29 ms·

NeRF: An eventual successor for deepfakes?

169 points by Hard_Space 4y ago

Workaccount2 4y ago
I know there are a lot of groups working on how to prevent AI disruptions to society, or how to mitigate their impact, but are there any groups working on how to adapt society to a full blown unchained AI world? Like throw out all the safeguards (which seems inevitable) and how does society best operate in a world where no media can be trusted as authentic? Or where "authentic" is cut from the same cloth as "fake"? Is anyone working on this?
- strohwueste 4y ago
  What about nft-based camera recording?
  - irjustin 4y ago
    This has been discussed many times and it doesn't work. Simple answer is I can just record a deep fake and get it cryptographically signed.
    - andruby 4y ago
      If you trust a person (or source) and they have a private key that they can properly secure, they could always sign their material with that key. That would prove that the source provided that material. A blockchain could be a way to store and publish that signature & hash. It can't say "this is real", it can only say "that signature belongs to source X".
      - blamestross 4y ago
        > A blockchain could be a way to store and publish that signature & hash. yes but it would be a bad one. We have multiple key distribution mechanism that are better for the use case.
        intrasight 4y ago
        I disagree. The key alone is not sufficient nor secure. We will need crowdsourced validity data as well. We need a zero-trust model - and I too believe that blockchains will play a role.
        blamestross 4y ago
        Zero trust models don't exist and the laws of physics (probably) don't provide for them. (Materialism is a real problem in physics nowadays)
        notfed 4y ago
        If a video is already cryptographcally signed, then you can safely distribute the signature on an untrusted channel. Adding Blockchain into the mix is superfluous, and destroys scalability.
        intrasight 4y ago
        We don't watch signature keys - we watch videos. The TV will have to match every short segment - perhaps 5 seconds of video - against a blockchain which scores the validity of that segment - and of course looking back to it's original source. Signing the whole video is necessary but not sufficient. But yes, this is going to be resource-intensive.
        blamestross 4y ago
        > against a blockchain which scores the validity of that segment Why not just allow a cert with that information to be delivered alongside the video? Where would the "score" come from?
        intrasight 4y ago
        score is ai and/or crowdsourced and comes from a special blockchain
- cameronh90 4y ago
  I suspect we'll need to return to the idea of getting our news from trusted sources, rather than being able to rely on videos on social media being trustworthy. Technically, we could try and build a trusted computing-like system to ensure trust from the sensor all the way to a signed video file output, but keeping that perfectly secure is likely to be virtually impossible except in narrow situations, such as CCTV installations. I believe Apple may be attempting to do things like this with how Face ID is implemented on iPhone, but I suspect we'll always find ways to trick any such device.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    80% of the problem could be solved with a reliable signature scheme that allows some remixing of video content. So if CNN publishes a video, signed with their key so it's verifiably CNN, we need the ability to take a 20 second bit of it and still have a valid key attached that verifies that the source is CNN (without trusting the editor). Then you can share clips, remix it, etc, and have integration in social media that attests the source.
    - intrasight 4y ago
      My plan to solve this "20 second bit of it" is that it's done at the analog hole. Whatever is painting those pixels, a smart TV for instance, will be coordinating with cloud services to fingerprint at a relatively high temporal resolution - maybe 5 seconds. The video itself is the signature. But we will need either trusted analog hole vendors or some trusted non-profit organization - or likely both. I think that "viewing" will be delayed by perhaps 30 seconds to allow for that signature analysis. These smart TVs will overlay a scorecard for all displayed content, and owners will be able to set device scorecard thresholds such that low-scoring content will be fuzzed out.
      - dTal 4y ago
        I sincerely hope this dystopian vision of the future is satire, but it's already a worrying sign of the times that I'm not sure.
    - 4y ago
- Agamus 4y ago
  One thing we should be doing is supporting critical thinking at the high school and university level. Unfortunately, it seems we have been dedicated to the opposite of this for about 50 years, at least in the US.
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Critical thinking is the most overrated skill ever. "Critical theorists" are the people who fetishize "critical thinking" and all it got them was to embrace cultural Marxism. Constructive thinking is far better than learning how to shit on people, as the skill of critique teaches us...
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      This is reasoning by word chaining.
    - gknoy 4y ago
      At the risk of falling for a joke, I'm not sure "critical thinking" means what you think it means. It just means thinking objectively about things before making judgments, it has nothing to do with criticizing people. The things one criticizes are our own beliefs and reasons for believing them. What do I believe? Why do I believe that? Why do I feel that evidence supports that belief, but not this one? For example, I can explain in a fair bit of detail why I believe that the Apollo landing was not faked. I wouldn't normally bother to explain those reasons, but all of them are based on beliefs and evidence that I've read about, and most of those beliefs are subject to reversal should counter-evidence surface.
    - Eupraxias 4y ago
      I think of critical thinking as the art of being critical toward oneself when one is thinking. In other words, when I read something and hear myself think, "oh yeah, that sounds right", there is another part of my mind that thinks, "maybe not". Critical thinking is precisely what could have spared us from all of that 'cultural marxism' you mentioned, or at least, to do it in a way that is... constructive.
- endtime 4y ago
  I think most of those people believe that humans will no longer exist in a "full blown unchained AI world".
kobalsky 4y ago
why do websites feel the need to hijack the browser's scrolling logic? this is very annoying to browse on chrome, but it works well on firefox.
- arky527 4y ago
  Very much agreed. It just results in a terrible UX when 98% of other websites have a standard scrolling mechanism
- sigspec 4y ago
  Agree. It's a jolt to scrolling expectations
RubyRidgeRandy 4y ago
Something I've wondered lately is what will life be like in a post-truth society? we already see examples of this now where a large number of people get their news from fake memes on facebook. There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen. What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake? How long before someone uses this technology to frame someone for a crime? Could the FBI create a deepfake of a cartel leader meeting with them and leak it so they think he's a snitch? I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly.
- kache_ 4y ago
  The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly. The good news is that we've been going through rapid, rapid tech advancements the past 50 years and we're still here.
  - mckirk 4y ago
    The thing I don't like about these 'well people have been complaining about this forever' arguments is that, it's entirely possible to have a) people pointing at an issue for a long time and b) still have that issue get progressively, objectively worse over time. There's that example of people pointing out smartphones might be bad for children, then someone counters with 'well thirty years ago people complained about children reading too much instead of playing outside', with the implication being: adults of all ages will find some fault with newer generations, and not to worry so much. But just because it is true that adults will probably always worry about 'new, evil things' corrupting the youth, this does not mean that the 'new, evil things' aren't getting _objectively more dangerous_ over time. Today adults would be happy if children still had the attention span and motivation necessary to read a book. They'd be happy if they themselves still had it, actually. Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I would say.
jdthedisciple 4y ago
The bad news: This can and obviously will be abused - be it by the secret services or hackers. The good news, I suppose: As fast and scarily as the tech to fake things is evolving, so is presumably the tech that detects fakes.
- _tom_ 4y ago
  Technology to detect fakes necessarily lags a bit from technology to create fakes. In general, you need to have examples of a type of fake to detect it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
natly 4y ago
I was initially annoyed by this title but now I'm gonna switch my perspective to being happy that ideas like this are floating around since it acts as a really cheap signal to tell if someone knows what they're talking about or not when it comes to ML.
wazoox 4y ago
There are more dangereous AI than deepfakes. Blackrock 10 trillions investments are driven by an AI, Aladdin. It was also sold to some other investors, and controls about 21$ trillion globally. It has basically the power to drive markets worldwide. It's a systemic problem nobody talks about...
- smiddereens 4y ago
- astrange 4y ago
  Blackrock sells passive index funds. There's no room for an AI to make decisions there, so it probably doesn't do anything interesting.
- nix0n 4y ago
  That's not an AI problem, it's a concentration of wealth problem. Giving that power to a person or group of people would be almost as bad.
echelon 4y ago
What's the difference in NeRF from a classical photogrammetry pointcloud workflow? It seems like the representation and outputs are identical. Why would you prefer NeRF to photogrammetry? Or vice versa?
- randyrand 4y ago
  Nerfs can represent reflection, speculars, refractions. They also are proving to be faster, more accurate, etc The input data is the same. Nerfs have the chance of requiring less input data.
- flor1s 4y ago
  Neural Radiance Fields are a technique from the neural rendering research field, while photogrammetry is a research field on its own. However these are just turf wars and in practice there is a lot of overlap between both fields. For example, most NeRF implementations recommend the use of COLMAP (traditionally a photogrammetry tool) to obtain camera positions/rotations that are used alongside their images. So this multi-view stereo step is shared between both NeRF (except a few research works that also optimize for camera positions/rotations through a neural network) and photogrammetry. After the multi-view stereo step in NeRF you train a neural renderer, while in photogrammetry you would run a multi-view geometry step/package that uses more traditional optimization algorithms. The expected output of both techniques is slightly different. NeRF produces renderings and can optionally export a mesh (using the marching cubes algorithm). Photogrammetry produces meshes and in the process might render the scene for editting purposes.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)
EGreg 4y ago
Is this what Matterport 2 app uses? When you take many photos of a scene or indoor place and it’s stitched together? Can this be used for metaverses? ALSO why not synchronize videos of the same event and make an animated 3d movie from 2d ones !!! Great as a “disney ride metaverse” Who is doing that in our space?
getcrunk 4y ago
I just started playing cyberpunk 2077. Spoilers: The idea of the "black wall" to keep out bad ai comes to mind. Not arguing for it but just acknowledging that maybe one day will all have to live in walled gardens to stay safe from rouge ai's or rather rouge actors using powerful ai's
- henriquecm8 4y ago
  One thing I've always wondered about that, they explained where those are running, but how they still have autonomy? Are they producing they own power? How about when they need to replace hardware? I am not saying it's impossible, but I would like to see that part being explored, even if it's in the tie-ins comics.
nathias 4y ago
can't wait until deepfakes completely revolutionizes people's relation to information
joeld42 4y ago
Not sure about NeRF's impact on deepfakes specifically, but they are looking like a seismic shift in the graphics world. Even without the "neural" part, as a scene representation they are already having a huge impact, and will have implications everywhere. It feels almost like a new primitive is being discovered. Maybe I'm just getting caught up in all the hype, but I can't remember the last time I saw a topic with this much momentum.
- FrostKiwi 4y ago
  > It feels almost like a new primitive is being discovered. That's a really nice way of putting it. The impact on the field of computer graphics is tough to predict, but ohh my am I excited.
Davonbon 4y ago
Each day technology becomes scarier, even if technology exists to detect deepfakes and all, and there are infinite methods to tell reality appart from digital images, it doesn't matter, because most people don't know about that, and it's not their fault, not everyone has to get into tech that deeply. However, technology being used to lie to people has always been a thing, think back to photoshop, you can also create fake pictures in there, doesn't matter if they're a hundred percent realistic, many people are still gonna believe it's real, videos of ARMA 3 being used as war footage has been a thing for a long time, even in the ukraine war it happened again, so it's not news, the scary thing is how easily accessible this technology is becoming, and I'm thinking a lot of new laws on usage of technology that will have to be created because of this.
- FrostKiwi 4y ago
  > videos of ARMA 3 being used as war footage I am genuinely disappointed in the public for falling for that.

169 points by Hard_Space 4y ago

I know there are a lot of groups working on how to prevent AI disruptions to society, or how to mitigate their impact, but are there any groups working on how to adapt society to a full blown unchained AI world? Like throw out all the safeguards (which seems inevitable) and how does society best operate in a world where no media can be trusted as authentic? Or where "authentic" is cut from the same cloth as "fake"? Is anyone working on this?

strohwueste 4y ago
What about nft-based camera recording?
- irjustin 4y ago
  This has been discussed many times and it doesn't work. Simple answer is I can just record a deep fake and get it cryptographically signed.
  - andruby 4y ago
    If you trust a person (or source) and they have a private key that they can properly secure, they could always sign their material with that key. That would prove that the source provided that material. A blockchain could be a way to store and publish that signature & hash. It can't say "this is real", it can only say "that signature belongs to source X".
    - blamestross 4y ago
      > A blockchain could be a way to store and publish that signature & hash. yes but it would be a bad one. We have multiple key distribution mechanism that are better for the use case.
      - intrasight 4y ago
        I disagree. The key alone is not sufficient nor secure. We will need crowdsourced validity data as well. We need a zero-trust model - and I too believe that blockchains will play a role.
        blamestross 4y ago
        Zero trust models don't exist and the laws of physics (probably) don't provide for them. (Materialism is a real problem in physics nowadays)
        notfed 4y ago
        If a video is already cryptographcally signed, then you can safely distribute the signature on an untrusted channel. Adding Blockchain into the mix is superfluous, and destroys scalability.
        intrasight 4y ago
        We don't watch signature keys - we watch videos. The TV will have to match every short segment - perhaps 5 seconds of video - against a blockchain which scores the validity of that segment - and of course looking back to it's original source. Signing the whole video is necessary but not sufficient. But yes, this is going to be resource-intensive.
        blamestross 4y ago
        > against a blockchain which scores the validity of that segment Why not just allow a cert with that information to be delivered alongside the video? Where would the "score" come from?
        intrasight 4y ago
        score is ai and/or crowdsourced and comes from a special blockchain
cameronh90 4y ago
I suspect we'll need to return to the idea of getting our news from trusted sources, rather than being able to rely on videos on social media being trustworthy. Technically, we could try and build a trusted computing-like system to ensure trust from the sensor all the way to a signed video file output, but keeping that perfectly secure is likely to be virtually impossible except in narrow situations, such as CCTV installations. I believe Apple may be attempting to do things like this with how Face ID is implemented on iPhone, but I suspect we'll always find ways to trick any such device.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  80% of the problem could be solved with a reliable signature scheme that allows some remixing of video content. So if CNN publishes a video, signed with their key so it's verifiably CNN, we need the ability to take a 20 second bit of it and still have a valid key attached that verifies that the source is CNN (without trusting the editor). Then you can share clips, remix it, etc, and have integration in social media that attests the source.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    My plan to solve this "20 second bit of it" is that it's done at the analog hole. Whatever is painting those pixels, a smart TV for instance, will be coordinating with cloud services to fingerprint at a relatively high temporal resolution - maybe 5 seconds. The video itself is the signature. But we will need either trusted analog hole vendors or some trusted non-profit organization - or likely both. I think that "viewing" will be delayed by perhaps 30 seconds to allow for that signature analysis. These smart TVs will overlay a scorecard for all displayed content, and owners will be able to set device scorecard thresholds such that low-scoring content will be fuzzed out.
    - dTal 4y ago
      I sincerely hope this dystopian vision of the future is satire, but it's already a worrying sign of the times that I'm not sure.
  - 4y ago
Agamus 4y ago
One thing we should be doing is supporting critical thinking at the high school and university level. Unfortunately, it seems we have been dedicated to the opposite of this for about 50 years, at least in the US.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Critical thinking is the most overrated skill ever. "Critical theorists" are the people who fetishize "critical thinking" and all it got them was to embrace cultural Marxism. Constructive thinking is far better than learning how to shit on people, as the skill of critique teaches us...
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    This is reasoning by word chaining.
  - gknoy 4y ago
    At the risk of falling for a joke, I'm not sure "critical thinking" means what you think it means. It just means thinking objectively about things before making judgments, it has nothing to do with criticizing people. The things one criticizes are our own beliefs and reasons for believing them. What do I believe? Why do I believe that? Why do I feel that evidence supports that belief, but not this one? For example, I can explain in a fair bit of detail why I believe that the Apollo landing was not faked. I wouldn't normally bother to explain those reasons, but all of them are based on beliefs and evidence that I've read about, and most of those beliefs are subject to reversal should counter-evidence surface.
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    I think of critical thinking as the art of being critical toward oneself when one is thinking. In other words, when I read something and hear myself think, "oh yeah, that sounds right", there is another part of my mind that thinks, "maybe not". Critical thinking is precisely what could have spared us from all of that 'cultural marxism' you mentioned, or at least, to do it in a way that is... constructive.
endtime 4y ago
I think most of those people believe that humans will no longer exist in a "full blown unchained AI world".

kobalsky 4y ago

why do websites feel the need to hijack the browser's scrolling logic? this is very annoying to browse on chrome, but it works well on firefox.

arky527 4y ago
Very much agreed. It just results in a terrible UX when 98% of other websites have a standard scrolling mechanism
sigspec 4y ago
Agree. It's a jolt to scrolling expectations

RubyRidgeRandy 4y ago

Something I've wondered lately is what will life be like in a post-truth society? we already see examples of this now where a large number of people get their news from fake memes on facebook. There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen. What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake? How long before someone uses this technology to frame someone for a crime? Could the FBI create a deepfake of a cartel leader meeting with them and leak it so they think he's a snitch? I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly.

kache_ 4y ago
The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly. The good news is that we've been going through rapid, rapid tech advancements the past 50 years and we're still here.
- mckirk 4y ago
  The thing I don't like about these 'well people have been complaining about this forever' arguments is that, it's entirely possible to have a) people pointing at an issue for a long time and b) still have that issue get progressively, objectively worse over time. There's that example of people pointing out smartphones might be bad for children, then someone counters with 'well thirty years ago people complained about children reading too much instead of playing outside', with the implication being: adults of all ages will find some fault with newer generations, and not to worry so much. But just because it is true that adults will probably always worry about 'new, evil things' corrupting the youth, this does not mean that the 'new, evil things' aren't getting _objectively more dangerous_ over time. Today adults would be happy if children still had the attention span and motivation necessary to read a book. They'd be happy if they themselves still had it, actually. Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I would say.

jdthedisciple 4y ago

The bad news: This can and obviously will be abused - be it by the secret services or hackers. The good news, I suppose: As fast and scarily as the tech to fake things is evolving, so is presumably the tech that detects fakes.

_tom_ 4y ago
Technology to detect fakes necessarily lags a bit from technology to create fakes. In general, you need to have examples of a type of fake to detect it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

natly 4y ago

I was initially annoyed by this title but now I'm gonna switch my perspective to being happy that ideas like this are floating around since it acts as a really cheap signal to tell if someone knows what they're talking about or not when it comes to ML.

wazoox 4y ago

There are more dangereous AI than deepfakes. Blackrock 10 trillions investments are driven by an AI, Aladdin. It was also sold to some other investors, and controls about 21$ trillion globally. It has basically the power to drive markets worldwide. It's a systemic problem nobody talks about...

smiddereens 4y ago
astrange 4y ago
Blackrock sells passive index funds. There's no room for an AI to make decisions there, so it probably doesn't do anything interesting.
nix0n 4y ago
That's not an AI problem, it's a concentration of wealth problem. Giving that power to a person or group of people would be almost as bad.

echelon 4y ago

What's the difference in NeRF from a classical photogrammetry pointcloud workflow? It seems like the representation and outputs are identical. Why would you prefer NeRF to photogrammetry? Or vice versa?

randyrand 4y ago
Nerfs can represent reflection, speculars, refractions. They also are proving to be faster, more accurate, etc The input data is the same. Nerfs have the chance of requiring less input data.
flor1s 4y ago
Neural Radiance Fields are a technique from the neural rendering research field, while photogrammetry is a research field on its own. However these are just turf wars and in practice there is a lot of overlap between both fields. For example, most NeRF implementations recommend the use of COLMAP (traditionally a photogrammetry tool) to obtain camera positions/rotations that are used alongside their images. So this multi-view stereo step is shared between both NeRF (except a few research works that also optimize for camera positions/rotations through a neural network) and photogrammetry. After the multi-view stereo step in NeRF you train a neural renderer, while in photogrammetry you would run a multi-view geometry step/package that uses more traditional optimization algorithms. The expected output of both techniques is slightly different. NeRF produces renderings and can optionally export a mesh (using the marching cubes algorithm). Photogrammetry produces meshes and in the process might render the scene for editting purposes.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)

EGreg 4y ago

Is this what Matterport 2 app uses? When you take many photos of a scene or indoor place and it’s stitched together? Can this be used for metaverses? ALSO why not synchronize videos of the same event and make an animated 3d movie from 2d ones !!! Great as a “disney ride metaverse” Who is doing that in our space?

getcrunk 4y ago

I just started playing cyberpunk 2077. Spoilers: The idea of the "black wall" to keep out bad ai comes to mind. Not arguing for it but just acknowledging that maybe one day will all have to live in walled gardens to stay safe from rouge ai's or rather rouge actors using powerful ai's

henriquecm8 4y ago
One thing I've always wondered about that, they explained where those are running, but how they still have autonomy? Are they producing they own power? How about when they need to replace hardware? I am not saying it's impossible, but I would like to see that part being explored, even if it's in the tie-ins comics.

nathias 4y ago

can't wait until deepfakes completely revolutionizes people's relation to information

joeld42 4y ago

Not sure about NeRF's impact on deepfakes specifically, but they are looking like a seismic shift in the graphics world. Even without the "neural" part, as a scene representation they are already having a huge impact, and will have implications everywhere. It feels almost like a new primitive is being discovered. Maybe I'm just getting caught up in all the hype, but I can't remember the last time I saw a topic with this much momentum.

FrostKiwi 4y ago
> It feels almost like a new primitive is being discovered. That's a really nice way of putting it. The impact on the field of computer graphics is tough to predict, but ohh my am I excited.

Davonbon 4y ago

Each day technology becomes scarier, even if technology exists to detect deepfakes and all, and there are infinite methods to tell reality appart from digital images, it doesn't matter, because most people don't know about that, and it's not their fault, not everyone has to get into tech that deeply. However, technology being used to lie to people has always been a thing, think back to photoshop, you can also create fake pictures in there, doesn't matter if they're a hundred percent realistic, many people are still gonna believe it's real, videos of ARMA 3 being used as war footage has been a thing for a long time, even in the ukraine war it happened again, so it's not news, the scary thing is how easily accessible this technology is becoming, and I'm thinking a lot of new laws on usage of technology that will have to be created because of this.

FrostKiwi 4y ago
> videos of ARMA 3 being used as war footage I am genuinely disappointed in the public for falling for that.