17 ms·
Zelensky video deepfake
Video with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky asking to retreat and surrender their weapons was published hours ago [1].
Although I must admit the quality of the video is mediocre, the voice of the president is a little unnatural and stagy, the color of the skin of the face doesn't match, though the facial expression is not bad.
Nevertheless, here we are, deepfake video created specifically for war!
(PS: I'm Ukrainian and just try to be sarcastic about the whole thing which is horrific, be careful and take care)
(PS2: considering our attitude towards the situation, we're not even taking this video serious)
[1] https://twitter.com/_delanay/status/1504048298520371201 https://twitter.com/_delanay/status/1504048298520371201
- mFixman 5y agoHow is this worse than the last 30 years of Photoshopped war images?
- onion2k 5y agoPeople are less aware how well video can be faked with few resources, so they're more likely to believe it.
- mFixman 5y agoThat's the same moral panic there used to be about Photoshop. It turned out that people don't believe tricked imaged without any context.
- onion2k 5y agoThat's the same moral panic there was about Photoshop, but it turned out that people don't believe tricked imaged without any context. Photoshop exists because people believe images that have been modified. Pretty much every billboard, magazine cover, print advert, or Instagram post you see has been photoshopped literally because people believe images enough to make it worthwhile spending the time changing it to be 'better'. Adobe built a multi-billion dollar business on the basis of tricking people with images that aren't real. The assumption that it wouldn't work for video, or that people won't believe modified news images, is counter to all of the available evidence.
- caf 5y agoAlthough every mildly surprising authentic image is also now greeted by inevitable shouts of "FAKE!". In a world of easy image trickery, people stopped believing any image they didn't want to believe.
- tgv 5y agoO, well, let me see: because people are more susceptible to believing a video than a picture and some accompanying text when it comes to statements by a person?
- spupe 5y agoInteresting. Pretty bad quality as far as deepfakes go, as you say. But I can imagine this fooling some people nevertheless.
- replwoacause 5y agoI wonder who is viewing that thinking it's real? It's obviously fake and a bad fake at that.
- mkr-hn 5y agoThis kind of belief doesn't survive contact with the kind of person bad fakes are targeted at. They're not stupid people, they're just people who've lived long enough to feel confident in their understanding of the world, and that understanding has at best an abstract concept of deep fakes. It only has to be more convincing than what they expect a fake to look like.
- tfigment 5y agoI would argee that if it confirms a view they already hold or are inclined to believe then that is all that is needed.
- XorNot 5y agoIt's also to drive a narrative: think of all the discussions on HN where we're reacting to the headline and not the article. This is a dynamic we've not seen before - Zelensky is out and about so he's seen by his people, but a huge amount of this entire effort is being shared online through social media. You don't have to convince people its authentic - you can just convince everyone that everything is fake.
- saiya-jin 5y agoOld people, many folks with IQ in the lowest 20% spectrum... and these are just the honest types. Then there are whole groups of folks so deep in the hoax echo chambers they treat anything coming from outside as fake and yet another attempt to get them.
- michaelbuckbee 5y agoPut this deepfake through a couple levels of email forwards, GIFs with burned in captions and lots of dodgy media spots of "Did Zelensky actually say this or didn't he? Some people are saying he did." and it's going to be taken for ground truth. There's a subreddit called "AteTheOnion" which chronicles people mistaking wildly obviously fake and humorous articles from The Onion and other sites. If people aren't able to discern those articles from reality what hope is there? 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion/
- Loughla 5y agoI always find it interesting to watch the trickle down of news I find here on HN. I live in a very, very, very conservative part of the US. It always goes the same; see fake thing called out for being fake on HN. One week later, hear rumblings related to the fake thing in my community. One week after that, hear people openly talking about how that fake thing is true, but Google/MSM don't want you to hear about it. Such as: Zelensky is a nazi, the Ukraine war is all CGI, anything related to Hillary or Bill Clinton (yes still), and so on and so forth. Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- diarrhea 5y ago> Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be. If you include reactions, sure. But regular fluid dynamics very much leaves the substance intact. Water flows down a stream and is still water at the end.
- Freak_NL 5y agoI think there might be a sewage plant or two having overflow issues in the clear mountain stream of this analogy (your username is on-topic in this case).
- phkahler 5y ago>> Water flows down a stream and is still water at the end. Even that has fish shit added.
- t_mann 5y agoThere are actual models for this, I think they're often similar to a spin glass.
- kwhitefoot 5y agoPerhaps there are models of waterway pollution that could shed light on it?
- nkozyra 5y agoIs this really even a deepfake? It just looks like a juxtaposition.
- Tenoke 5y agoIt does seem worse than what people create with DeepFakeLab. https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab
- eth0up 5y agoSeems more effective than the peculiarly hokey MIT efforts recently discussed on HN. Deepfakes, can you spot them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606263
- ganzuul 5y agoI hear Putin is a horrible pervert.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- imtemplain 5y ago
- rvz 5y agoThat is social media for you. Disinformation still existing on there despite multiple calls to remove it. Just don't straight up believe everything you see on the internet. The 'propaganda' happens on either side.
- aww_dang 5y agoIf nobody believes this poorly executed deepfake, but it is used as a pretext for further censorship, whose agenda does it advance?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- monkeybutton 5y agoThe head doesn't even look attached to the body. Wow.
- fish45 5y agoInterestingly Zelensky might be easier to deepfake than other world leaders because there's more footage and a wider variety of facial expressions to train on due to his acting career
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
- belter 5y agoFor him the deep fakes will be used to make considerate and respectful comments, while the real videos will be the outrageous ones :-)
- jonathanstrange 5y agoThat might be the best way to make him do something. When he realizes that people think the fake video makes sense, he'll claim the video was real out of spite and start defending a reasonable position.
- mikeyjk 5y agoThat is hilarious. Can we use deep fakes combined with trump's spite to move him closer toward the left??
- krapp 5y agoHe used to be a Democrat - one of the excuses people had for voting for him was that he would really govern from the left. There are (probably authentic) photos of him palling around with the Clintons. He praised Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. I don't think you can deepfake Donald Trump. The man is a recursive deepfake of himself.
- mindslight 5y agoTrump never came around to accepting Covid had to be dealt with (doing so would have easily given him a second term), and is just barely starting to condemn Putler. This idea that Trump masterfully chooses his positions based on popular effectiveness is highly overrated.
- mmaunder 5y agoThe quality on this is really awful. Lighting mismatch on the neck, no atmospheric effects, voice sounds robotic, very little movement and it’s unnatural. It’s not even a useful PoC. It’s more like a meme. I think if it actually got some traction in mainstream media - like Marina Ovsyannikova’s fake Twitter account which was quoted by journos, then you could call it a legitimate first.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoIt pales in comparison to those Tom Cruise ones that were going around a little while ago.
- mufufu 5y agoI don’t know, honestly I felt the opposite way, maybe because I’m not Ukrainian and it’s not my native language. But I found the level of deep fake we can achieve nowadays truly scary. Even if it was a shoddy job, I feel like that’s enough to convince a lot of people, or at least stir confusion
- bspammer 5y agoThey could definitely have done a better job. It makes me think that the purpose is not to actually fool people, but to sow seeds of doubt for future genuine Ukrainian government communications. Surely it benefits Russia for people to not trust what they see online.
- yznovyak 5y agoI've seen a deep fake with Putin "surrendering" on 28th of February: https://youtu.be/ZbudZw1LlHg https://youtu.be/ZbudZw1LlHg I guess the video itself was made even earlier than that. The video is not excellent, but the audio is pretty spot on, if you ask me. Edit: re-worded the first sentence.
- zionic 5y ago-258 views -nonsensical title -no comments -all videos on account are unlisted -you just found it Hmmm. How did you “find” this?
- BeefWellington 5y agoTo add on: - Largely inactive since 2019 until ~15 days ago. - Ukrainian with ML background[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20083793#20093381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20083793#20093381, Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210224044558/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20083793#20093381 https://web.archive.org/web/20210224044558/https://news.ycom...
- yznovyak 5y agoThat's my old gmail account that I've since abandoned because I moved to yuriy@znovyak.com (my first name @ my last name). My google apps account (znovyak.com) doesn't have youtube enabled, so I uploaded this to youtube channel associated with my old (since high school) gmail.
- yznovyak 5y ago> - Largely inactive since 2019 until ~15 days ago. I'm a lurker, sorry for that. > - Ukrainian with ML background[1] Thanks. I did finish Yandex's school of data science (2015-2018). I've been to Moscow in 2018 for their graduation ceremony. Edit: My remark about me visiting Moscow is to demonstrate that I did not harbor any anti-Russia sentiments.
- 5y ago
- aaron695 5y ago
- gunfighthacksaw 5y agoDoes Zelenskyy have a public-private key pair he can use to digitally sign videos which are to be uploaded to the internet?
- soco 5y agoI doubt the public targeted by this video knows what a key pair is, let alone how to use one.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y agoI was thinking more the infrastructure, though I guess the video streaming services are probably hostile actors too. Something like “this video was not signed by the president” similar to a blue check mark on the bird app.
- vaylian 5y agoI agree. And afaik he always posts on the same official channels, which makes these videos identifiable as fake.
- oftenwrong 5y agoWe all saw this coming. Even if this instance is low-quality, eventually a similar scenario will happen with one that is good enough to fool most people. I think it is not long until official videos come with cryptographic signatures. I am just realising that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actually had a similar scenario in an episode that aired in 1998. Essentially, a deepfake of a meeting of military leaders is created in a plot to persuade a neutral nation to join a war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Pale_Moonlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Pale_Moonlight
- phoe-krk 5y agoYou're kinda late to the party - these two are over two weeks old. https://streamable.com/8inzvg https://streamable.com/8inzvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVcokRghpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxVcokRghpE
- gerikson 5y agoIn Swedish telephone directories there used to be a section entitled "Om kriget kommer" (If there's war). Prominent among it was the phrase: > Varje meddelande att motsåndet ska uppges är falskt. (Every message stating that resistance has ceased is false). No doubt something similar is stated in Ukraine. https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/siteassets/5-information-och-fakta/historia/psykforsvarets-historia/om-kriget-kommer-1961.komprimerad.pdf https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/siteassets/5-information-och-f...
- Rastonbury 5y agoInteresting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_the_war_comes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_the_war_comes
- eru 5y agoFurther down that rabbit hole: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/9/20/trigger-happy-autonomous-and-disobedient-nordbat-2-and-mission-command-in-bosnia https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/9/20/trigger-h...
- nix23 5y agoWhats is that thing the blonde soldier is holding? Brightness meter? A nokia proto-smartphone?
- GameOfFrowns 5y agoMight just be a pen. If the object would have the width of a smartphone, the soldier wouldn't be able to wrap her ringfinger around like in the picture.
- nix23 5y agoWell the with is nearly like the length of her finger, and she has some color-table in her hand, maybe some infrared meter?
- hprotagonist 5y agoIt’s always a bit of a shock to remember that “photographs lie!” goes back to the very beginning of photography. See this (probably) staged war photograph from 1855 — in Crimea, of all ironic places: https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death-photo-was-most-likely-staged/ https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow...
- chillage 5y agoWhile an interesting investigation, I have to wonder why it took over a decade to think to compare the non cannonball details in the photos to figure out which came earlier.. I guess hindsight is 20-20 but does kind of seem like an obvious place to look, no?
- mikey_p 5y agoTo be completely fair, we don't know that it was staged just for the photograph. We don't know who moved the cannonballs, or why they moved them. All we know is that there are two photographs, and that the one without the cannonballs on the road came first.
- lisper 5y agowe can infer a little bit more than that. The framing of the two photographs is exactly the same (look at the two rocks in the lower right hand corner), and so that camera was almost certainly not moved between the frames. That seems pretty improbable to me if the cannonballs were actually delivered by cannons.
- bingohbangoh 5y agoFlipping through the tweet-replies, it looks like a lot of people noticed this.
- avodonosov 5y agoIs there an easy way (online service or something) to distinguish audio deepfakes from real recordings? I'd like to check one war related audio recording.
- Jerrrry 5y agoGAN networks make this a flawed endeavor. you can train a network to detect it, then a network to convince it, ad nauseum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
- avodonosov 5y agoI was hoping some inevitable property of deep fakes, that could help detecting them.
- Jerrrry 5y agoany such property will eventually be selected against by the discriminator. https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/discriminator https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/discrimin...
- bally0241 5y agoDefinitely in uncanny valley territory with this one.
- DonHopkins 5y agoI'd like to put in a request for Putin in Drag performing Lucille Ball's classic Vitameatavegamin skit, please! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/06/russia-bans-picture-of-vladimir-putin-in-drag https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/06/russia-bans-pi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY3eOtJwOhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY3eOtJwOhE
- hestefisk 5y agoThe way the eyes blink is pretty revealing…
- duxup 5y agoI'm curious about the usefulness of deepfakes in the face of 'momentum'. Russia has largely been seen negatively, not just for the invasion, but also their military performance. Underdogs are popular and Ukraine's stiff resistance vs what was thought to be a vastly stronger power and they have has captured a lot of the West's enthusiasm / support. Russia's propaganda about nazis, being liberators, chemical weapons, 'military operation' vs war really hasn't penetrated much of the west / just comes off as absurd. With that, is a video like this likely to do much? This seems like a fake that only the fakers would think would work...
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoWar is war... russia just has a worse propaganda machine in the west, than the west has. Internally (in russia), the propaganda was probably better, but so was the eg. "iraq has weapons of mass destruction" in the west. But this video looks like someone from 4chan made it "for the lulz".
- duxup 5y ago>But this video looks like someone from 4chan made it "for the lulz". That would make a lot more sense.
- ghostpepper 5y agoI doubt that any propagandist ever thinks a single piece of propaganda will single-handedly turn the tide of a war. I am no expert but I assume it's more a case of 'every little bit helps'
- duxup 5y agoI wonder though, as it gets more absurd does the sell get harder?
- Terry_Roll 5y agoNow if the head didnt oscillate sideways like it wasnt connected to the neck and perhaps they used a grainy pixelated recording, they might have got away with the visuals. Cant comment on the voice recording, but so far most deepfake software isnt that good because its not aware of other variables. Good laugh though, still the existence of sky fairies like god, ie something that cant be proved is still order of the day for now it seems!
- bradstewart 5y agoSure, it's not perfect. But you also knew it was a fake before seeing it, right? Maybe I should be, but I'm generally not looking for inconsistencies like that in everything I watch.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago> Sure, it's not perfect. But you also knew it was a fake before seeing it, right? Open mind. Do you trust everything you see and hear in the news or internet? There is fake news, fake science, fake lots of things, some call it Magic entertainment, its been going on for how many hundreds if not thousands of years, irrespective of maliciousness or not. Sometimes its best to follow the money or look at the resulting change in behaviour to get an idea of whats going on. Edit: How many people have followed their sat-nav into lakes and rivers? You cant give anything absolute trust, even binary on a cpu is just voltage ranges.
- verisimi 5y agoBoy... that is so obvious!
- zelphirkalt 5y agoThe idea could also be to first post something obviously fake, in order to make everyone think, that their deep fake video tech is not addvanced enough to create really good fakes. Later they post something, where they put in maximum effort to make it seem real, having people think back to the previous fake and think: "Oh but this looks real and they are not able to produce better deep fakes than that other video."
- newsbinator 5y agoThat seems self-defeating via Streisand Effect or at least Cry Wolf effect. Most of the people who’d believe a video saying the opposite of what they’d expect is real have never been aware of deep fakes. And now thanks to this poor deepfake they are aware of deepfakes and are primed to question future videos, even if they seem real.
- zelphirkalt 5y agoGood point. Hm, it might be my bubble making me think, that of course people will have heard of usage of AI to fake videos, even if they don't necessarily call them "deep fake" or stuff like that. I wonder how likely it really is, that people have not heard about the idea of videos being fake, involving making people say things they never said and making them look realistic.
- newsbinator 5y agoMy parent's generation all forward "articles" to each other's inboxes with full text in the message body. None of them, as far as I'm aware, have yet questioned who wrote the article, where it was published, what other sources have run the story, or whether the article content in the email message body has been manipulated. Videos being fake? That's asking an order of magnitude more scepticism from them.
- rapind 5y ago> And now thanks to this poor deepfake they are aware of deepfakes and are primed to question future videos, even if they seem real. They may also be primed to question real videos. Aka “flood the zone with shit”.
- hermannj314 5y agoIs a deep fake asking Ukrainians to surrender an Article 37 violation of Geneva convention for perfidy? I know false surrender is a crime, but using propaganda to trick the enemy into a surrender by pretending to be them, I wasn't sure. I guess - is this a tool we will see more often or a tool not fit for civilized warfare?
- RobertMiller 5y agoIt's a form of what is called 'black propaganda': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda
- runswithd6s 5y agoHas there been any effort to introduce cryptographic signing of media in a way that makes it easy for viewers to validate authenticity?
- markhahn 5y agoand how do you verify the signature? public key infrastructure has always stumbled over issues of authenticity, more than just indexing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shmde 5y agoPeople calling it looks fake are not exactly the targeted audience. My mom and dad have been countless times fooled by whatsapp forwarded videos which obviously looks fake to me but not to them. I have to explain them to look for certain clues to identify anything fake but I have been fooled countless times by videos looking legit. Captain disillusion does a good job in debunking real looking viral videos.
- servytor 5y agoMIT had an interview with a Putin deepfake a while ago[0]. [0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/vladimir-putin-deepfake-mit-ai-technology-hao-li-2019-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/vladimir-putin-deepfake-mit-...
- kozak 5y agoVoice sounds even more unrealistic than the video (source: I'm Ukrainian). No one in Ukraine would believe the audio part of this fake, even if video was perfect. This is a pathetic attempt. Also, the script (the text that is being read) is written as if the target audience are Russian, not Ukrainian people (because it's based on propaganda narratives that people outside of Russia are not familiar with). This is such a poor fake from every standpoint.
- hermannj314 5y agoI assume the good deepfakers are using social media datasets to trick unsuspecting grandparents into giving up money, not meddling in geopolitics.
- coayer 5y agoOr being hired by Disney!
- saltmeister 5y ago
- mardiyah 5y ago@osynavets , not clear what you meant by "Volodymyr Zelensky asking to retreat and surrender their weapons" did it mean: Volodymyr Zelensky asking invaders, Russia, to retreat and surrender their weapons ?
- T3RMINATED 5y ago
- raspasov 5y agoFar from believable.
- bitL 5y agoBan on Deep Learning is coming. It's going to be classified as a weapon and practitioners will need a background check/license to perform it.
- markhahn 5y agohah! it would be funny to see politicians try that - not far from legislating Pi.
- markhahn 5y agoI'm surprised this sort of thing isn't done far more widely (and better). Can anyone comment on reasons why it's not more widespread? Especially in social media, where provenance is nonexistent.
- lettergram 5y agoSo much of the video I’ve seen online is fake. I’d argue most of the video on Twitter; particularly of burning vehicles and tanks.
- RoboRy 5y agowould you mind posting an example of allegedly fake content? If I've been getting duped the past weeks, i'd like to be able to tell how
- hogrider 5y agoWhy do rusdians waste time on this when they should be getting fuel to their fuel starved convoys?
- wpdev_63 5y agoWell they did one of trump and that was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jrebvmPlk&t=14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jrebvmPlk&t=14s
- kblev 5y agoYou can see how his shoulder isn't moving, only his head on that still body.
- blingojames 5y agoI had an idea to do a site that verifies the authenticity of such movies, the content creator should sign the link through this site: https://movieverify.com/ https://movieverify.com/ If it interests someone, please contact me, any help will be appreciated.
- oliwarner 5y ago> the quality of the video is mediocre That's generous. This video and it's audio are so bad, I wonder if this is a PSA, to remind people that this stuff exists, that the next one you see might also be fake.
- rambojazz 5y agoIs there a mirror of this somewhere? Looks like it's been removed by twitter