I would imagine the problems of hiding detection in video to be a magnitude harder to hide?
- bogwog 6y ago
  True, but photoshop is usually done by hand. An AI-generated deepfake could maybe eventually be trained so that it outputs videos that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    The detection side also gets the benefits of AI though. I can't see the generation side getting that far ahead.
    - Gh0stRAT 6y ago
      From what I understand though, generators always have an advantage because the generator is allowed to "see" the discriminator's gradients during training. [0] >The model for the discriminator is usually more complex than the generator (more filters and more layers) and a good discriminator gives quality information. In many GAN applications, we may run into bottlenecks where increasing generator capacity shows no quality improvement. Until we identify the bottlenecks and resolve them, increasing generator capacity does not seem to be a priority for many partitioners. [1] Put another way: GAN training ends when the discriminator can no longer meaningfully distinguish real from fake. By definition then, the best generator will have no useful discriminator that can distinguish its output from real data. (conversely, if you did have such a discriminator, you could use it to train a better generator) [0] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/generator https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/generator [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/gan-ways-to-improve-gan-performance-acf37f9f59b https://towardsdatascience.com/gan-ways-to-improve-gan-perfo...
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > I can't see the generation side getting that far ahead. How far ahead do they need to be? Suppose that it's cat and mouse, at least initially. Every six months someone comes up with a new way to detect the best known deepfakes, then six months after that there is a new way to evade that means of detection as well. Someone drops a deepfake five weeks before an election.
metalliqaz 6y ago
The synthetic media apocalypse is even worse then these examples. The ability for liberal democracy to exist at all is highly in doubt. We need serious leadership to be attacking this problem head-on. Instead, I'm pretty sure that our current administration (in the US but also elsewhere) only see it as a welcome propaganda tool.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Wouldn't surprise me if society gets completely blindsided. As corona has shown, the people who know lack power, and the people with power don't give a shit.
murzy 6y ago
> The moment a computer knows what gives away a hint that it is a deepfakes and not real, a computer can solve to not present that give away. The “good guys” and “bad guys” will iterate with each other until it is perfected. You just described a GAN (generative adversarial network)!
acover 6y ago
Would signing the image in hardware alleviate some of the problem? It would create a high cost to faking.
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  Maybe we should just go back to analog video?
optymizer 6y ago
I think it'll be similar to the situation with pictures. We've had the ability to 'photoshop' people's faces in and out of images for a long time now. I think the first question asked of a video is going to be "is this a deep fake?" just like we currently ask "is this picture photoshopped?". It doesn't mean that we no longer use pictures, or that we don't alter pictures, just that we are more critical of them. That said, there is just more realism in a series of moving pictures, but I don't see why the situation for a series of fake pictures has to be wildly different from the situation of a single fake picture.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  The issue is cost. Proving that an image is or isn't photoshopped isn't all that difficult/expensive. Anyone well versed in digital imagery can use basic tools to expose 99.99% of photoshopped images. But moving pictures are different. Due to compression artifacts and the overall lower quality of each frame there is much more room for opinion. An answer one way or another may be possible but it will be a much greater and more expensive battle of experts.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    If anything it's the opposite and it's much harder to fake videos without leaving traces.
- evan_ 6y ago
  In just the last couple hours someone has tweeted a picture of Biden from June 2019 not wearing a facemask, and claiming it's from more recently and he's being irresponsible by not wearing a facemask. It has tens of thousands of retweets, no deep fake necessary.
snarfy 6y ago
It's never perfected, just look to the animal kingdom for examples. Mimicry and camouflage is a never ending evolution.
underdeserver 6y ago
Well, others would be doing it anyway. Deepfakes are something you can do at home, today (if you're willing to spend some time and money on power to train them). By being so open about it Stone and Parker will just increase awareness of how easy it is to do, so people will know how realistic these things can look and not blindly believe what they see. So, again, what these guys are doing is a true public service.
captainmuon 6y ago
Actually, I'm a bit more optimistic about this. One thing that worries me is that everything is becoming immutable, saved forever, and digitally signed. Hard to claim you didn't post something if your account is super secure. You can't go anywhere without cameras taking your picture. And if someone steals your bitcoin or your smart contract has a mistake, your money is gone. You can't argue with an algorithm. And the internet never forgets. (Well, unless it is inconvenient for you, then Murphy's law applies ;-)) There are many such phenomena but I'd say they are all related: They mean you have less wiggle room for mistakes, or social deviance. If you are in a situation where you have to break a law, or if you are just having an affair, chances are someone or something is going to see you. There is no anonymity in the crowd anymore, on the contrary. But this deep fake technology, if it really evolves to be undetectable, can be liberating, if it erodes the trust in pictures. At least the social control mechanisms based on cameras are going to stop working. We were living in a very specific phase of human history, where we learned how to produce pictures from real scenes, but haven't learned yet to easily fake them. I just think this is going to come to an end, and we'll have to adapt. (I hope we'll adapt socially, and not just by cramming DRM into our technology like we tend do to; but that is a different topic.)
- notsuoh 6y ago
  Indeed. We went from a world where nothing was recorded outside of very fallible memory, to one where everything is recorded, to perhaps one where even though everything is recorded, there’s enough deniability via deep fakes that it doesn’t matter as much that things were recorded.
- jackfoxy 6y ago
  Everything is not immutable or even becoming immutable. Content is merely endpoints. Unless extraordinary care is taken, like publishing hashes, the response from the endpoints can change over time. Lots of content has changed, for instance on Wikipedia. In theory you could wade through the wiki history. I don't know if that is protected by hashing or not. Lots of content gets shoved down the memory hole.
staticautomatic 6y ago
I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: Audio and video evidence isn't admissible because it's audio or video (and may be inadmissible nonetheless). It's admissible because someone testifies under oath that they have personal knowledge of its provenance. The burden is on the party introducing the evidence to show that it's reliable, and the question of whether or not it is indeed reliable is a factual one for a judge or jury to answer. It's not assumed to be "true" or to accurately reflect reality just because it's a purported photo, video, or audio recording.
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  I appreciate you saying this, I hadn't known that. I think therefore it may be OK in the court of law but what about in the court of public opinion? I could see videos like this easily eroding our trust in the judicial system even further.
  - diegoperini 6y ago
    It's probably not gonna take a single generation to get used to this but as it always happened with new technology throughout centuries, people who are born into this new normal will know how not to be fooled.
    - germinalphrase 6y ago
      Will they be able to? Widespread cynicism and distrust feels more likely.
- lkxijlewlf 6y ago
  This works in a courtroom. This won't work for a politician who retweets a faked video that then incites real violence. And that, at least for now, is where we truly need to be concerned.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    It doesn't work right now due to the partisan divide in America. Spreading misinformation to help your party's cause isn't currently looked down on - so, honestly, having deepfakes out there might not hurt much and might at least help reduce the weight that blatantly doctored videos carry with the general populace.
woah 6y ago
Who cares? Photographic evidence has barely existed for 100 years, and it’s been frequently doctored the whole time.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
> It’s going to get to the point where you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true. At the same time it will add additional fake situations to the conversation. You cannot underestimate the global political ramifications of this. If you think the amount of video manipulation was bad enough this cycle in the 2020 presidential election? Imagine a few years from now when video's are being put out by political operatives and people with nefarious agenda's with impunity all over social media. This sort of thing absolutely terrifies me since you can start to twist reality to whatever you want and influence people in ways we never thought possible. I really feel like the genie is out of the bottle and this has the potential to become a very dangerous tool for people with bad intentions.
- m_ke 6y ago
  It's worse than that, politicians will be able to credibly claim that anything that's not advantageous to them is fake. We'll end up in a world where a tin pot dictator like Trump can go out and say that anything he said or did in the past was not real.
- cm2187 6y ago
  The other way round. Any shocking video trending on twitter will start with a -100 credibility as people will think "just another deepfake". You are assuming people will have never heard of these deepfakes. Sure there are still a few grannies today who have never heard of photoshop. But your average twitter user?
  - mwigdahl 6y ago
    I think that's overoptimistic. A shocking video trending on Twitter that reinforces some population's existing beliefs and biases about the subject will find a ready audience of believers. Every piece of controversial video content will have a group loudly screaming "TRUTH!" at the same time as another group screaming "FAKE!", and it will just amplify the social polarization we're already experiencing.
usrusr 6y ago
> This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not. Well, something really bad is definitely ahead with fake videos (as if real videos, with significantly meaning-changing omissions made with the plain old cutting process weren't bad enough) and people with high visibility creating awareness by doing it in the open is the closest thing to a defense that we have. It's a hopelessly weak defense but better than nothing.
hugi 6y ago
It’s not bad, it’s inevitable and it’s nice we have some light shed on it. Stupid people will no doubt try to “ban deepfakes”, but we are going to have to learn to live with them.
m_ke 6y ago
I recommend watching Adam Curtis' documentary called Hypernormalisation to get a sense of how badly this can get abused by political operatives. Especially this clip: https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
- mistermann 6y ago
  There are a lot of valid and important ideas in Adam Curtis (and many, many others) documentaries people could benefit from exposing themselves to (Century of Self is another one that I believe is a must watch for citizens of a democracy). A weird thing about this thread, and others like it, is that there seems to be this broadly shared implicit premise within the thread context that the feared ill effects of new technologies like this have not already been prevalent in our societies and information ecosystems for decades. In a thread about bias, fake news, propaganda, etc, people seem to have no problem realizing and acknowledging that we already have a very serious problem (often only visible in one's personal outgroup, but that's better than nothing) - but when the specific topic of conversation is a new technology, the majority of the comments seem to be written as if we don't really have any significant issues currently. It seems as if there's some sort of a phenomenon whereby the logical methodology for evaluation of the situation changes according to the topic, as opposed to there being a consistent methodology that at all times has an explicit awareness of the ever-present bigger picture. Here's [1] an 8 minute video on Presidential debates. This fairly well demonstrates how this aspect of our political system is largely pure theatre...and yet, intelligent people often speak (again, depending on the specific(!) topic of discussion) as if this charade is highly legitimate process, within a larger political (and journalistic) process that is also highly legitimate. The way I view the ecosystem is that the vast majority of things are to a very large extent ~fake (in whole or in part). Cranking up the absurdity to 11 in classic South Park style, making a complete mockery of both the politicians as well as those who can't consistently(!) conceptualize the true nature of our system, seems like an excellent response to a situation that has been sorely in need of some good old fashioned satirical mocking for decades. Western society & politics lost the right to be taken seriously ages ago - admitting to ourselves that there's a problem seems to me like a prerequisite first step in fixing it. [1] Winning the Presidency: Debating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayz7zLn6uFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayz7zLn6uFU
javier123454321 6y ago
Yes, deepfakes are going to kill plausible deniability in audio and video.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > deepfakes are going to kill plausible deniability in audio and video Huh? Don't deepfakes do the exact opposite - make plausible deniability in audio and video a much stronger argument? Before if you denied a video of you was genuine that would not be plausible. Now it would be plausible.
autumn_unlaces 6y ago
We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
DennisP 6y ago
So there are two problems: people not trusting true videos, and people trusting fake videos. I think the second problem is probably worse, and this satire will at least help with that.
sbmassey 6y ago
Maybe people will learn to no longer believe partisan information sources, and organisations whose reputation is based solely on the veracity of their content will predominate.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  The current media environment demonstrates that inaccurate reporting in favor of the audience biases is actually rewarded. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523045-cable-news-october-ratings-explode-as-fox-news-hits-historic-highs https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523045-cable-news-october... Tucker Carlson spent the month of October pushing Russian disinfo on Hunter Biden, all for it to culminate in "losing" his documents, re-finding them and then suddenly, inexplicably backing down. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-suddenly-says-its-time-to-leave-hunter-biden-alone https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-suddenly-says-i...
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Can you post your source on this story being Russian disinformation please.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
cm2187 6y ago
How is that different from photoshop? Today no one trusts a photo, as even a teenager can do a decent fake on a smartphone. Now the same for audio and video. Doesn't change our world.
- wcarron 6y ago
  What? There are obvious examples where faked video can have a serious affect. What kind of solipsistic nightmare are we slipping into?
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Because people still have some faith in videos. Deepfakes will remediate that very quickly.
    - alcover 6y ago
      I fear they won't. Some crowds only need a spark to explode. They won't wait for counter-evidence. They just need a pretext.
DenisM 6y ago
It’s been exactly like that with newspapers and eyewitness accounts for hundreds of years. We survived.
rexpop 6y ago
> you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. Good. We should dispense with retributive justice, and replace it with restorative, transformative systems which are a noop on the wrongly accused.
njharman 6y ago
> “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true That's good. Courts should not have high confidence in any single bit of evidence. It can all be manufactured. And long before now. It's just (too) hard to manufacture, not be detected, and get larger number of people required to "go along" with it, when you have manufacture multiple collaborating pieces.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

But you can say "we have emails where he admits to doing this" in a court room, even though emails can be trivially faked. You just have to provide information about how you got the emails and how you know they're authentic. Is there a reason to expect video will be more problematic as it becomes easier to fake?

harrisonjackson 6y ago
Chain of custody is a good argument for protections within a court room but court of public opinion is where the deep fakes will really run wild.

conception 6y ago

Maybe... photoshop detection hasn’t gone down that path as far as I know. I would imagine the problems of hiding detection in video to be a magnitude harder to hide?

bogwog 6y ago
True, but photoshop is usually done by hand. An AI-generated deepfake could maybe eventually be trained so that it outputs videos that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
- thebean11 6y ago
  The detection side also gets the benefits of AI though. I can't see the generation side getting that far ahead.
  - Gh0stRAT 6y ago
    From what I understand though, generators always have an advantage because the generator is allowed to "see" the discriminator's gradients during training. [0] >The model for the discriminator is usually more complex than the generator (more filters and more layers) and a good discriminator gives quality information. In many GAN applications, we may run into bottlenecks where increasing generator capacity shows no quality improvement. Until we identify the bottlenecks and resolve them, increasing generator capacity does not seem to be a priority for many partitioners. [1] Put another way: GAN training ends when the discriminator can no longer meaningfully distinguish real from fake. By definition then, the best generator will have no useful discriminator that can distinguish its output from real data. (conversely, if you did have such a discriminator, you could use it to train a better generator) [0] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/generator https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/generator [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/gan-ways-to-improve-gan-performance-acf37f9f59b https://towardsdatascience.com/gan-ways-to-improve-gan-perfo...
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > I can't see the generation side getting that far ahead. How far ahead do they need to be? Suppose that it's cat and mouse, at least initially. Every six months someone comes up with a new way to detect the best known deepfakes, then six months after that there is a new way to evade that means of detection as well. Someone drops a deepfake five weeks before an election.

metalliqaz 6y ago

The synthetic media apocalypse is even worse then these examples. The ability for liberal democracy to exist at all is highly in doubt. We need serious leadership to be attacking this problem head-on. Instead, I'm pretty sure that our current administration (in the US but also elsewhere) only see it as a welcome propaganda tool.

im3w1l 6y ago
Wouldn't surprise me if society gets completely blindsided. As corona has shown, the people who know lack power, and the people with power don't give a shit.

murzy 6y ago

> The moment a computer knows what gives away a hint that it is a deepfakes and not real, a computer can solve to not present that give away. The “good guys” and “bad guys” will iterate with each other until it is perfected. You just described a GAN (generative adversarial network)!

acover 6y ago

Would signing the image in hardware alleviate some of the problem? It would create a high cost to faking.

b0rsuk 6y ago
Maybe we should just go back to analog video?

optymizer 6y ago

I think it'll be similar to the situation with pictures. We've had the ability to 'photoshop' people's faces in and out of images for a long time now. I think the first question asked of a video is going to be "is this a deep fake?" just like we currently ask "is this picture photoshopped?". It doesn't mean that we no longer use pictures, or that we don't alter pictures, just that we are more critical of them. That said, there is just more realism in a series of moving pictures, but I don't see why the situation for a series of fake pictures has to be wildly different from the situation of a single fake picture.

sandworm101 6y ago
The issue is cost. Proving that an image is or isn't photoshopped isn't all that difficult/expensive. Anyone well versed in digital imagery can use basic tools to expose 99.99% of photoshopped images. But moving pictures are different. Due to compression artifacts and the overall lower quality of each frame there is much more room for opinion. An answer one way or another may be possible but it will be a much greater and more expensive battle of experts.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  If anything it's the opposite and it's much harder to fake videos without leaving traces.
evan_ 6y ago
In just the last couple hours someone has tweeted a picture of Biden from June 2019 not wearing a facemask, and claiming it's from more recently and he's being irresponsible by not wearing a facemask. It has tens of thousands of retweets, no deep fake necessary.

snarfy 6y ago

It's never perfected, just look to the animal kingdom for examples. Mimicry and camouflage is a never ending evolution.

underdeserver 6y ago

Well, others would be doing it anyway. Deepfakes are something you can do at home, today (if you're willing to spend some time and money on power to train them). By being so open about it Stone and Parker will just increase awareness of how easy it is to do, so people will know how realistic these things can look and not blindly believe what they see. So, again, what these guys are doing is a true public service.

captainmuon 6y ago

Actually, I'm a bit more optimistic about this. One thing that worries me is that everything is becoming immutable, saved forever, and digitally signed. Hard to claim you didn't post something if your account is super secure. You can't go anywhere without cameras taking your picture. And if someone steals your bitcoin or your smart contract has a mistake, your money is gone. You can't argue with an algorithm. And the internet never forgets. (Well, unless it is inconvenient for you, then Murphy's law applies ;-)) There are many such phenomena but I'd say they are all related: They mean you have less wiggle room for mistakes, or social deviance. If you are in a situation where you have to break a law, or if you are just having an affair, chances are someone or something is going to see you. There is no anonymity in the crowd anymore, on the contrary. But this deep fake technology, if it really evolves to be undetectable, can be liberating, if it erodes the trust in pictures. At least the social control mechanisms based on cameras are going to stop working. We were living in a very specific phase of human history, where we learned how to produce pictures from real scenes, but haven't learned yet to easily fake them. I just think this is going to come to an end, and we'll have to adapt. (I hope we'll adapt socially, and not just by cramming DRM into our technology like we tend do to; but that is a different topic.)

notsuoh 6y ago
Indeed. We went from a world where nothing was recorded outside of very fallible memory, to one where everything is recorded, to perhaps one where even though everything is recorded, there’s enough deniability via deep fakes that it doesn’t matter as much that things were recorded.
jackfoxy 6y ago
Everything is not immutable or even becoming immutable. Content is merely endpoints. Unless extraordinary care is taken, like publishing hashes, the response from the endpoints can change over time. Lots of content has changed, for instance on Wikipedia. In theory you could wade through the wiki history. I don't know if that is protected by hashing or not. Lots of content gets shoved down the memory hole.

staticautomatic 6y ago

I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: Audio and video evidence isn't admissible because it's audio or video (and may be inadmissible nonetheless). It's admissible because someone testifies under oath that they have personal knowledge of its provenance. The burden is on the party introducing the evidence to show that it's reliable, and the question of whether or not it is indeed reliable is a factual one for a judge or jury to answer. It's not assumed to be "true" or to accurately reflect reality just because it's a purported photo, video, or audio recording.

jimkleiber 6y ago
I appreciate you saying this, I hadn't known that. I think therefore it may be OK in the court of law but what about in the court of public opinion? I could see videos like this easily eroding our trust in the judicial system even further.
- diegoperini 6y ago
  It's probably not gonna take a single generation to get used to this but as it always happened with new technology throughout centuries, people who are born into this new normal will know how not to be fooled.
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    Will they be able to? Widespread cynicism and distrust feels more likely.
lkxijlewlf 6y ago
This works in a courtroom. This won't work for a politician who retweets a faked video that then incites real violence. And that, at least for now, is where we truly need to be concerned.
- munk-a 6y ago
  It doesn't work right now due to the partisan divide in America. Spreading misinformation to help your party's cause isn't currently looked down on - so, honestly, having deepfakes out there might not hurt much and might at least help reduce the weight that blatantly doctored videos carry with the general populace.

woah 6y ago

Who cares? Photographic evidence has barely existed for 100 years, and it’s been frequently doctored the whole time.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

> It’s going to get to the point where you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true. At the same time it will add additional fake situations to the conversation. You cannot underestimate the global political ramifications of this. If you think the amount of video manipulation was bad enough this cycle in the 2020 presidential election? Imagine a few years from now when video's are being put out by political operatives and people with nefarious agenda's with impunity all over social media. This sort of thing absolutely terrifies me since you can start to twist reality to whatever you want and influence people in ways we never thought possible. I really feel like the genie is out of the bottle and this has the potential to become a very dangerous tool for people with bad intentions.

m_ke 6y ago
It's worse than that, politicians will be able to credibly claim that anything that's not advantageous to them is fake. We'll end up in a world where a tin pot dictator like Trump can go out and say that anything he said or did in the past was not real.
cm2187 6y ago
The other way round. Any shocking video trending on twitter will start with a -100 credibility as people will think "just another deepfake". You are assuming people will have never heard of these deepfakes. Sure there are still a few grannies today who have never heard of photoshop. But your average twitter user?
- mwigdahl 6y ago
  I think that's overoptimistic. A shocking video trending on Twitter that reinforces some population's existing beliefs and biases about the subject will find a ready audience of believers. Every piece of controversial video content will have a group loudly screaming "TRUTH!" at the same time as another group screaming "FAKE!", and it will just amplify the social polarization we're already experiencing.

usrusr 6y ago

> This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not. Well, something really bad is definitely ahead with fake videos (as if real videos, with significantly meaning-changing omissions made with the plain old cutting process weren't bad enough) and people with high visibility creating awareness by doing it in the open is the closest thing to a defense that we have. It's a hopelessly weak defense but better than nothing.

hugi 6y ago

It’s not bad, it’s inevitable and it’s nice we have some light shed on it. Stupid people will no doubt try to “ban deepfakes”, but we are going to have to learn to live with them.

m_ke 6y ago

I recommend watching Adam Curtis' documentary called Hypernormalisation to get a sense of how badly this can get abused by political operatives. Especially this clip: https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM

mistermann 6y ago
There are a lot of valid and important ideas in Adam Curtis (and many, many others) documentaries people could benefit from exposing themselves to (Century of Self is another one that I believe is a must watch for citizens of a democracy). A weird thing about this thread, and others like it, is that there seems to be this broadly shared implicit premise within the thread context that the feared ill effects of new technologies like this have not already been prevalent in our societies and information ecosystems for decades. In a thread about bias, fake news, propaganda, etc, people seem to have no problem realizing and acknowledging that we already have a very serious problem (often only visible in one's personal outgroup, but that's better than nothing) - but when the specific topic of conversation is a new technology, the majority of the comments seem to be written as if we don't really have any significant issues currently. It seems as if there's some sort of a phenomenon whereby the logical methodology for evaluation of the situation changes according to the topic, as opposed to there being a consistent methodology that at all times has an explicit awareness of the ever-present bigger picture. Here's [1] an 8 minute video on Presidential debates. This fairly well demonstrates how this aspect of our political system is largely pure theatre...and yet, intelligent people often speak (again, depending on the specific(!) topic of discussion) as if this charade is highly legitimate process, within a larger political (and journalistic) process that is also highly legitimate. The way I view the ecosystem is that the vast majority of things are to a very large extent ~fake (in whole or in part). Cranking up the absurdity to 11 in classic South Park style, making a complete mockery of both the politicians as well as those who can't consistently(!) conceptualize the true nature of our system, seems like an excellent response to a situation that has been sorely in need of some good old fashioned satirical mocking for decades. Western society & politics lost the right to be taken seriously ages ago - admitting to ourselves that there's a problem seems to me like a prerequisite first step in fixing it. [1] Winning the Presidency: Debating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayz7zLn6uFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayz7zLn6uFU

javier123454321 6y ago

Yes, deepfakes are going to kill plausible deniability in audio and video.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> deepfakes are going to kill plausible deniability in audio and video Huh? Don't deepfakes do the exact opposite - make plausible deniability in audio and video a much stronger argument? Before if you denied a video of you was genuine that would not be plausible. Now it would be plausible.

autumn_unlaces 6y ago

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

DennisP 6y ago

So there are two problems: people not trusting true videos, and people trusting fake videos. I think the second problem is probably worse, and this satire will at least help with that.

sbmassey 6y ago

Maybe people will learn to no longer believe partisan information sources, and organisations whose reputation is based solely on the veracity of their content will predominate.

chillwaves 6y ago
The current media environment demonstrates that inaccurate reporting in favor of the audience biases is actually rewarded. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523045-cable-news-october-ratings-explode-as-fox-news-hits-historic-highs https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523045-cable-news-october... Tucker Carlson spent the month of October pushing Russian disinfo on Hunter Biden, all for it to culminate in "losing" his documents, re-finding them and then suddenly, inexplicably backing down. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-suddenly-says-its-time-to-leave-hunter-biden-alone https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-suddenly-says-i...
- mistermann 6y ago
  Can you post your source on this story being Russian disinformation please.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

cm2187 6y ago

How is that different from photoshop? Today no one trusts a photo, as even a teenager can do a decent fake on a smartphone. Now the same for audio and video. Doesn't change our world.

wcarron 6y ago
What? There are obvious examples where faked video can have a serious affect. What kind of solipsistic nightmare are we slipping into?
- cm2187 6y ago
  Because people still have some faith in videos. Deepfakes will remediate that very quickly.
  - alcover 6y ago
    I fear they won't. Some crowds only need a spark to explode. They won't wait for counter-evidence. They just need a pretext.

DenisM 6y ago

It’s been exactly like that with newspapers and eyewitness accounts for hundreds of years. We survived.

rexpop 6y ago

> you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. Good. We should dispense with retributive justice, and replace it with restorative, transformative systems which are a noop on the wrongly accused.

njharman 6y ago

> “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true That's good. Courts should not have high confidence in any single bit of evidence. It can all be manufactured. And long before now. It's just (too) hard to manufacture, not be detected, and get larger number of people required to "go along" with it, when you have manufacture multiple collaborating pieces.