8 ms·

Yes. The video fakes are always blurry around the mouth and gestures don't match the words. The audio fakes are too "clean" (too defined breaks between words

by bloaf 5y ago

Yes. The video fakes are always blurry around the mouth and gestures don't match the words. The audio fakes are too "clean" (too defined breaks between words and no background noise) and sound like caricatures. Text is virtually impossible because politicians say "fake" stuff all the time (e.g. speeches someone else wrote) so you can't rely on uncharacteristic language.

bobsmooth 5y ago
I found the grammar of the fake text just off enough to pick them out consistently.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  I only got one of the text ones wrong. I think content was my key indicator. The fakes seemed more like what the opposite party would try to make them say... like a caricature of whatever message they actually said.
jedberg 5y ago
The only mistakes I made were calling real ones fake, but I was always able to detect the fakes. Some of the audio sounded too clean but turned out to be real. I guess I'm just extra skeptical.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's an easy enough to achieve result though: simply label everything fake.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    I mean sure, but I was actually trying. :P
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      I was trying as well... 1 wrong (the penultimate one), and a perfect score for the remainder. I found the 'silent' clips the hardest.
      - Shared404 5y ago
        I did much worse than that, but also found the silent clips the hardest. I did much better on them once I realized that the real speakers were much more likely to look around the room, or especially down toward the podium.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        A much easier criterium: the real speakers were speaking continuous sentences with logical spots for breathing pauses, the fakes discrete words. And I guess that's also why I had a harder time with the silent clips, then you don't have that signal.
    - godelski 5y ago
      Problem is that you're primed to look for fakes. The game is much harder when your in a normal environment.
- brewdad 5y ago
  It would be interesting to test how well any of us could spot these fakes if we weren't already on a web site priming us to look for them. How much of the skepticism is because you are on "alert" vs one's baseline levels of skepticism.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    To me they always look like uncanny valley so my brain flags them as fishy. Everything deepfake feels like watching Gemini Man to me. But then again, I am pretty paranoid as I do think the media and web are not out there to provide me with quality; they want to achieve money and/or power and will try to manipulate me in order to do that so I would assume fake in case of doubt.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
> The audio fakes are too "clean" (too defined breaks between words and no background noise) and sound like caricatures. The lack of background noise alone was a pretty instant key for me. And adding realistic background noise, appropriate echo/reverb that would match (even roughly as one-on-one conversation vs podium at press briefing) the room they are speaking in aren't even things you need deepfake for and would be simple audio post-processing.
- tgv 5y ago
  Ambience was missing: the recordings were dry. And the voice acting was quite bad. I've heard better Trump impersonators, and I'm not from the USA.
  - bspammer 5y ago
    The impersonators were so bad that I assumed they were intentionally added as a control. Anyone who called those real should likely be discarded from the final results.
Underphil 5y ago
Yeah, the fake audio clips had way too many telltale signs of a fake to be plausible. One of the Trump ones sounded like an SNL skit attempting his accent.
sweezyjeezy 5y ago
I marked a couple of Biden's videos as fake due to looking for the eerily stiff upper lip, but apparently that's what his mouth is really like
fallat 5y ago
100% on the money. I only got the text wrong. Still the study is extremely valuable at probing the current state of things! I'm super happy they did this.
jerojero 5y ago
Ah, that's good, I watched on my phone and not in fullscreen so couldn't always tell those details.
camjohnson26 5y ago
The silent videos are a pointless test because it could easily be poor quality video, and what does fake mean if it’s a video of the politician speaking behind the podium? The videos with spoken words were very easy to spot, and the ones that dealt with substantive content you could tell by the intonations.
- avalys 5y ago
  You can still see some bizarre artifacts in the silent fakes. Biden’s teeth moving in a different direction than the rest of his jaw is an obvious tell.
carlmr 5y ago
Exactly my feeling about this. Biden and Trump also both ramble incoherent sentences all the time, so they do talk like GPT-3, making it much harder to discern text fakes here. The only thing that made me score higher than random on the text segments was assuming that the stereotypical extreme things for Trump and Biden to say are usually fake. I.e. they used a bit of truth but stretched it too far.
- propogandist 5y ago
  >Biden and Trump also both ramble incoherent sentences all the time, only one of these two does it with 100% consistency, especially if there's no teleprompter, even then he flubs it. One wrote mostly coherent thoughts in 140 characters, the other has handlers. Guess which one got cancelled?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  This is just nihilistic cynicism. Both Trump and Biden speak in easily understood sentences. I would tend to disagree with Trump more often than not, but that doesn't mean he isn't a clear communicator. Biden is different in that he choses his words more carefully. There are many questions where it is better for him and the US to not answer a question, so he won't. But nothing about either person's sentences is 'incoherent'. And 'stretching the truth too far' is something entirely different. Incoherent sentences, by definition, cannot be 'stretching the truth', because they convey no meaning.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    >Both Trump and Biden speak in easily understood sentences. They do, unless they don't. And that's the issue, because these text snippets could be a gaffe, or they could be GPT-3. GPT-3 often gives you similar, somewhat meaningful sounding sentences that are a semantic mess. https://youtu.be/4MyLwAokINc https://youtu.be/4MyLwAokINc https://youtu.be/sli2Vn6Iiy4 https://youtu.be/sli2Vn6Iiy4 I'm not saying everything that Trump and Biden say is like this, but the existence of so many bumbling speech examples from both makes it really hard to discern what is real and what is fake.
dash2 5y ago
I saw one of Donald and was like ha ha, no way, those ears are obviously AI-generated. It was real. There’s a great Just William story where he sneaks into a waxworks exhibition and pretends to be one, and a young man comes along and points out all the defects in his utterly unrealistic anatomy. It was a bit like that.
vmception 5y ago
I found the text easy because my understanding of what they would say is based on their positions in reality than the fictional caricatures of them in the opposition party blogs. If you weren't familiar then I could see it being hard.
KarlKemp 5y ago
To label the practice of speechwriting as 'fake' is deeply misguided. Is the contract you signed 'fake' because you didn't write it? Do you believe politicians should be judged primarily on their writing skills? A politician choses their speechwriters, works with them, and takes ultimate responsibility. The process just happens to be exactly the same as it for all other tasks they do. I would argue a demonstrated ability to choose good people and judge their work is so essential for high government office, the process involving speechwriters is a far better measure of their suitability for office. Speechwriters, at least good ones, also don't write 'generic' texts. They will study their client's speech patterns and adjust word choices, rhythm, humor, and other patterns to fit the person's style. For offices as high as the US president, the writers tend not to change, sometimes over decades. See the chart at the top of https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-language-of-the-state-of-the-union/384575/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-lan... for word choices in the State of the Union. There are clear difference between and consistencies within each presidents' speeches.

by bloaf 5y ago

bobsmooth 5y ago

I found the grammar of the fake text just off enough to pick them out consistently.

Enginerrrd 5y ago
I only got one of the text ones wrong. I think content was my key indicator. The fakes seemed more like what the opposite party would try to make them say... like a caricature of whatever message they actually said.

jedberg 5y ago

The only mistakes I made were calling real ones fake, but I was always able to detect the fakes. Some of the audio sounded too clean but turned out to be real. I guess I'm just extra skeptical.

jacquesm 5y ago
That's an easy enough to achieve result though: simply label everything fake.
- jedberg 5y ago
  I mean sure, but I was actually trying. :P
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I was trying as well... 1 wrong (the penultimate one), and a perfect score for the remainder. I found the 'silent' clips the hardest.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      I did much worse than that, but also found the silent clips the hardest. I did much better on them once I realized that the real speakers were much more likely to look around the room, or especially down toward the podium.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        A much easier criterium: the real speakers were speaking continuous sentences with logical spots for breathing pauses, the fakes discrete words. And I guess that's also why I had a harder time with the silent clips, then you don't have that signal.
  - godelski 5y ago
    Problem is that you're primed to look for fakes. The game is much harder when your in a normal environment.
brewdad 5y ago
It would be interesting to test how well any of us could spot these fakes if we weren't already on a web site priming us to look for them. How much of the skepticism is because you are on "alert" vs one's baseline levels of skepticism.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  To me they always look like uncanny valley so my brain flags them as fishy. Everything deepfake feels like watching Gemini Man to me. But then again, I am pretty paranoid as I do think the media and web are not out there to provide me with quality; they want to achieve money and/or power and will try to manipulate me in order to do that so I would assume fake in case of doubt.

dr_orpheus 5y ago

> The audio fakes are too "clean" (too defined breaks between words and no background noise) and sound like caricatures. The lack of background noise alone was a pretty instant key for me. And adding realistic background noise, appropriate echo/reverb that would match (even roughly as one-on-one conversation vs podium at press briefing) the room they are speaking in aren't even things you need deepfake for and would be simple audio post-processing.

tgv 5y ago
Ambience was missing: the recordings were dry. And the voice acting was quite bad. I've heard better Trump impersonators, and I'm not from the USA.
- bspammer 5y ago
  The impersonators were so bad that I assumed they were intentionally added as a control. Anyone who called those real should likely be discarded from the final results.

Underphil 5y ago

Yeah, the fake audio clips had way too many telltale signs of a fake to be plausible. One of the Trump ones sounded like an SNL skit attempting his accent.

sweezyjeezy 5y ago

I marked a couple of Biden's videos as fake due to looking for the eerily stiff upper lip, but apparently that's what his mouth is really like

fallat 5y ago

100% on the money. I only got the text wrong. Still the study is extremely valuable at probing the current state of things! I'm super happy they did this.

jerojero 5y ago

Ah, that's good, I watched on my phone and not in fullscreen so couldn't always tell those details.

camjohnson26 5y ago

The silent videos are a pointless test because it could easily be poor quality video, and what does fake mean if it’s a video of the politician speaking behind the podium? The videos with spoken words were very easy to spot, and the ones that dealt with substantive content you could tell by the intonations.

avalys 5y ago
You can still see some bizarre artifacts in the silent fakes. Biden’s teeth moving in a different direction than the rest of his jaw is an obvious tell.

carlmr 5y ago

Exactly my feeling about this. Biden and Trump also both ramble incoherent sentences all the time, so they do talk like GPT-3, making it much harder to discern text fakes here. The only thing that made me score higher than random on the text segments was assuming that the stereotypical extreme things for Trump and Biden to say are usually fake. I.e. they used a bit of truth but stretched it too far.

propogandist 5y ago
>Biden and Trump also both ramble incoherent sentences all the time, only one of these two does it with 100% consistency, especially if there's no teleprompter, even then he flubs it. One wrote mostly coherent thoughts in 140 characters, the other has handlers. Guess which one got cancelled?
KarlKemp 5y ago
This is just nihilistic cynicism. Both Trump and Biden speak in easily understood sentences. I would tend to disagree with Trump more often than not, but that doesn't mean he isn't a clear communicator. Biden is different in that he choses his words more carefully. There are many questions where it is better for him and the US to not answer a question, so he won't. But nothing about either person's sentences is 'incoherent'. And 'stretching the truth too far' is something entirely different. Incoherent sentences, by definition, cannot be 'stretching the truth', because they convey no meaning.
- carlmr 5y ago
  >Both Trump and Biden speak in easily understood sentences. They do, unless they don't. And that's the issue, because these text snippets could be a gaffe, or they could be GPT-3. GPT-3 often gives you similar, somewhat meaningful sounding sentences that are a semantic mess. https://youtu.be/4MyLwAokINc https://youtu.be/4MyLwAokINc https://youtu.be/sli2Vn6Iiy4 https://youtu.be/sli2Vn6Iiy4 I'm not saying everything that Trump and Biden say is like this, but the existence of so many bumbling speech examples from both makes it really hard to discern what is real and what is fake.

dash2 5y ago

I saw one of Donald and was like ha ha, no way, those ears are obviously AI-generated. It was real. There’s a great Just William story where he sneaks into a waxworks exhibition and pretends to be one, and a young man comes along and points out all the defects in his utterly unrealistic anatomy. It was a bit like that.

vmception 5y ago

I found the text easy because my understanding of what they would say is based on their positions in reality than the fictional caricatures of them in the opposition party blogs. If you weren't familiar then I could see it being hard.

KarlKemp 5y ago

To label the practice of speechwriting as 'fake' is deeply misguided. Is the contract you signed 'fake' because you didn't write it? Do you believe politicians should be judged primarily on their writing skills? A politician choses their speechwriters, works with them, and takes ultimate responsibility. The process just happens to be exactly the same as it for all other tasks they do. I would argue a demonstrated ability to choose good people and judge their work is so essential for high government office, the process involving speechwriters is a far better measure of their suitability for office. Speechwriters, at least good ones, also don't write 'generic' texts. They will study their client's speech patterns and adjust word choices, rhythm, humor, and other patterns to fit the person's style. For offices as high as the US president, the writers tend not to change, sometimes over decades. See the chart at the top of https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-language-of-the-state-of-the-union/384575/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-lan... for word choices in the State of the Union. There are clear difference between and consistencies within each presidents' speeches.