4 ms·

While technically curious, from legal/societal point of view to me there doesn't seem to be huge difference between having a deepfake or a lookalike actor on th

by zokier 6y ago

While technically curious, from legal/societal point of view to me there doesn't seem to be huge difference between having a deepfake or a lookalike actor on the other end. And with old-fashioned telephone presumably has had this impostor problem since forever.

jonplackett 6y ago
Quite a few politicians have been caught out by phone call pranksters in the past too. I guess this is getting more attention because it’s not just a prank. Makes you wonder though, if pranksters could do it, how often spies have just used fake phone calls before now!
JimBlackwood 6y ago
Aslong as the message from the deepfake or lookalike actor is authorized by the person you’re intending to speak to. That’s mostly the problem here.
dalbasal 6y ago
It's always hard to know if tech based phenomenon is actually new or just a migration of something to digital form. There are two ways to be wrong, broadly. One way is the "technically true" error. There are plenty of predecessors to twitter, spam, podcasting, etc. Legally, philosophically and such... it's usually easy to underestimate impact because it really is "nothing new." But... in different medium, at a different scale or higher velocity things change. Junk mail is like spam, but the junk mail problem rarely got beyond manual handling scale. The other way to be wrong is the opposite. Assuming that digitization will create change, but all we get is a digital version of the previous. It's hard to know the future. I agree that Deepfake is likely not going to change the world of imposter/fraud too much, though it may get a lot of attention. OTOH, I do think it has the potential to weird up the entertainment world. I also think it could be high impact in media. If nothing else, it'll strengthen the "skeptical of everything" segment's skepticism. That said, guessing these things is a losing game.
rwmj 6y ago
Now they don't need to hire a lookalike actor or impersonator, so that both greatly reduces the chance of the getting caught because you can use someone already on your team (instead of an actor), and increases your capabilities because you can call more targets, more often. At last a genuine case of computers improving productivity ...
- zokier 6y ago
  I don't know too much about deepfakes, but I'd imagine that you still need some actor, and having them at least remotely resemble the target character is probably helpful. You still need the source actor to act the mannerisms, way of speaking, physical posture etc of the target character
  - rwmj 6y ago
    If you're immitating Tom Cruise. But not if you just need to roughly look and sound like someone that the Dutch MPs have rarely seen before.
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      And over Zoom, not HD video.
  - iandanforth 6y ago
    Nope. It's more like puppeteering an image. No initial similarity required. It's not directly discussed in the below link but extending this technique to arbitrary new faces or even cartoon characters isn't truly difficult anymore. https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Perhaps one would be wise to demand a certain authentication ere one proceed with sensitive politics.
  - 6y ago
awb 6y ago
> And with old-fashioned telephone presumably has had this impostor problem since forever. Nalvany himself impersonated a Russian official via telephone to uncover details of his own assassination attempt: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683 And here’s the call itself: https://youtu.be/ibqiet6Bg38 https://youtu.be/ibqiet6Bg38 It’s an incredible story and yes it does still happen.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
The problem is one of ease and feasibility. As deep fakes become easier and cheaper it makes them more easily done by anyone. Thus from say a US perspective someone could make a fake Trump video and rally together a violent mob to attempt a second takeover of the capitol or similar to another building/group of people but this time call for AR15s rather than flags poles and even random office items to beat the police. Imagine that sent to an underground group of qanon people who believe that Hillary is an illuminati pedophile who eats children under pizza shops and it's a secret message to them to commit some act of terrorism. Anyone with that little of a grip on reality could be tricked into just about anything with a deep fake.
jka 6y ago
Likely true, yep. The scalability of this kind of attack might be different nowadays (or in future), though.
jimmySixDOF 6y ago
> [XYZ] ... has had this imposter problem since forever seems to be a prevailing argument against deepfakes being anything to worry about. What will happen when there is a realtime crisis where quick decisions are required and suddenly, amongst the other noise, there is believable CCTV footage of X or an inflammatory statement by Y or any of a hundred bad actor insertions into the fog of war that disrupts a nation state OODA loop output in the real world where bombs are dropped and people are killed in response to what, too late and only after the fact, is determined to be a deepfake. Assuming that any effort at look back retrospection is made - which is by no means at all certain. The ability to stage things with a Hollywood studio and VFX team was with us before now, yes, but the ability to have any joker with a GPU on the fly invent footage to meet the realtime and flammable story of the moment is new. Oh, there is an Indonesian submarine that went missing in Bali yesterday? Well here is footage from an Indian trawler showing a Russian boat acting suspiciously in the area. Good luck unpeeling that onion while you are in a hurry.

by zokier 6y ago

jonplackett 6y ago

Quite a few politicians have been caught out by phone call pranksters in the past too. I guess this is getting more attention because it’s not just a prank. Makes you wonder though, if pranksters could do it, how often spies have just used fake phone calls before now!

JimBlackwood 6y ago

Aslong as the message from the deepfake or lookalike actor is authorized by the person you’re intending to speak to. That’s mostly the problem here.

dalbasal 6y ago

It's always hard to know if tech based phenomenon is actually new or just a migration of something to digital form. There are two ways to be wrong, broadly. One way is the "technically true" error. There are plenty of predecessors to twitter, spam, podcasting, etc. Legally, philosophically and such... it's usually easy to underestimate impact because it really is "nothing new." But... in different medium, at a different scale or higher velocity things change. Junk mail is like spam, but the junk mail problem rarely got beyond manual handling scale. The other way to be wrong is the opposite. Assuming that digitization will create change, but all we get is a digital version of the previous. It's hard to know the future. I agree that Deepfake is likely not going to change the world of imposter/fraud too much, though it may get a lot of attention. OTOH, I do think it has the potential to weird up the entertainment world. I also think it could be high impact in media. If nothing else, it'll strengthen the "skeptical of everything" segment's skepticism. That said, guessing these things is a losing game.

rwmj 6y ago

Now they don't need to hire a lookalike actor or impersonator, so that both greatly reduces the chance of the getting caught because you can use someone already on your team (instead of an actor), and increases your capabilities because you can call more targets, more often. At last a genuine case of computers improving productivity ...

zokier 6y ago
I don't know too much about deepfakes, but I'd imagine that you still need some actor, and having them at least remotely resemble the target character is probably helpful. You still need the source actor to act the mannerisms, way of speaking, physical posture etc of the target character
- rwmj 6y ago
  If you're immitating Tom Cruise. But not if you just need to roughly look and sound like someone that the Dutch MPs have rarely seen before.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    And over Zoom, not HD video.
- iandanforth 6y ago
  Nope. It's more like puppeteering an image. No initial similarity required. It's not directly discussed in the below link but extending this technique to arbitrary new faces or even cartoon characters isn't truly difficult anymore. https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Perhaps one would be wise to demand a certain authentication ere one proceed with sensitive politics.
- 6y ago

awb 6y ago

> And with old-fashioned telephone presumably has had this impostor problem since forever. Nalvany himself impersonated a Russian official via telephone to uncover details of his own assassination attempt: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683 And here’s the call itself: https://youtu.be/ibqiet6Bg38 https://youtu.be/ibqiet6Bg38 It’s an incredible story and yes it does still happen.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

The problem is one of ease and feasibility. As deep fakes become easier and cheaper it makes them more easily done by anyone. Thus from say a US perspective someone could make a fake Trump video and rally together a violent mob to attempt a second takeover of the capitol or similar to another building/group of people but this time call for AR15s rather than flags poles and even random office items to beat the police. Imagine that sent to an underground group of qanon people who believe that Hillary is an illuminati pedophile who eats children under pizza shops and it's a secret message to them to commit some act of terrorism. Anyone with that little of a grip on reality could be tricked into just about anything with a deep fake.

jka 6y ago

Likely true, yep. The scalability of this kind of attack might be different nowadays (or in future), though.

jimmySixDOF 6y ago

> [XYZ] ... has had this imposter problem since forever seems to be a prevailing argument against deepfakes being anything to worry about. What will happen when there is a realtime crisis where quick decisions are required and suddenly, amongst the other noise, there is believable CCTV footage of X or an inflammatory statement by Y or any of a hundred bad actor insertions into the fog of war that disrupts a nation state OODA loop output in the real world where bombs are dropped and people are killed in response to what, too late and only after the fact, is determined to be a deepfake. Assuming that any effort at look back retrospection is made - which is by no means at all certain. The ability to stage things with a Hollywood studio and VFX team was with us before now, yes, but the ability to have any joker with a GPU on the fly invent footage to meet the realtime and flammable story of the moment is new. Oh, there is an Indonesian submarine that went missing in Bali yesterday? Well here is footage from an Indian trawler showing a Russian boat acting suspiciously in the area. Good luck unpeeling that onion while you are in a hurry.