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Trying to "solve" deepfakes with recognition is a dead end, as it's an arms-race between generators and detectors. We stop treating video as if its some perfec

• WanderPanda 6y ago
  > Focus on media literacy, critical thinking and digital literacy. 1. That is not the easy solution for the politicians 2. That is not the easy solution for the individual (needs to question himself) = Not gonna happen I believe “The hard way” does only appeal to a small minority (maybe not in HN :D )
  • brobdingnagians 6y ago
    Indeed, most politicians don't really want you to focus on critical thinking. It would solve some of their problems, and create lots more problems for them. But for yourself, it is becoming more and more important to really think through what is being presented to you in whatever media form and analyze whether it is credible. The print form of a deep fake is plain old well constructed word-lies, which is why we have had the phrase "don't believe everything you read on the internet" for awhile. There are people who do, but we live better lives if we don't. Deep fakes aren't really a new problem, they are just a different form of an old problem.
    • EGreg 6y ago
      Actually once the politicians speeches are being deepfaked they will BEG the public to make sure there is a digital watermark on the video before trusting it. And then of course the keys to the watermarking will be leaked :)
    • WanderPanda 6y ago
      That “don't believe everything you read on the internet” example is nice, I hope society comes up with a similar immune response for other things
      • eivarv 6y ago
        "Don't believe anything without sitting down, investigating and evaluating" holds true for most cases, including your own impressions/emotions, what you see, hear, read, etc.
• jackric 6y ago
  "This fact must be true, I saw it on Facebook!"
• wilde 6y ago
  That’s like saying “we should educate the customer” when you have a sales problem. It doesn’t work. We should measure harm and then fine the businesses that spread the harm. It’s very similar to pollution.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    We should measure harm and then fine the businesses that spread the harm. Maybe, but this has nothing to do with deepfakes, and can be generalized. Societies should teach people to recognize and deal with mis- and disinformation, rather than provide them faulty assumptions upon which to base their trust.
    • faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      Who is the “We” in this case?
      • eivarv 6y ago
        Sorry; "Societies"
    • Retric 6y ago
      That requires people to have some trusted sources they can use as a baseline. It’s all well and good to assume objective truth is available, but really it’s the most blatant examples people catch not the more subtle. Add in biases and people are all to willing to discount the truth they dislike as propaganda etc.
      • eivarv 6y ago
        No, it doesn't. It requires teaching people the tools to evaluate arguments, statements and media. I don't claim anything wrt objective truth (though I tend to think there is one, but whether we're able to directly observe it and/or agree on it is another matter) – I'm claiming we have tools (knowledge, cognitive ability) to weed out obviously incoherent, illogical, biased, untrustworthy or otherwise bad thought.
• atleta 6y ago
  I agree with the first part. They have just created a new adversary to train on. (Not saying that it's not an interesting result, but not a solution.) Regarding media literacy, while it's important in general I don't think it will help much in the short run. (Because it takes a long time and becuase it needs the cooperation of those who are actually sometimes willingly deceive themselves.) I expect digital signature and timestamped fingerprinting to appear in videos that want to prove that they are legit and from that point on you just don't believe anything that's not treated that way. This will eliminate all deep fakes other than the ones that claim to be a leak/recorded without the consent of the faked person. Deep fakes will in the end make (real) hidden camera and leaked recordings lose a lot of their credibility and power, which is sad.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    I agree media literacy (and critical thinking, for that matter) is a difficult problem, which is why we should get going already. We've had some of the tools needed to distinguish good from bad thinking for millennia, so I find it kind of weird there hasn't been more focus on this in basic education earlier. Digital signature and timestamped fingerprinting will also have errors, and they don't solve the social side of this issue. It still leads us to a faulty thought-process; We cannot inherently trust content on the basis of its medium.
    • JasonFruit 6y ago
      It is in fact weird that there isn't more focus on logic and critical thinking in basic education. I wonder how much of that has to do with government control of education: that is, the people who run the schools are beholden to those who benefit most from a population that doesn't think too critically about what they're told.
      • atleta 6y ago
        I keep hearing this, but it's also a simple and convenient logical fallacy ;). If something doesn't go well, just find a perpetrator who you can blame. I'd stick with Hanlon's razor as usual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor . The society is a complex system, politics is complex (you have to calculate what all those pesky voters say they want, think they want and actually want) and there are a lot of issues. No one in their right mind can be serious about trying to manipulate future elections through carefully crafting education for that purpose. Dictators do that, for sure. They can stay around long enough to benefit, but they rarely participate in fair elections.
• mkl95 6y ago
  I agree that digital literacy and critical thinking are lacking. But having a generator vs detector arms race would benefit the fields involved.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    Sure – but technical development is the only positive outcome, it won't solve the social side of the issue.
    • admiral33 6y ago
      The social side is better served with a signature from the device manufacturer stored in the metadata (or as a watermark) of the original file verifying that a photo/video was taken with an Apple etc lens. Make two copies of the file on capture one read only with the signature and one for editing.
      • eivarv 6y ago
        No it's not, because there can be no technical guarantee wrt to the accuracy of its assessment because of an arms race power balance in perpetual fluctuation. There's also computational cost, hackable vendors, inevitable implementation errors and vulnerabilities, vulnerable supply chain, corruption, etc. I'd rather not teach people to trust AUTHENTIC VIDEO™ (that can't guarantee authenticity), but to learn to deal with the fact that there's Photoshop for video now.
• jMyles 6y ago
  > Trying to "solve" deepfakes with recognition is a dead end, as it's an arms-race between generators and detectors. The fact that there is an arms-race doesn't mean that it's a dead end; it's possible that one side has a fundamental mathematical advantage. Consider discrete log problems: as computational power increases, it's possible to brute force smaller key spaces, but the same CPU will always be far, far better at the efficient solution than the brute one. Similarly, it's plausible that deepfakes will always be far easier for computers to detect than to generate.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    Sure, but the opposite is also plausible. Why not learn to how to deal with the fact that we can't trust any information at face value, rather than keep making cognitive shortcuts based on assumptions?
    • jMyles 6y ago
      Oh, absolutely, they're not mutually exclusive. But I think that tech to tell them apart is useful.
      • eivarv 6y ago
        Sure, but no tech can make that guarantee. As the balance in this arms-race will always be in fluctuation, you can't rely on tech to tell them apart in one moment.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  >> Focus on media literacy, critical thinking and digital literacy. That is just another arms race. I think it naïve to assume that people can be educated out of this problem. Some people can be, but large numbers will always fall for a good hoax. What we need is laws and policies to address the problem. The good news is that this problem is nothing new. The laws are already on the books. Imho this is something that the law can manage so long as the legal system is allowed to run its course. People publishing true deepfakes, not parodies but actual attempts to fool people, should face the same slander and defamation charges that previous fakes have for centuries. Even copyright law has tests to draw lines between legitimate parody and improper fakery. Hustler v. Falwell (the Larry Flint case) was about a literary deepfake, a sham interview in a porn magazine. Those who take deepfake too far, or republish such material, open themselves to legal attack. Let the lawyers do their thing.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    I agree on the regulation-part, but I still think many more are able to be educated (at least partway) out of the problem than are given an opportunity. And laws have retroactive impact via e.g. police and courts. Education would have a preventive impact.
  • achow 6y ago
    The problem is - law is slow. Law has its place, but we also need detection techniques to prevent the quick consequences that rumors and fake media can bring - 'doxing', public shaming, mob lynching, etc.
    • admax88q 6y ago
      What if we took the other approach. Currently fake media can bring all sorts of negative consequences because people are conditioned to trust media to a degree. "Most" of the media is true-ish, so a well crafted hoax will be believed by many. But what if we saturated the media with convincing deep fakes. I feel like there's an inflection point, where people are exposed to so much believable but contradictory fake news, that they might develop a natural distrust of anything presented to them. Believing that the media is for the most part true, sets you up to be manipulated or misled when the media gets it wrong.
• DC1350 6y ago
  > We stop treating video as if its some perfect representation of reality that's inherently trustworthy, and learn from confronting similar issues with other media earlier in history. Deep fakes won’t be any worse for the world than photoshop ever was. Until we have any reason to believe that deep fakes are actively misleading anyone in ways that actually matter I think it’s fine to ignore the problem.
• Taylor_OD 6y ago
  I agree with your suggested approach but is it really realistic? A non insignificant portion of the USA/World still sees doctored photographs in tabloids and takes them as fact. It feels easy to write them all off but that is a lot of people. Take the average intelligence. Half of the people in the world are less intelligence than that. So is it really realistic to train everyone on the areas you mentioned?
  • aww_dang 6y ago
    Humans will always fall short of perfection. That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to improve. That's most we can realistically ask for.
  • aerostable_slug 6y ago
    I'd also suggest sufficient damage could be done before any reasonable corrections could be made, specifically if the faked individual "said" or "did" things that meet people's preconceptions about the individual. I could imagine fake footage that would cause market impacts, riots, etc. before anyone could get in front of it, and even after official corrections come from Upon High many would believe the explanations themselves are the lies (not the faked footage). This would not be assisted by media organizations saying "allegedly", "can't confirm", and of course the words of anonymous sources that totally would never lie, right?
• aparsons 6y ago
  The cost to win the arms race may be prohibitive for the generators. Of course, that isn’t a problem for large/state actors
• ericjang 6y ago
  proof-of-work based blockchains are technically also an arms race between good and bad actors. It still works because extending the chain costs compute, so as long as the good actors have the majority of compute, all is well. Training a GAN can be thought about as a proof-of-work type job, where you need to recover the best Generator from the SOTA Discriminator, or vice versa. So the proof of work chain looks like D-G-D-G-D-G. As long as the good actors continue to dedicate more compute to tackling deepfakes than bad actors, I think it should help mitigate the issue.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    But why should we ever go with this as a "solution" – with its computational cost, hackable vendors, inevitable implementation errors and vulnerabilities, vulnerable supply chain, inability to make any technical guarantees wrt to the accuracy of its assessment because of an arms race power balance in perpetual fluctuation – instead of learning to reason about these things?
• airhead969 6y ago
  I don't think deepfakes can be "solved" without authenticated audio/video capture cryptographic signatures. In the near future, I believe it will be possible to construct essentially-undetectable DF. I think benign, newsworthy DF hoaxes should be played to educate the media and the public.
• DanBC 6y ago
  > Focus on media literacy, critical thinking and digital literacy You're assuming that people want to spot the fake, but it's pretty clear by now that they don't. This is why we have the American College of Pediatricians and the American Academy of Pediatrics. ACP is a fringe group who spend time attacking LGTB+ rights. AAP is a mainstream respected group of pediatricians. If you're a news editor and you want science you'd go to AAP, but editors often don't want science. They want a sound bite, and they'll get that from ACP.
  • eivarv 6y ago
    This is why we have the American College of Pediatricians and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Seems to me like strengthening consumer rights and/or striking down on fake marketing and quacks in regulation could solve at least some of this.
• horse666 6y ago
  Just because something might be impossible to solve fully, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try? For example cryptography is an arms race against code breakers, but that’s not a reason to just give up on encryption? Also a multi-front defence seems sensible. Agree with points below that the law needs to catch up on this front, but is not mutually exclusive to efforts in improving detection.