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What really worries me about the DeepFakes stuff is not so much the fakes -- I'm worried about that, but that's been written about to death -- but that now it a

by SamBam 6y ago

What really worries me about the DeepFakes stuff is not so much the fakes -- I'm worried about that, but that's been written about to death -- but that now it adds plausible deniability to anyone caught on camera doing anything. If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something clearly illegal on camera, then it's simply the word of the politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom may need to remain anonymous. That said... the other way around is still the more dangerous, I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get its boots on.

keiferski 6y ago
Personally I think this might be a good thing. The alternative is a squeaky clean politician that has no character, mistakes, or experiences. > I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get its boots on. By the time this becomes possible, it will be widespread knowledge that deepfakes exist.
- SamBam 6y ago
  It's already possible. Look at the Tom Cruise deepfakes. It just requires the power to get a great actor of similar build, and lots of processing power, both of which are within the reach of a state, easily. And I don't think knowing the deepfakes exists will convince everyone. Plenty of fake photos already get passed around on Facebook and what-not, even though Photoshop has existed for decades.
- Majestic121 6y ago
  Even with widespread knowledge that deepfakes exists, you can still make credible videos of people that damages them. For example, picture a video of Trump saying in private committee 'I want to fuck that nigress'. That would be extremely heinous, and probably be a fake, but can you be 100% sure from a president that also said 'grab them by the pussy' ? The line between real and fake news is becoming more and more tenuous.
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colechristensen 6y ago
Would better cameras circumvent the issue? Sure a deepfake is convincing on a low resolution compressed video, but what about a 4k or 8k video where lens distortion and fine details are everywhere? I don't have a lot of confidence that facial pores could be convincingly simulated.
- SamBam 6y ago
  But are most secret camera recordings using high-res cameras? Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    >Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real. But why? The cheap last-gen iPhone in my pocket can take 4k videos, almost everybody has something like it in their pockets. Quality is cheap and will continue spreading, fuzzy video that looks like it was taken on a 90s camcorder will itself seem suspicious.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Generating those low level feature is actually a much easier problem. Here is an example I found using a google image search for "upscaling": https://copyrightimage.com/2018/05/09/better-image-upscaling-method-in-photoshop/ https://copyrightimage.com/2018/05/09/better-image-upscaling... This is from 2018, which is an eternity for machine learning research.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    But those kinds of things also could reveal the fraud - adding a blemish where the real person doesn't have one, features that move around frame by frame in a video. The difference is things which look believable might be details which are trivially verifiably false - sure you can simulate my face and my voice, but can you accurately simulate every pore on my nose. Here's a random example: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6619284 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6619284 They can detect a persons pulse from tiny variations in head movement, I'd like to see a deepfake simulate that! And it's not about this one thing, I'm sure you could design against these tiny measurements one by one... the key is that there are a lot of them and a deepfake is going to have to simulate an enormous amount of data in order to pass what will become trivial tests for realism. This is made a much easier weapon against deepfakes when you have progressively better videos.
not2b 6y ago
How will the adversary get the deep fake into circulation? If it suddenly appears on social media from some sketchy account, and in the meantime the White House press pool points out that they were with the President in a completely different place, it will blow up. And it would have to be technically perfect or it would fall apart on analysis.
simion314 6y ago
There are old examples with photos including newspapers/TV that used faked images, so it not something new. If there is a big punishment for intentionally faking videos and presenting them as true similar like for official documents or impersonating officials then this technology would be used a lot less in the countries where this laws apply.
- pdpi 6y ago
  Convincingly faking photos was, until recently, pretty damn hard. This is currently possible by just using a screenshot from a game and an app from the AppStore: https://twitter.com/nillxzero/status/1369452664979943427 https://twitter.com/nillxzero/status/1369452664979943427
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  - shard 6y ago
    I think people's ability to detect fake photos have increased over the years. Consider the Cottingley Fairies photos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies), to my modern eyes, the fairies are unmistakably fake: the lighting is wrong, the resolution is wrong, the texture is wrong. However there were people who were convinced that these were real photos of fairies back then.
  - JetSpiegel 6y ago
    > Convincingly faking photos was, until recently, pretty damn hard. Stalin did it nearly 100 years ago.
- noxer 6y ago
  But its not about evidence. Its about shifting public opinion. There is and most probably never will be a law that prevents people from sharing/liking/commenting or otherwise trigger the algorithms to spread something based on the fact that it is fake. Media also fakes stuff by simply not providing context. It need no "active" image manipulation. cutting and embedding it into other content works fine since years and apparently there is very very little that can legally be done against this. The fact that the original is out there is also rather meaningless. take for example the very popular "very fine people on both sides" quote, nothing stops you or me to listen to the full conversation. But even today from random people on the street who recognizes the quote probably 50% do not know the real context. Most probably because they simply dont care enough. They involuntary heard the quote but they will not involuntary hear the context, because one goes viral the other does not.
brippalcharrid 6y ago
It also has the potential to devalue real evidence in the form of existing compromising material unless people have done things like adding cryptographic hashes to immutable public records with attestations.
ballenf 6y ago
So we'll return to how guilt or provenance were determined for thousands of years. We've only had "reliable" non-human witnesses for a few decades. And even with deep fakes, we'll still have fingerprints, DNA, phone and car tracking, facial ID systems in public places, etc.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
It just pressures us to come up with ways to prove authenticity. Those ways definitely exist but are not common yet and we have courts and governments full of people with a poor grasp on technology. But basically it calls for chains of evidence that are cryptographically tamper proof. That's not a thing right now. But it's going to become a hard requirement when evidence can be fabricated, falsified, etc. It's also the key to countering fake news and a few other things. People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences. Short term it's going to be a mess, but long term it's a good thing for us to figure this out and move on.
- osmarks 6y ago
  I don't see how you can cryptographically validate much more than "this was validated by this source before this time", which doesn't seem to solve the problem stated by the parent at all.
  - osmarks 6y ago
    Maybe you could have some DRMish thing where the camera signs it with a "secret" key, but this would be terrible for various reasons and also likely broken very fast.
    - pxue 6y ago
      I don't think so. You can cryptographically sign anything much like how SSL works now. You'll have to rely on certificate authorities to assign these certs, but it works. Videos should be cryptographically signed, and verified once online. You can spoof certs but you can't really fake the cert authority
      - osmarks 6y ago
        That's what I meant by "validated by this source". But unlike with CAs, where they're (meant to) just base issuance on the simple objectively testable criterion of whether you control the domain in question, an external authority cannot easily know whether a video represents real events, whatever that means.
fossuser 6y ago
I used to be more worried about this, but one of the things Trump proved is you can have unquestionably authentic video evidence of lies and many people won’t care. The people that care about figuring out the truth and critical thinking will probably still figure it out. Others will believe crazy things for stupid tribal reasons despite contrary evidence.
kukx 6y ago
"If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous (...)" Did we not see enough fake stories about US presidents already? The DeepFakes are not really needed to falsely accuse a politician, or to wash away the compromising material. The media can use anonymous sources to claim anything bad about any public figure without consequences. Also, they can ignore and diminish any compromising material, effectively shielding the subject. It is all about who controls the media and subsequently the narrative. DeepFake may or may not be used in court though.
dheera 6y ago
The plausible deniability of camera footage always existed, even in the film days. There are lots of tricks to fake things on camera. Neural networks do make it much easier, but it's not new. That said though, make forging evidence a crime of the utmost seriousness. Also, /more/ cameras always makes deepfaking harder.
imhoguy 6y ago
Wait till we have real-time deep fake video and audio. That will twist the world, especially the remote work/schooling/presence one.
brightball 6y ago
This isn't much different than the problem we've had with internet for many years, from inflammatory headlines with no substance in the story on down. "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." - Mark Twain
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  >pedant alert< "...there exists a family of expressions contrasting the dissemination of lies and truths, and these adages have been evolving for more than 300 years. Jonathan Swift can properly be credited with the statement he wrote in 1710. Charles Haddon Spurgeon popularized the version he employed in a sermon in 1855, but he did not craft it. At this time, there is no substantive support for assigning the saying to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill." [0] [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
  - Nursie 6y ago
    I like to look further into the past for ruminations that, while not as concise, explore the same territory. A passage from the Aeneid says - Rumour the swiftest of all evils. Speed lends her strength, and she winds vigour as she goes; small at first through fear, soon she mounts up to heaven, and walks the ground with head hidden in the clouds. Mother Earth, provoked to anger against the gods, brought her forth last, they, say as sister to Coeus and Enceladus, swift of foot and fleet of wing, a monster awful and huge, who for the many feathers in her body has as many watchful eyes beneath – wondrous to tell – as many tongues, as many sounding mouths, as many pricked-up ears. By night, midway between heaven and earth, she flies through the gloom, screeching, and droops not her eyes in sweet sleep; by day she sits on guard on high rooftop or lofty turrets, and afrights great cities, clinging to the false and the wrong, yet heralding truth.
GrumpyNl 6y ago
The problem is much bigger, i can now use deep fake to present myself in a very relaxed way with a lot of confidedence and great facial expressions. Now i can deliver video presentations like a champ, just improve myself. Its me and not me.
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shpx 6y ago
Lying is not a new phenomenon. Whether or not it's useful or good is a philosophical question with many answers which don't matter because if it becomes possible we will (have to) adjust and there will always be some upside if you want to see it. Today, lying with video is really expensive, but if in the future everyone is able to do it and everyone knows that it's possible then we're back to he-said-she-said, which is how society has worked since the beginning, except the last 200-ish years. I can easily lie and say I saw Bill Clinton murder someone in 1990. Maybe in the future I'll be able to generate fake video evidence of it just as easily as I typed out that sentence. If everyone has a feel for how easy it is, then so what? The danger is in the transition, when lying using video is affordable by a select few, and not everyone knows about it. Then it's powerful. If you're worried about that then we need to develop and teach this technology as quickly as possible. We can also do something fun like collect a time capsule of important videos before this becomes easy and timestamp it in a verifiable way (by posting the hash to a blockchain or some authority for example).
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Very good post. Another factor to consider is that a technology can be powerful when everyone does know a bit about it, but the perceptions of around it can be manipulated. To stick with your 'Bill Clinton murdered someone in 1990' example, if you are Alex Jones and you say that then I will be skeptical gien Alex Jones' serial unreliability. But if you deepfake yourself to resemble a (hypothetical) real person called Albert Johannsen who died in 1995, and manipulate the video to look like old VHS, then the authentic-seeming testimonial can be 'discovered' by someone clearing out an attic or storage unit, and then merely publicized by you-as-Alex Jones, who merely reports the claim of the discover (actually a collaborator of course). There is an endless variety of of applications, eg you have really committed a crime and video exists, but you produce a deepfake of yourself committing the same crime multiple different ways or the like, such that everyone thinks You Did It but nobody can agree about exactly how or to what extent and you escape justice due to the ambiguity (albeit with diminished future prospects).
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cyborgx7 6y ago
> it adds plausible deniability to anyone caught on camera doing anything. I see this concern brought up frequently but I don't really think this is a big deal. In the grand scheme of things, ubiquous availability of video cameras is a fairly new development. Video cameras themself are a fairly new development. We had a functional society before video evidence and we will have a functional society after video evidence. There was a very short window of time in which we had somewhat reliable video evidence but it is now coming to an end and we will manage.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Functional? perhaps, but I would say that if one peer into history, what one finds is suspects convicted on evidence that would seem flimsy by today's standard, and so will the future look at us. I would think that the number of false positive convictions declines with the advancement of new technology, and that this is perhaps a temporary setback. There was a time before fingerprints and d.n.a. evidence as well, both of which have been very helpful not only in convicting the guilty, but in exonerating the innocent, and if ever come the time that it be feasible and affordable for a layman to plant fake d.n.a. evidence and fingerprints, that would be quite a setback for criminal forensics.
- koboll 6y ago
  I think it's even simpler -- liars attracting any degree of press attention won't be able to get away with it. "That picture was Photoshopped" doesn't work as a defense because it's not too difficult for experts to tell a Photoshop from a genuine image, nor to interview someone at the scene of an alleged event and learn the truth. The same will be true with deepfakes, only much more so, because there are so many more ways to give away that it's a deepfake. Video adds new dimensions of scrutiny like how well the fake face tracks the head, matches lighting and expression, etc. Deepfake detection is in its infancy but you can bet it'll be even more accurate than Photoshop detection.
aeternum 6y ago
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Having so much on video in the first place is a pretty recent phenomenon. 30 years ago, politicians had a very low chance of being caught on camera at all.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  It comes to min that I know of few politica scandals that were revealed by anyone caught on camera.
ttfxxcc 6y ago
I highly recommend you watch this lecture on blackmail inflation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xlmhhh9HYqc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xlmhhh9HYqc
127 6y ago
Machines that write believable stories can fabricate entire realities. The deepfake stuff is just a very small part of it. How much of the information we use to make our daily decisions on come from unverified sources on the internet? How many of the "trusted" sources are just paid PR for the rich and powerful? The deepfake stuff can be solved with public/private key crypto anyways.
- osmarks 6y ago
  How do you solve deepfakes with asymmetric cryptography, without just trusting the person the videos purport to be of to say (cryptographically) whether something is real or not (which is not a good solution)?
cwkoss 6y ago
"News" organizations already edit video to maximize emotional impact to viewers, often in misleading ways. I don't see this as a paradigm shift as much as a continued slide down the slippery slope of normalized propaganda.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Any evidence relied on in court needs a chain of custody, and pictures and videos are no different. It's why screenshots are generally inadmissible in court: anyone could have edited them.
joe_the_user 6y ago
If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something clearly illegal on camera, then it's simply the word of the politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom may need to remain anonymous. -- How often are politicians caught on camera doing illegal things now? I don't recall this happening very often. The bad behavior on camera I remember from way bad when ("Abscam") was an FBI entrapment scheme so you have more than just the video as testament. -- The most common "guilty by camera" situation in recent years have been cops and when a scene from an event where other facts are known gets filmed, you need far more than face manipulation to make a fake that's going to be plausible.
kawera 6y ago
Related: Chinese deepfakes are going viral, and Beijing is freaking out https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-deepfakes-regulators-alibaba-tencent https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-deepfakes-regulators-...
01100011 6y ago
There's plenty to worry about with deepfakes. They enable what amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack in real life. Imagine an AI able to break into the conversation and maintain two different communication threads with each party. Imagine what happens when you present someone with the voice and/or image of their loved one and pitch a product, plant an idea, or execute fraud? What happens when an emotionally unstable person is harassed by the voice of their lover or even a deceased relative. Now imagine that you could rent some computing power and perform a million of those frauds in parallel. Psychological warfare will never be the same. When people tell me the robots are going to kill us someday, I always reply that they won't have to, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.
PhilosAccnting 6y ago
I'm comforted by history. Shopped photos don't mean we distrust photos entirely, but we're now generally "herd immune" to silly things in a photo because we all know that it came from somebody's edits. This will hold true for deepfakes. It means that we might start judging the character of a person, their surrounding information (e.g., who they know who vouches for them) instead of the core information itself. It'll be a bit like how cybersecurity involves trusting the trust of trustworthy sources: not perfect, but doable.
TheDudeMan 6y ago
More megapixels!
balls187 6y ago
A single video itself would not meet a preponderance of evidence required to secure a conviction. Also,as most states are 2-party consent for video recording the scenario you described would have a huge evidentiary rules hurdle regardless of the deepfake capability.

by SamBam 6y ago

keiferski 6y ago

Personally I think this might be a good thing. The alternative is a squeaky clean politician that has no character, mistakes, or experiences. > I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get its boots on. By the time this becomes possible, it will be widespread knowledge that deepfakes exist.

SamBam 6y ago
It's already possible. Look at the Tom Cruise deepfakes. It just requires the power to get a great actor of similar build, and lots of processing power, both of which are within the reach of a state, easily. And I don't think knowing the deepfakes exists will convince everyone. Plenty of fake photos already get passed around on Facebook and what-not, even though Photoshop has existed for decades.
Majestic121 6y ago
Even with widespread knowledge that deepfakes exists, you can still make credible videos of people that damages them. For example, picture a video of Trump saying in private committee 'I want to fuck that nigress'. That would be extremely heinous, and probably be a fake, but can you be 100% sure from a president that also said 'grab them by the pussy' ? The line between real and fake news is becoming more and more tenuous.
- deleted 6y ago
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colechristensen 6y ago

Would better cameras circumvent the issue? Sure a deepfake is convincing on a low resolution compressed video, but what about a 4k or 8k video where lens distortion and fine details are everywhere? I don't have a lot of confidence that facial pores could be convincingly simulated.

SamBam 6y ago
But are most secret camera recordings using high-res cameras? Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  >Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real. But why? The cheap last-gen iPhone in my pocket can take 4k videos, almost everybody has something like it in their pockets. Quality is cheap and will continue spreading, fuzzy video that looks like it was taken on a 90s camcorder will itself seem suspicious.
ma2rten 6y ago
Generating those low level feature is actually a much easier problem. Here is an example I found using a google image search for "upscaling": https://copyrightimage.com/2018/05/09/better-image-upscaling-method-in-photoshop/ https://copyrightimage.com/2018/05/09/better-image-upscaling... This is from 2018, which is an eternity for machine learning research.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  But those kinds of things also could reveal the fraud - adding a blemish where the real person doesn't have one, features that move around frame by frame in a video. The difference is things which look believable might be details which are trivially verifiably false - sure you can simulate my face and my voice, but can you accurately simulate every pore on my nose. Here's a random example: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6619284 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6619284 They can detect a persons pulse from tiny variations in head movement, I'd like to see a deepfake simulate that! And it's not about this one thing, I'm sure you could design against these tiny measurements one by one... the key is that there are a lot of them and a deepfake is going to have to simulate an enormous amount of data in order to pass what will become trivial tests for realism. This is made a much easier weapon against deepfakes when you have progressively better videos.

not2b 6y ago

How will the adversary get the deep fake into circulation? If it suddenly appears on social media from some sketchy account, and in the meantime the White House press pool points out that they were with the President in a completely different place, it will blow up. And it would have to be technically perfect or it would fall apart on analysis.

simion314 6y ago

There are old examples with photos including newspapers/TV that used faked images, so it not something new. If there is a big punishment for intentionally faking videos and presenting them as true similar like for official documents or impersonating officials then this technology would be used a lot less in the countries where this laws apply.

pdpi 6y ago
Convincingly faking photos was, until recently, pretty damn hard. This is currently possible by just using a screenshot from a game and an app from the AppStore: https://twitter.com/nillxzero/status/1369452664979943427 https://twitter.com/nillxzero/status/1369452664979943427
- deleted 6y ago
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- shard 6y ago
  I think people's ability to detect fake photos have increased over the years. Consider the Cottingley Fairies photos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies), to my modern eyes, the fairies are unmistakably fake: the lighting is wrong, the resolution is wrong, the texture is wrong. However there were people who were convinced that these were real photos of fairies back then.
- JetSpiegel 6y ago
  > Convincingly faking photos was, until recently, pretty damn hard. Stalin did it nearly 100 years ago.
noxer 6y ago
But its not about evidence. Its about shifting public opinion. There is and most probably never will be a law that prevents people from sharing/liking/commenting or otherwise trigger the algorithms to spread something based on the fact that it is fake. Media also fakes stuff by simply not providing context. It need no "active" image manipulation. cutting and embedding it into other content works fine since years and apparently there is very very little that can legally be done against this. The fact that the original is out there is also rather meaningless. take for example the very popular "very fine people on both sides" quote, nothing stops you or me to listen to the full conversation. But even today from random people on the street who recognizes the quote probably 50% do not know the real context. Most probably because they simply dont care enough. They involuntary heard the quote but they will not involuntary hear the context, because one goes viral the other does not.

brippalcharrid 6y ago

It also has the potential to devalue real evidence in the form of existing compromising material unless people have done things like adding cryptographic hashes to immutable public records with attestations.

ballenf 6y ago

So we'll return to how guilt or provenance were determined for thousands of years. We've only had "reliable" non-human witnesses for a few decades. And even with deep fakes, we'll still have fingerprints, DNA, phone and car tracking, facial ID systems in public places, etc.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

It just pressures us to come up with ways to prove authenticity. Those ways definitely exist but are not common yet and we have courts and governments full of people with a poor grasp on technology. But basically it calls for chains of evidence that are cryptographically tamper proof. That's not a thing right now. But it's going to become a hard requirement when evidence can be fabricated, falsified, etc. It's also the key to countering fake news and a few other things. People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences. Short term it's going to be a mess, but long term it's a good thing for us to figure this out and move on.

osmarks 6y ago
I don't see how you can cryptographically validate much more than "this was validated by this source before this time", which doesn't seem to solve the problem stated by the parent at all.
- osmarks 6y ago
  Maybe you could have some DRMish thing where the camera signs it with a "secret" key, but this would be terrible for various reasons and also likely broken very fast.
  - pxue 6y ago
    I don't think so. You can cryptographically sign anything much like how SSL works now. You'll have to rely on certificate authorities to assign these certs, but it works. Videos should be cryptographically signed, and verified once online. You can spoof certs but you can't really fake the cert authority
    - osmarks 6y ago
      That's what I meant by "validated by this source". But unlike with CAs, where they're (meant to) just base issuance on the simple objectively testable criterion of whether you control the domain in question, an external authority cannot easily know whether a video represents real events, whatever that means.

fossuser 6y ago

I used to be more worried about this, but one of the things Trump proved is you can have unquestionably authentic video evidence of lies and many people won’t care. The people that care about figuring out the truth and critical thinking will probably still figure it out. Others will believe crazy things for stupid tribal reasons despite contrary evidence.

kukx 6y ago

"If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous (...)" Did we not see enough fake stories about US presidents already? The DeepFakes are not really needed to falsely accuse a politician, or to wash away the compromising material. The media can use anonymous sources to claim anything bad about any public figure without consequences. Also, they can ignore and diminish any compromising material, effectively shielding the subject. It is all about who controls the media and subsequently the narrative. DeepFake may or may not be used in court though.

dheera 6y ago

The plausible deniability of camera footage always existed, even in the film days. There are lots of tricks to fake things on camera. Neural networks do make it much easier, but it's not new. That said though, make forging evidence a crime of the utmost seriousness. Also, /more/ cameras always makes deepfaking harder.

imhoguy 6y ago

Wait till we have real-time deep fake video and audio. That will twist the world, especially the remote work/schooling/presence one.

brightball 6y ago

This isn't much different than the problem we've had with internet for many years, from inflammatory headlines with no substance in the story on down. "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." - Mark Twain

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
>pedant alert< "...there exists a family of expressions contrasting the dissemination of lies and truths, and these adages have been evolving for more than 300 years. Jonathan Swift can properly be credited with the statement he wrote in 1710. Charles Haddon Spurgeon popularized the version he employed in a sermon in 1855, but he did not craft it. At this time, there is no substantive support for assigning the saying to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill." [0] [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
- Nursie 6y ago
  I like to look further into the past for ruminations that, while not as concise, explore the same territory. A passage from the Aeneid says - Rumour the swiftest of all evils. Speed lends her strength, and she winds vigour as she goes; small at first through fear, soon she mounts up to heaven, and walks the ground with head hidden in the clouds. Mother Earth, provoked to anger against the gods, brought her forth last, they, say as sister to Coeus and Enceladus, swift of foot and fleet of wing, a monster awful and huge, who for the many feathers in her body has as many watchful eyes beneath – wondrous to tell – as many tongues, as many sounding mouths, as many pricked-up ears. By night, midway between heaven and earth, she flies through the gloom, screeching, and droops not her eyes in sweet sleep; by day she sits on guard on high rooftop or lofty turrets, and afrights great cities, clinging to the false and the wrong, yet heralding truth.

GrumpyNl 6y ago

The problem is much bigger, i can now use deep fake to present myself in a very relaxed way with a lot of confidedence and great facial expressions. Now i can deliver video presentations like a champ, just improve myself. Its me and not me.

deleted 6y ago

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shpx 6y ago

Lying is not a new phenomenon. Whether or not it's useful or good is a philosophical question with many answers which don't matter because if it becomes possible we will (have to) adjust and there will always be some upside if you want to see it. Today, lying with video is really expensive, but if in the future everyone is able to do it and everyone knows that it's possible then we're back to he-said-she-said, which is how society has worked since the beginning, except the last 200-ish years. I can easily lie and say I saw Bill Clinton murder someone in 1990. Maybe in the future I'll be able to generate fake video evidence of it just as easily as I typed out that sentence. If everyone has a feel for how easy it is, then so what? The danger is in the transition, when lying using video is affordable by a select few, and not everyone knows about it. Then it's powerful. If you're worried about that then we need to develop and teach this technology as quickly as possible. We can also do something fun like collect a time capsule of important videos before this becomes easy and timestamp it in a verifiable way (by posting the hash to a blockchain or some authority for example).

anigbrowl 6y ago
Very good post. Another factor to consider is that a technology can be powerful when everyone does know a bit about it, but the perceptions of around it can be manipulated. To stick with your 'Bill Clinton murdered someone in 1990' example, if you are Alex Jones and you say that then I will be skeptical gien Alex Jones' serial unreliability. But if you deepfake yourself to resemble a (hypothetical) real person called Albert Johannsen who died in 1995, and manipulate the video to look like old VHS, then the authentic-seeming testimonial can be 'discovered' by someone clearing out an attic or storage unit, and then merely publicized by you-as-Alex Jones, who merely reports the claim of the discover (actually a collaborator of course). There is an endless variety of of applications, eg you have really committed a crime and video exists, but you produce a deepfake of yourself committing the same crime multiple different ways or the like, such that everyone thinks You Did It but nobody can agree about exactly how or to what extent and you escape justice due to the ambiguity (albeit with diminished future prospects).

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cyborgx7 6y ago

> it adds plausible deniability to anyone caught on camera doing anything. I see this concern brought up frequently but I don't really think this is a big deal. In the grand scheme of things, ubiquous availability of video cameras is a fairly new development. Video cameras themself are a fairly new development. We had a functional society before video evidence and we will have a functional society after video evidence. There was a very short window of time in which we had somewhat reliable video evidence but it is now coming to an end and we will manage.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Functional? perhaps, but I would say that if one peer into history, what one finds is suspects convicted on evidence that would seem flimsy by today's standard, and so will the future look at us. I would think that the number of false positive convictions declines with the advancement of new technology, and that this is perhaps a temporary setback. There was a time before fingerprints and d.n.a. evidence as well, both of which have been very helpful not only in convicting the guilty, but in exonerating the innocent, and if ever come the time that it be feasible and affordable for a layman to plant fake d.n.a. evidence and fingerprints, that would be quite a setback for criminal forensics.
koboll 6y ago
I think it's even simpler -- liars attracting any degree of press attention won't be able to get away with it. "That picture was Photoshopped" doesn't work as a defense because it's not too difficult for experts to tell a Photoshop from a genuine image, nor to interview someone at the scene of an alleged event and learn the truth. The same will be true with deepfakes, only much more so, because there are so many more ways to give away that it's a deepfake. Video adds new dimensions of scrutiny like how well the fake face tracks the head, matches lighting and expression, etc. Deepfake detection is in its infancy but you can bet it'll be even more accurate than Photoshop detection.

aeternum 6y ago

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Having so much on video in the first place is a pretty recent phenomenon. 30 years ago, politicians had a very low chance of being caught on camera at all.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
It comes to min that I know of few politica scandals that were revealed by anyone caught on camera.

ttfxxcc 6y ago

I highly recommend you watch this lecture on blackmail inflation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xlmhhh9HYqc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xlmhhh9HYqc

127 6y ago

Machines that write believable stories can fabricate entire realities. The deepfake stuff is just a very small part of it. How much of the information we use to make our daily decisions on come from unverified sources on the internet? How many of the "trusted" sources are just paid PR for the rich and powerful? The deepfake stuff can be solved with public/private key crypto anyways.

osmarks 6y ago
How do you solve deepfakes with asymmetric cryptography, without just trusting the person the videos purport to be of to say (cryptographically) whether something is real or not (which is not a good solution)?

cwkoss 6y ago

"News" organizations already edit video to maximize emotional impact to viewers, often in misleading ways. I don't see this as a paradigm shift as much as a continued slide down the slippery slope of normalized propaganda.

heavyset_go 6y ago

Any evidence relied on in court needs a chain of custody, and pictures and videos are no different. It's why screenshots are generally inadmissible in court: anyone could have edited them.

joe_the_user 6y ago

If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something clearly illegal on camera, then it's simply the word of the politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom may need to remain anonymous. -- How often are politicians caught on camera doing illegal things now? I don't recall this happening very often. The bad behavior on camera I remember from way bad when ("Abscam") was an FBI entrapment scheme so you have more than just the video as testament. -- The most common "guilty by camera" situation in recent years have been cops and when a scene from an event where other facts are known gets filmed, you need far more than face manipulation to make a fake that's going to be plausible.

kawera 6y ago

Related: Chinese deepfakes are going viral, and Beijing is freaking out https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-deepfakes-regulators-alibaba-tencent https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-deepfakes-regulators-...

01100011 6y ago

There's plenty to worry about with deepfakes. They enable what amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack in real life. Imagine an AI able to break into the conversation and maintain two different communication threads with each party. Imagine what happens when you present someone with the voice and/or image of their loved one and pitch a product, plant an idea, or execute fraud? What happens when an emotionally unstable person is harassed by the voice of their lover or even a deceased relative. Now imagine that you could rent some computing power and perform a million of those frauds in parallel. Psychological warfare will never be the same. When people tell me the robots are going to kill us someday, I always reply that they won't have to, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.

PhilosAccnting 6y ago

I'm comforted by history. Shopped photos don't mean we distrust photos entirely, but we're now generally "herd immune" to silly things in a photo because we all know that it came from somebody's edits. This will hold true for deepfakes. It means that we might start judging the character of a person, their surrounding information (e.g., who they know who vouches for them) instead of the core information itself. It'll be a bit like how cybersecurity involves trusting the trust of trustworthy sources: not perfect, but doable.

TheDudeMan 6y ago

More megapixels!

balls187 6y ago

A single video itself would not meet a preponderance of evidence required to secure a conviction. Also,as most states are 2-party consent for video recording the scenario you described would have a huge evidentiary rules hurdle regardless of the deepfake capability.