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This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video tha

This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

0xffff2 6y ago
>years from now or never? I really don't think this is true. I hear stories about deepfakes on NPR pretty regularly. It would be very strange if a subject that has managed to gain some mainstream media traction was never internalized by a large percentage of the general public.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cacois 6y ago
  NPR listeners != large percentage of the general public. Also, people believe what they see, on an instinctual level. Hell, people believe what they hear, mostly. It will take a lot of education and time to untrain that.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    I try to avoid consuming too much news, so I don't have much exposure to other news sources (and I only probably get an hour or two of NPR programming per week). Given the level of coverage I've heard on NPR, I would be pretty shocked if the subject hasn't received some coverage by most major media outlets.
cm2187 6y ago
Agree, video has always been a deeply manipulative media. Between editing, angles of shooting, music. The simple fact that you have a voice over that tells you something and that somehow because you are watching the video (what you watch is real) the voice over is also the truth. It will introduce a healthy dose of skepticism to that media.
- Bluestein 6y ago
  We might as well ask Kuleshov about this, father of the Kuleshov effect with his experiments between 1910 and 1920 ... In the - now famous - film below, Kuleshov edited a shot of the expressionless face of an actor, which was alternated with various other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc When the clip was shown to an audience, they believed that the expression on the protagonist's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the bowl of soup, a girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief, or desire, respectively. Of course, the footage of actor Ivan Mosjoukine was actually the same shot each time.- The audience even went on to rave about the actors "performance" ... "the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, [they] were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman".- The point is that, given the audiovisual medium, a certain degree of manipulation, or "intent" on the part of those creating the work is always to be expected ... ... and, also, that audiences bring their own bagage when they view something.-
echelon 6y ago
I agree 100%. Deepfake hysteria is absurd. I'm the author of https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, and my goal has been to make deep fakes as accessible as possible so people become familiar with them. You know what people use vo.codes for? Memes. That's it. A number of journalists have decided the technology is entirely confusing and deceitful. While there are new risks posed by deep fakes, I believe the potential for good far outweighs the bad. Today I see it being used mostly for artistic purposes and for humor. The real threat is social media and the soapbox amplification and attention algorithm, not deep fakes. Deep fakes enable creatives to make this kind of stuff (most of these are made with vocodes) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSgd4PoQofQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSgd4PoQofQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpqJF5LXX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpqJF5LXX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs https://twitter.com/RodanSpeedwagon/status/1317230494715621376 https://twitter.com/RodanSpeedwagon/status/13172304947156213... https://twitter.com/twpl_logan/status/1306542488694460416 https://twitter.com/twpl_logan/status/1306542488694460416 https://youtu.be/mS0v2zbjtTg https://youtu.be/mS0v2zbjtTg vtubers are using it to give themselves new voices, which is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKcrSrPYcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKcrSrPYcw As the technology improves, it will become disruptive and enable average people to join the ranks of Hollywood actors, directors, music producers, and vocalists. The future isn't A-list celebrities and grammy winners, it's people like you and me. The people stoking the anti-deepfake fire are the media. They claim that this is the end of trust and authenticity, despite the fact that classical methods of trickery and deceit are already way more common. Where are their doomsday articles about catfishing, phishing, and social engineering? There aren't any, because it isn't exciting. This technology doesn't really move the needle for deception if you can slow a video of Nancy Pelosi to half speed and claim that she's drunk. Deepfakes are just the next wave of photoshop. People don't use photoshop to steal elections and win court cases. They use it to make memes. It's the same deal with deepfakes. The technology is going to improve. And I'm sure the hysteria will increase in volume too. Real time voice conversion and video generation is going to be cited as "scary", but it'll mostly be a hit with gamers and vtubers. It's not going to be a "Mission Impossible"-style espionage tool. It's going to be used in good humor and to good effect. These tools are going to bring about a new media renaissance. They'll let the small players compete with the giants. That's not scary - it's exciting. That's also what I'm working on for my startup: memes today, hollywood / old media disruption tomorrow. I've already got insane growth (millions of requests a week, and our videos have hundreds of thousands of YouTube views). I'm wondering when to pull the trigger and start hiring people. (My users are already working with me to build more!) I'm super excited by this field, and you should be too. The media is screaming fire, but I'm running at it with full speed. I see the magic and the amazing opportunity.
phailhaus 6y ago
> What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire? There is a sizable group of people who do not know that The Colbert Report was satire. The problem with satire is that there will always be a group of people who think it's real, it's like a corollary to Poe's Law. Source: Research: Conservatives believe Colbert isn't joking https://www.cnet.com/news/research-conservatives-believe-colbert-isnt-joking/ https://www.cnet.com/news/research-conservatives-believe-col...
- tines 6y ago
  Not a compelling problem imo. You could say the same thing about irony, sarcasm, etc. but nobody calls it a problem.
- malandrew 6y ago
  Yup. The same goes the other direction. The Babylon Bee has been fact checked a bunch of times because some liberals think it is fake news not satire. Whether it's a few, some, many, whatever is debatable, but seems like a general rule that people generally don't perceive satire to be satire when it doesn't match their preferred consumer choice of gaslighting mainstream media. It's hardly specific to liberals or conservatives.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). Maybe we'll have to go back to sworn witness statements. Worked for thousands of years.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Sadly we are well aware of how inaccurate and untrustworthy eye-witness accounts can be.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    But at least there is a human being behind each statement. You can question, you can examine their motives, you can challenge. A video is just a video. An anonymous accuser. You can't ask a video any questions.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      Slightly OT, but I finally realized this was probably the long-game behind Facebook et al.'s real-identity-only policy. Sure it has the side (main!) benefit of empowering targeted advertising. But fundamentally creating traceability between content/comment and a singular identity enables elimination of the most egregious abuses (mass-disinformation/ganging). I'm as 90s internet-is-for-anonymous as anyone, but I have to admit traceability has merit in the larger social ecosystems.
      - intotheabyss 6y ago
        We can create decentralized identity systems, where you decide which information should be public, while also providing accountability. https://www.microsoft.com/en/security/business/identity/own-your-identity https://www.microsoft.com/en/security/business/identity/own-... Rather than let mega corps control identities, which should be building open source tools to allow developers to include decentralized identities within their platforms, preferably systems that interoperate with Ethereum.
gsich 6y ago
Digital signatures do exist.
rossjudson 6y ago
I couldn't agree with you more. It probably is the best way to popularize what deep fakes can really do. I also agree on video provenance/signing. Perhaps signed video will be something devices do by default in the future. If there are multiple devices recording, we can probably find a way to cross-check. Actually, that probably also exists. ;)
- seg_lol 6y ago
  Multicamera deep fakes are already a thing. I just saw some patches for injecting the same hardware codec fingerprints into the synthesized video so that one appears to come from a samsung and the other an iphone 11.
hutzlibu 6y ago
"I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now)" But they still should be spottable as Fake, if examined. Related, a MIT project to build a KI to spot deepfakes (also ways to spot deepfake as human): https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/detect-fakes/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/detect-fakes/overview/

0xffff2 6y ago

>years from now or never? I really don't think this is true. I hear stories about deepfakes on NPR pretty regularly. It would be very strange if a subject that has managed to gain some mainstream media traction was never internalized by a large percentage of the general public.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cacois 6y ago
NPR listeners != large percentage of the general public. Also, people believe what they see, on an instinctual level. Hell, people believe what they hear, mostly. It will take a lot of education and time to untrain that.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  I try to avoid consuming too much news, so I don't have much exposure to other news sources (and I only probably get an hour or two of NPR programming per week). Given the level of coverage I've heard on NPR, I would be pretty shocked if the subject hasn't received some coverage by most major media outlets.

cm2187 6y ago

Agree, video has always been a deeply manipulative media. Between editing, angles of shooting, music. The simple fact that you have a voice over that tells you something and that somehow because you are watching the video (what you watch is real) the voice over is also the truth. It will introduce a healthy dose of skepticism to that media.

Bluestein 6y ago
We might as well ask Kuleshov about this, father of the Kuleshov effect with his experiments between 1910 and 1920 ... In the - now famous - film below, Kuleshov edited a shot of the expressionless face of an actor, which was alternated with various other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc When the clip was shown to an audience, they believed that the expression on the protagonist's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the bowl of soup, a girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief, or desire, respectively. Of course, the footage of actor Ivan Mosjoukine was actually the same shot each time.- The audience even went on to rave about the actors "performance" ... "the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, [they] were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman".- The point is that, given the audiovisual medium, a certain degree of manipulation, or "intent" on the part of those creating the work is always to be expected ... ... and, also, that audiences bring their own bagage when they view something.-

echelon 6y ago

I agree 100%. Deepfake hysteria is absurd. I'm the author of https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, and my goal has been to make deep fakes as accessible as possible so people become familiar with them. You know what people use vo.codes for? Memes. That's it. A number of journalists have decided the technology is entirely confusing and deceitful. While there are new risks posed by deep fakes, I believe the potential for good far outweighs the bad. Today I see it being used mostly for artistic purposes and for humor. The real threat is social media and the soapbox amplification and attention algorithm, not deep fakes. Deep fakes enable creatives to make this kind of stuff (most of these are made with vocodes) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSgd4PoQofQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSgd4PoQofQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpqJF5LXX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpqJF5LXX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs https://twitter.com/RodanSpeedwagon/status/1317230494715621376 https://twitter.com/RodanSpeedwagon/status/13172304947156213... https://twitter.com/twpl_logan/status/1306542488694460416 https://twitter.com/twpl_logan/status/1306542488694460416 https://youtu.be/mS0v2zbjtTg https://youtu.be/mS0v2zbjtTg vtubers are using it to give themselves new voices, which is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKcrSrPYcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKcrSrPYcw As the technology improves, it will become disruptive and enable average people to join the ranks of Hollywood actors, directors, music producers, and vocalists. The future isn't A-list celebrities and grammy winners, it's people like you and me. The people stoking the anti-deepfake fire are the media. They claim that this is the end of trust and authenticity, despite the fact that classical methods of trickery and deceit are already way more common. Where are their doomsday articles about catfishing, phishing, and social engineering? There aren't any, because it isn't exciting. This technology doesn't really move the needle for deception if you can slow a video of Nancy Pelosi to half speed and claim that she's drunk. Deepfakes are just the next wave of photoshop. People don't use photoshop to steal elections and win court cases. They use it to make memes. It's the same deal with deepfakes. The technology is going to improve. And I'm sure the hysteria will increase in volume too. Real time voice conversion and video generation is going to be cited as "scary", but it'll mostly be a hit with gamers and vtubers. It's not going to be a "Mission Impossible"-style espionage tool. It's going to be used in good humor and to good effect. These tools are going to bring about a new media renaissance. They'll let the small players compete with the giants. That's not scary - it's exciting. That's also what I'm working on for my startup: memes today, hollywood / old media disruption tomorrow. I've already got insane growth (millions of requests a week, and our videos have hundreds of thousands of YouTube views). I'm wondering when to pull the trigger and start hiring people. (My users are already working with me to build more!) I'm super excited by this field, and you should be too. The media is screaming fire, but I'm running at it with full speed. I see the magic and the amazing opportunity.

phailhaus 6y ago

> What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire? There is a sizable group of people who do not know that The Colbert Report was satire. The problem with satire is that there will always be a group of people who think it's real, it's like a corollary to Poe's Law. Source: Research: Conservatives believe Colbert isn't joking https://www.cnet.com/news/research-conservatives-believe-colbert-isnt-joking/ https://www.cnet.com/news/research-conservatives-believe-col...

tines 6y ago
Not a compelling problem imo. You could say the same thing about irony, sarcasm, etc. but nobody calls it a problem.
malandrew 6y ago
Yup. The same goes the other direction. The Babylon Bee has been fact checked a bunch of times because some liberals think it is fake news not satire. Whether it's a few, some, many, whatever is debatable, but seems like a general rule that people generally don't perceive satire to be satire when it doesn't match their preferred consumer choice of gaslighting mainstream media. It's hardly specific to liberals or conservatives.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). Maybe we'll have to go back to sworn witness statements. Worked for thousands of years.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Sadly we are well aware of how inaccurate and untrustworthy eye-witness accounts can be.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  But at least there is a human being behind each statement. You can question, you can examine their motives, you can challenge. A video is just a video. An anonymous accuser. You can't ask a video any questions.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Slightly OT, but I finally realized this was probably the long-game behind Facebook et al.'s real-identity-only policy. Sure it has the side (main!) benefit of empowering targeted advertising. But fundamentally creating traceability between content/comment and a singular identity enables elimination of the most egregious abuses (mass-disinformation/ganging). I'm as 90s internet-is-for-anonymous as anyone, but I have to admit traceability has merit in the larger social ecosystems.
    - intotheabyss 6y ago
      We can create decentralized identity systems, where you decide which information should be public, while also providing accountability. https://www.microsoft.com/en/security/business/identity/own-your-identity https://www.microsoft.com/en/security/business/identity/own-... Rather than let mega corps control identities, which should be building open source tools to allow developers to include decentralized identities within their platforms, preferably systems that interoperate with Ethereum.

gsich 6y ago

Digital signatures do exist.

rossjudson 6y ago

I couldn't agree with you more. It probably is the best way to popularize what deep fakes can really do. I also agree on video provenance/signing. Perhaps signed video will be something devices do by default in the future. If there are multiple devices recording, we can probably find a way to cross-check. Actually, that probably also exists. ;)

seg_lol 6y ago
Multicamera deep fakes are already a thing. I just saw some patches for injecting the same hardware codec fingerprints into the synthesized video so that one appears to come from a samsung and the other an iphone 11.

hutzlibu 6y ago

"I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now)" But they still should be spottable as Fake, if examined. Related, a MIT project to build a KI to spot deepfakes (also ways to spot deepfake as human): https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/detect-fakes/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/detect-fakes/overview/