6 ms·

Hmm, this does make me wonder what kind of an effect will deepfakes have on people's general perception of the world? I might be far fetching here, but wouldn'

Hmm, this does make me wonder what kind of an effect will deepfakes have on people's general perception of the world? I might be far fetching here, but wouldn't this lead to people being more mindful of what they watch and interact with? I think all that it will take is a few "state of the art" deepfakes to cause a ruckus and the domino effect should do the rest. Anyone in the field spent time thinking on this or has had similar notions?

wussboy 4y ago
I think we will get to a point where trust will only come from face-to-face physical meetings. We won't be able to believe in Zoom calls, phone calls, nothing except face-to-face. Just like it was for millions of years before now.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  It's already become an arms race. KYC identity services are already adding liveness and deep fake detection features.
- intrasight 4y ago
  In the future, TVs and monitors and smartphones will have built-in "truth meters". Face-to-face is only applicable with you small social network.
  - wussboy 4y ago
    > Face-to-face is only applicable with you small social network. That is my point precisely. And I will point out here that small social networks are our historical environment. I believe not only can we return to them and flourish, but also that it would be a great boon to human flourishing, the only outcome that really matters.
    - intrasight 4y ago
      I agree but I'm afraid that we're moving in the opposite direction. VR and deep fakes will make for interesting times. I've worked at home for nearly 20 years so I've had to learn to create a strong in-person social network. The pandemic and some medical issues have interfered, but I still much more enjoy having fun with my friends than doing things online.
alecfreudenberg 4y ago
Yeah a little more skepticism will be nice, but I still personally see myself getting fleeced every now and then.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  It will also lead to "that's a deepfake!" as an excuse given after getting caught on camera.
  - dagurp 4y ago
    Let's just hope that fake detection technology stays ahead of any innovations in this field
  - Loughla 4y ago
    Bingo. It's less about using fakes to push your agenda, and more about being able to (plausibly or implausibly it doesn't matter) claim that whatever video is a deepfake. The truth is meaningless, and as tools like deepfakes become more and more sophisticated, it's harder and harder to establish baseline realities. And someone is benefiting from that shift away from reality, I just don't know who.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    which will lead to people trusting forensic experts and corroborating data/witnesses. If you were a Karen caught in an embarrassing public meltdown you could absolutely say that the video was deepfaked and you were really just home alone sleeping at the time, but when 7 different people's cell phone videos, multiple security cameras, two dashcams, 14 ring cams, GPS data captured from your mobile device, and one police surveillance drone all agree it was you that's not going to work out so well. People made the same arguments about photoshop, but it's really not a problem. Almost never is a single video the only evidence of anything and in the cases where it is and that video can't be verified it's probably best not to ruin someone's life over it.
jsty 4y ago
If you have access to BBC iPlayer, "The Capture" is a really good fictional programme / drama exploring the possible implications re. justice and politics
- wingspar 4y ago
  In the US, it’s on Peacock. Enjoyed it very much. I think we had watched it on PBS. It’s a surveillance thriller.
Swizec 4y ago
As Abe Lincoln always said: Don't believe everything you read on the internet. But we do. There's research. Even if you read something that you know is wrong you still believe it. Especially when distracted or not taking the time to analyze. As we rarely do. https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-believe-untruths-even-after-instant-online-corrections/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-... https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-believe-everything-you-read-2011-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-believe-everything-y... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8366418/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8366418/
- tsol 4y ago
  I have suspected similarly. Skepticism and critical thinking are useful devices, but they can't always tell a truth from a lie. And even if they could-- humans aren't totally rational beings. Sometimes we believe lies because we want it to be true or because everyone around us does. Hell sometimes people believe things just to win an argument
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Even if you read something that you know is wrong you still believe it. That seems like bullshit to me. I read your words (you even posted links!) so how come I don't just instantly believe you? If it were true, wouldn't it make all fiction inherently dangerous? Let's see how it holds up in real life... here's a lie: "My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me that Mario (Jumpman at the time) was originally intended to only have one testicle, but the NES (famicom) didn't have powerful enough graphics to show that so they scraped that part of his official character design and have left the number of testicles unspecified ever since." Somewhere, secretly deep inside you, do you believe that now? Nah. I think we don't have to worry about people believing everything just because they read it. Reading things can put ideas into your head (have you ever even considered Mario's testicles before today?) but at this point we're straining the hell out of "belief" and going into philosophical arguments. In real life though, we are capable as a species of separating fact from fiction some of the time.
  - krapp 4y ago
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
I’d love that to be true, but I think we can use text on social media as a guide here. It’s already as easy to type a lie as typing the truth, and I’m pretty sure lots of made up comments/posts on reddit get taken as truth by tons of people, for example.
showerst 4y ago
Photoshop has been common knowledge for years, and people still buy some very dumb edits. I imagine that deepfakes will follow a similar path to edited photos -- lots of deception, followed by trustworthy sources gaining a little more cachet, but with many people still getting fleeced. Skepticism will ramp up in direct relation to youth, wealth, and tech-savvy.
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  Even simple video fakes such as slowing down a politicians speech to make them look slow or indecisive has gone viral. It doesn't take state of the art to lie to those who prefer their own echo chamber.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Plenty of people have mislead others online with nothing but text! Ultimately we're going to have to just accept the fact that you can't believe everything you see on the internet.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      Video is more effective than text, because people think they've seen whatever event and formed their own conclusions. Those are much stronger than just being told what happened.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        I've seen it argued that text is worse because it forces people to read the words with their own inner voice. Somewhere in this discussion is a guy who linked to studies saying you are incapable of reading anything without believing it. (Do you believe me?) Text, photoshop, special effects, deepfakes they're all just tools for spreading ideas, but we've been dealing (to some degree of success) with folks telling lies for as long as we've had language. I just can't see this fundamentally changing anything except the level of skepticism we give to video which (considering what hollywood has been capable of for some time) we should have been developing already.
e40 4y ago
I think it will make it far easier to manipulate dumb people. The same 30% (?) of the people who think the last US Presidential election was stolen. These people will be easier to whip into a frenzy. I worry this will increase the likelihood of violence, above what is already happening.
- tryauuum 4y ago
  (as a non-american) I don't think it was stolen, but the whole "vote via mail" thing made me really suspicious
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    > the whole "vote via mail" thing made me really suspicious Why? Mail-in voting is hardly unique to the US; what made you suspicious?
    - tryauuum 4y ago
      quite unique for my country (Russia). Though they recently started to do some remote "blockchain-based" voting in Moscow, which is widely considered to be a fraud
      - foobiekr 4y ago
        I mean.. most things blockchain are.
      - mr_toad 4y ago
        I think most people outside Russia (and some inside it) consider all Russian elections to be fraudulent.
        tryauuum 4y ago
        that's not the point. The point is, we don't have voting by mail in Russia and I think it help to observe how fraudulent the elections are.
cortesoft 4y ago
No, people will continue to believe as true videos that match their expectations and disbelieve those that don't
NavinF 4y ago
https://xkcd.com/2650/ https://xkcd.com/2650/
kyleplum 4y ago
There are ongoing efforts to enable digital signatures of online media. The idea is that you (or your browser) can validate that an image or video is unmodified from the source that produced it. https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/
- russdill 4y ago
  There are so many technical hurdles to something like this, I don't see it as a solution anytime soon or ever.
  - kyleplum 4y ago
    It's not as far away as one might think. There was a demo earlier this year (Jan) showcasing the proposed 1.0 spec working in Microsoft Edge: https://c2pa.org/jan-2022_event/ https://c2pa.org/jan-2022_event/
    - russdill 4y ago
      The browser side is not where all the hurdles occur. It's on the capture side and the key/certificate management/revocation side.
aimor 4y ago
We (people) already accept the lies we perceive. I think we choose to accept these fantasies because they're often outside our direct influence and when something is distant from us we have the luxury of turning it into entertainment. I think of beauty in media, every video we see today is processed to make people look pretty. Most play along with the fantasy: admire old celebrities for not aging, complement friends for clear skin. But when a friend says, "I feel so ugly" we move closer to reality and acknowledge the makeup, beauty filters, etc. The same effect happens in politics, news, business, technology: people indulge in fantasy at their convenience. I don't think people will be more mindful of what they watch and believe, I think the opposite will happen: an attraction to fake content. People will embrace the fantasy and share deepfakes at a scale so large governments will be running campaigns to alert the public that such-and-such video is fake, possibly attempting to regulate how content shared online must be labeled. That said I still believe when these lies are closer to us, enough for us to care either as professionals or friends and family, that we will be more discerning about reality.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I can't wait to just generate pornography on the fly while wearing a body monitor so that it can fine tune female body proportions to my exact specifications.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  Does that sound healthy? Personally or socially? I'd worry about how that would affect my view of the real women around me and, in turn, my behaviors towards others.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Definitely not. It actually scares me what future we are heading towards. Supernormal stimulus. Better than a human partner could ever be. Super addicting in a primordial way.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I'm guessing that most people will have very little trouble separating reality from fantasy.
bregma 4y ago
> wouldn't this lead to people being more mindful of what they watch and interact with? Have you been paying any attention to what's going on the last several years?
aaroninsf 4y ago
Why yes. Let me quote myself from a discussion I was having this morning with a friend who is a tenured professor of philosophy working on AI (as an ethics specialist his work is in oversight), we were discussing the work shared on HN this week showing a proof-of-concept of Stable Diffusion as better at image "compression" than existing webstandards. I was very provoked by commentary here about the high "quality" images produced, it was clear that they could in theory contain arbitrary levels of detail—but detail that was confabulated, not encoded in any sense except diffusely in the model training set. "I'm definitely inclined to push hard on the confabulation vs compression distinction, and by extension the ramifications. I see there a very meaningful qualitative distinction [between state of the art "compression" techniques, and confabulation by ML] and, an instrumental consequence which has a long shadow. The thing I am focused on being, whether or not the fact that a media object is lossy or not can be determined, even under even forensic scrutiny. There was a story I saw this week about the arms race in detection of 'deep fake' reproduction of voice... which now requires some pretty sophisticated models itself. Naturally I think this is an arms race in which the cost of detection is going to rapidly become infeasible except to the NSA. And maybe ultimately, infeasible full stop. So yeah, I think we're at a phase change already, which absolutely has been approaching, back to Soviet photo retouching and before, forgery and spycraft since forever... so many examples e.g. the story that went around a couple years ago about historians being up in arms about the fad for "restoring" and upscaling antique film and photographs, the issue of concern being that so much of that kind of restoration is confabulation and the presumptive dangers of mistaking compelling restoration for truth in some critical detail. Which at the time mostly seemed a concern for people who use the word hermeneutics unironically... ...but we now reach a critical inflection point where society as a whole integrates the notion that no media object no matter "convincing" can be trusted, and the consequent really hard problems about how we find consensus, and how we defend ourselves against bad actors who actively seek their Orbis Tertius Christofascist kingdom of rewritten history and alternative facts. The derisive "fake news" married to indetectably confabulated media is a really potent admixture!"
- gcanyon 4y ago
  Once you accept lossy compression, it becomes a question of what level and type of "lossy" you're willing to accept, and how clever the "compression" algorithm can be. If I want to compress the movie Thunderball -- a sufficiently clever "compression" algorithm could start with the synopsis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(film) add in some images of Sean Connery, and generate the film. That's...maybe a 100K to 1 compression ratio? If the algorithm itself understands "Sean Connery" then you could (theoretically) literally feed in the text description and achieve a reasonable result. I've seen Thunderball, but it was years ago and I don't remember the plot (boats?). I'd know the result was different, but I likely wouldn't be able to point to anything specific.
tshaddox 4y ago
I don't think it will change much. I think for claims that you think are important to determine an objective truth value for (like who the President of the U.S. is), your determinism mechanism is based on trusting sources you deem reliable and looking for broad agreement among many sources you deem to be independent. You're probably not just looking at a single sourceless video of Ronald Reagan behaving as if he's the president and believing that claim because the video couldn't possibly have been faked. And for other claim that you don't think are important to determine an objective truth value for, I don't think you need very high-fidelity evidence anyway. For example, people have no trouble believing claims that corroborate their closely-held ideologies even with very low-fidelity fraudulent evidence, or even claims made with no attempt whatsoever to provide even fraudulent evidence!
- arcticfox 4y ago
  I agree with your framework, but what happens when the sources I deem reliable can't trust their own eyes? A lot of people point to Photoshop not breaking truth, but in my experience, we simply rely on video instead. When I served on a grand jury, essentially all of the non-testimony evidence I saw was video, and it was incredibly compelling. Neutering the reliability of that evidence will hurt.
drc500free 4y ago
The ability to use this to plausibly deny any real evidence is more chilling than the fake evidence that could be created.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
> wouldn't this lead to people being more mindful of what they watch and interact with? No. We have already run the case study where people on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media will seethe at mere screenshots of headlines and captions under a picture with zero need for verification. Here on HN we will pile into the comments to react to the title without even clicking the link to read it ourselves. Deepfakes feel like a drop in the bucket. What does it matter that you can deepfake a president when people will simply believe a claim about the president than spreads around social media? I don’t see it.
ilaksh 4y ago
I actually think that live, full body AI-generated realistic avatars (sometimes imitating celebrities to one degree or another) will become an everyday part of life for many people within the next 5-10 years. I assume that full-on impersonation will still be illegal, but certain looks that are sometimes quite similar to a real celebrity will trend now and then. The context for this is the continual improvement in the capabilities and comfort of VR/AR devices. The biggest one I think is going to be lightweight goggles and eventually glasses. But also the ability to stream realistic 3d scenes and people using AI compression (including erasing the goggles or glasses if desired) could make the concept of going to a physical place for an event or even looking exactly like yourself feel somewhat quaint.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  Nobody seems to realize, the value is in inserting ordinary people into media with celebrities! Perfect for brand name advertising, you with a celebrity telling you how smart you are for using they brand they pitch. I formally built an ad agency with a feature film VFX pipeline for actor replacement advertising - but I built it back in '08, years before "deep fakes" and nobody believed what I had working was possible.
bsenftner 4y ago
Back in '02-'04 I was a former games/graphics programmer working as a digital artist in feature film VFX. One area I specialized in was stunt double actor replacements. Working on Disney's "Ice Princess" I fixed a stunt double replacement shot and realized a method of making the entire process generic, at feature film quality. By '06 I had an MBA with a Masters Thesis on the creation of a new Advertising format where the viewer, their family and friends are inserted into brand advertising for online advertising. By '08 I had global patents and an operating demonstration VFX pipeline specific for actor replacements at scale. However, it was the financial crisis of '08 and nobody in the general public had ever conceived of automated actor replacements. This was 5-7 years before the term deep fake became known. VCs simply disbelieved the technology was possible, even when demonstrated before their eyes. Going the angel investor route, 3 different times I formed an investor pool only to have at some point them realize what the technology could do with pornography, and then the investors insist the company pursue porn. However, we had Academy Award winning people in the company, why would they do porn? We refused and that was the end of those investors. With an agency for full motion video actor replacement advertising not getting financing, the award winning VFX people left and the company pivoted to the games industry - making realistic 3D avatars of game players. That effort was fully built out by '10, but the global patents were expensive to maintain and the games industry producers and studios I met simply wanted the service for free. Struggled for a few years. We closed, sold the patents, and I went into facial recognition. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/blake-senftner https://patents.justia.com/inventor/blake-senftner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lELORWgaudU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lELORWgaudU I was bitter about this all for a long time.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Going the angel investor route, 3 different times I formed an investor pool only to have at some point them realize what the technology could do with pornography, and then the investors insist the company pursue porn. I'm not sure there's a huge market for people wanting to insert their friends and family into porn, but if there was why not just try it? Seems like it'd have demonstrated the tech worked commercially which could have attracted investment in non-pron uses and it could have ended up just one more technology in a long list of tech made successful as a result of porn.
thrown_22 4y ago
>Anyone in the field spent time thinking on this or has had similar notions? Skepticism in general will only be applied to people we don't like and ignored for people we do. The continued lapping up of blatant Ukrainian propaganda in mains stream media for example doesn't even need photoshop to be believed, just the vague 'sources said'.
permo-w 4y ago
I really think there is absolutely nothing to worry about. put it this way: written text has always been extremely mutable and therefore falsifiable. video is simply going to become more like text. people will trust it based on the context and their own judgment rather than the content. I suspect most people already do this anyway

wussboy 4y ago

I think we will get to a point where trust will only come from face-to-face physical meetings. We won't be able to believe in Zoom calls, phone calls, nothing except face-to-face. Just like it was for millions of years before now.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
It's already become an arms race. KYC identity services are already adding liveness and deep fake detection features.
intrasight 4y ago
In the future, TVs and monitors and smartphones will have built-in "truth meters". Face-to-face is only applicable with you small social network.
- wussboy 4y ago
  > Face-to-face is only applicable with you small social network. That is my point precisely. And I will point out here that small social networks are our historical environment. I believe not only can we return to them and flourish, but also that it would be a great boon to human flourishing, the only outcome that really matters.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    I agree but I'm afraid that we're moving in the opposite direction. VR and deep fakes will make for interesting times. I've worked at home for nearly 20 years so I've had to learn to create a strong in-person social network. The pandemic and some medical issues have interfered, but I still much more enjoy having fun with my friends than doing things online.

alecfreudenberg 4y ago

Yeah a little more skepticism will be nice, but I still personally see myself getting fleeced every now and then.

jjoonathan 4y ago
It will also lead to "that's a deepfake!" as an excuse given after getting caught on camera.
- dagurp 4y ago
  Let's just hope that fake detection technology stays ahead of any innovations in this field
- Loughla 4y ago
  Bingo. It's less about using fakes to push your agenda, and more about being able to (plausibly or implausibly it doesn't matter) claim that whatever video is a deepfake. The truth is meaningless, and as tools like deepfakes become more and more sophisticated, it's harder and harder to establish baseline realities. And someone is benefiting from that shift away from reality, I just don't know who.
- autoexec 4y ago
  which will lead to people trusting forensic experts and corroborating data/witnesses. If you were a Karen caught in an embarrassing public meltdown you could absolutely say that the video was deepfaked and you were really just home alone sleeping at the time, but when 7 different people's cell phone videos, multiple security cameras, two dashcams, 14 ring cams, GPS data captured from your mobile device, and one police surveillance drone all agree it was you that's not going to work out so well. People made the same arguments about photoshop, but it's really not a problem. Almost never is a single video the only evidence of anything and in the cases where it is and that video can't be verified it's probably best not to ruin someone's life over it.

jsty 4y ago

If you have access to BBC iPlayer, "The Capture" is a really good fictional programme / drama exploring the possible implications re. justice and politics

wingspar 4y ago
In the US, it’s on Peacock. Enjoyed it very much. I think we had watched it on PBS. It’s a surveillance thriller.

Swizec 4y ago

As Abe Lincoln always said: Don't believe everything you read on the internet. But we do. There's research. Even if you read something that you know is wrong you still believe it. Especially when distracted or not taking the time to analyze. As we rarely do. https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-believe-untruths-even-after-instant-online-corrections/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-... https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-believe-everything-you-read-2011-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-believe-everything-y... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8366418/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8366418/

tsol 4y ago
I have suspected similarly. Skepticism and critical thinking are useful devices, but they can't always tell a truth from a lie. And even if they could-- humans aren't totally rational beings. Sometimes we believe lies because we want it to be true or because everyone around us does. Hell sometimes people believe things just to win an argument
autoexec 4y ago
> Even if you read something that you know is wrong you still believe it. That seems like bullshit to me. I read your words (you even posted links!) so how come I don't just instantly believe you? If it were true, wouldn't it make all fiction inherently dangerous? Let's see how it holds up in real life... here's a lie: "My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me that Mario (Jumpman at the time) was originally intended to only have one testicle, but the NES (famicom) didn't have powerful enough graphics to show that so they scraped that part of his official character design and have left the number of testicles unspecified ever since." Somewhere, secretly deep inside you, do you believe that now? Nah. I think we don't have to worry about people believing everything just because they read it. Reading things can put ideas into your head (have you ever even considered Mario's testicles before today?) but at this point we're straining the hell out of "belief" and going into philosophical arguments. In real life though, we are capable as a species of separating fact from fiction some of the time.
- krapp 4y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

I’d love that to be true, but I think we can use text on social media as a guide here. It’s already as easy to type a lie as typing the truth, and I’m pretty sure lots of made up comments/posts on reddit get taken as truth by tons of people, for example.

showerst 4y ago

Photoshop has been common knowledge for years, and people still buy some very dumb edits. I imagine that deepfakes will follow a similar path to edited photos -- lots of deception, followed by trustworthy sources gaining a little more cachet, but with many people still getting fleeced. Skepticism will ramp up in direct relation to youth, wealth, and tech-savvy.

smrtinsert 4y ago
Even simple video fakes such as slowing down a politicians speech to make them look slow or indecisive has gone viral. It doesn't take state of the art to lie to those who prefer their own echo chamber.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Plenty of people have mislead others online with nothing but text! Ultimately we're going to have to just accept the fact that you can't believe everything you see on the internet.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    Video is more effective than text, because people think they've seen whatever event and formed their own conclusions. Those are much stronger than just being told what happened.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      I've seen it argued that text is worse because it forces people to read the words with their own inner voice. Somewhere in this discussion is a guy who linked to studies saying you are incapable of reading anything without believing it. (Do you believe me?) Text, photoshop, special effects, deepfakes they're all just tools for spreading ideas, but we've been dealing (to some degree of success) with folks telling lies for as long as we've had language. I just can't see this fundamentally changing anything except the level of skepticism we give to video which (considering what hollywood has been capable of for some time) we should have been developing already.

e40 4y ago

I think it will make it far easier to manipulate dumb people. The same 30% (?) of the people who think the last US Presidential election was stolen. These people will be easier to whip into a frenzy. I worry this will increase the likelihood of violence, above what is already happening.

tryauuum 4y ago
(as a non-american) I don't think it was stolen, but the whole "vote via mail" thing made me really suspicious
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  > the whole "vote via mail" thing made me really suspicious Why? Mail-in voting is hardly unique to the US; what made you suspicious?
  - tryauuum 4y ago
    quite unique for my country (Russia). Though they recently started to do some remote "blockchain-based" voting in Moscow, which is widely considered to be a fraud
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      I mean.. most things blockchain are.
    - mr_toad 4y ago
      I think most people outside Russia (and some inside it) consider all Russian elections to be fraudulent.
      - tryauuum 4y ago
        that's not the point. The point is, we don't have voting by mail in Russia and I think it help to observe how fraudulent the elections are.

cortesoft 4y ago

No, people will continue to believe as true videos that match their expectations and disbelieve those that don't

NavinF 4y ago

https://xkcd.com/2650/ https://xkcd.com/2650/

kyleplum 4y ago

There are ongoing efforts to enable digital signatures of online media. The idea is that you (or your browser) can validate that an image or video is unmodified from the source that produced it. https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/

russdill 4y ago
There are so many technical hurdles to something like this, I don't see it as a solution anytime soon or ever.
- kyleplum 4y ago
  It's not as far away as one might think. There was a demo earlier this year (Jan) showcasing the proposed 1.0 spec working in Microsoft Edge: https://c2pa.org/jan-2022_event/ https://c2pa.org/jan-2022_event/
  - russdill 4y ago
    The browser side is not where all the hurdles occur. It's on the capture side and the key/certificate management/revocation side.

aimor 4y ago

We (people) already accept the lies we perceive. I think we choose to accept these fantasies because they're often outside our direct influence and when something is distant from us we have the luxury of turning it into entertainment. I think of beauty in media, every video we see today is processed to make people look pretty. Most play along with the fantasy: admire old celebrities for not aging, complement friends for clear skin. But when a friend says, "I feel so ugly" we move closer to reality and acknowledge the makeup, beauty filters, etc. The same effect happens in politics, news, business, technology: people indulge in fantasy at their convenience. I don't think people will be more mindful of what they watch and believe, I think the opposite will happen: an attraction to fake content. People will embrace the fantasy and share deepfakes at a scale so large governments will be running campaigns to alert the public that such-and-such video is fake, possibly attempting to regulate how content shared online must be labeled. That said I still believe when these lies are closer to us, enough for us to care either as professionals or friends and family, that we will be more discerning about reality.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

I can't wait to just generate pornography on the fly while wearing a body monitor so that it can fine tune female body proportions to my exact specifications.

AlecSchueler 4y ago
Does that sound healthy? Personally or socially? I'd worry about how that would affect my view of the real women around me and, in turn, my behaviors towards others.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Definitely not. It actually scares me what future we are heading towards. Supernormal stimulus. Better than a human partner could ever be. Super addicting in a primordial way.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I'm guessing that most people will have very little trouble separating reality from fantasy.

bregma 4y ago

> wouldn't this lead to people being more mindful of what they watch and interact with? Have you been paying any attention to what's going on the last several years?

aaroninsf 4y ago

Why yes. Let me quote myself from a discussion I was having this morning with a friend who is a tenured professor of philosophy working on AI (as an ethics specialist his work is in oversight), we were discussing the work shared on HN this week showing a proof-of-concept of Stable Diffusion as better at image "compression" than existing webstandards. I was very provoked by commentary here about the high "quality" images produced, it was clear that they could in theory contain arbitrary levels of detail—but detail that was confabulated, not encoded in any sense except diffusely in the model training set. "I'm definitely inclined to push hard on the confabulation vs compression distinction, and by extension the ramifications. I see there a very meaningful qualitative distinction [between state of the art "compression" techniques, and confabulation by ML] and, an instrumental consequence which has a long shadow. The thing I am focused on being, whether or not the fact that a media object is lossy or not can be determined, even under even forensic scrutiny. There was a story I saw this week about the arms race in detection of 'deep fake' reproduction of voice... which now requires some pretty sophisticated models itself. Naturally I think this is an arms race in which the cost of detection is going to rapidly become infeasible except to the NSA. And maybe ultimately, infeasible full stop. So yeah, I think we're at a phase change already, which absolutely has been approaching, back to Soviet photo retouching and before, forgery and spycraft since forever... so many examples e.g. the story that went around a couple years ago about historians being up in arms about the fad for "restoring" and upscaling antique film and photographs, the issue of concern being that so much of that kind of restoration is confabulation and the presumptive dangers of mistaking compelling restoration for truth in some critical detail. Which at the time mostly seemed a concern for people who use the word hermeneutics unironically... ...but we now reach a critical inflection point where society as a whole integrates the notion that no media object no matter "convincing" can be trusted, and the consequent really hard problems about how we find consensus, and how we defend ourselves against bad actors who actively seek their Orbis Tertius Christofascist kingdom of rewritten history and alternative facts. The derisive "fake news" married to indetectably confabulated media is a really potent admixture!"

gcanyon 4y ago
Once you accept lossy compression, it becomes a question of what level and type of "lossy" you're willing to accept, and how clever the "compression" algorithm can be. If I want to compress the movie Thunderball -- a sufficiently clever "compression" algorithm could start with the synopsis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(film) add in some images of Sean Connery, and generate the film. That's...maybe a 100K to 1 compression ratio? If the algorithm itself understands "Sean Connery" then you could (theoretically) literally feed in the text description and achieve a reasonable result. I've seen Thunderball, but it was years ago and I don't remember the plot (boats?). I'd know the result was different, but I likely wouldn't be able to point to anything specific.

tshaddox 4y ago

I don't think it will change much. I think for claims that you think are important to determine an objective truth value for (like who the President of the U.S. is), your determinism mechanism is based on trusting sources you deem reliable and looking for broad agreement among many sources you deem to be independent. You're probably not just looking at a single sourceless video of Ronald Reagan behaving as if he's the president and believing that claim because the video couldn't possibly have been faked. And for other claim that you don't think are important to determine an objective truth value for, I don't think you need very high-fidelity evidence anyway. For example, people have no trouble believing claims that corroborate their closely-held ideologies even with very low-fidelity fraudulent evidence, or even claims made with no attempt whatsoever to provide even fraudulent evidence!

arcticfox 4y ago
I agree with your framework, but what happens when the sources I deem reliable can't trust their own eyes? A lot of people point to Photoshop not breaking truth, but in my experience, we simply rely on video instead. When I served on a grand jury, essentially all of the non-testimony evidence I saw was video, and it was incredibly compelling. Neutering the reliability of that evidence will hurt.

drc500free 4y ago

The ability to use this to plausibly deny any real evidence is more chilling than the fake evidence that could be created.

hombre_fatal 4y ago

> wouldn't this lead to people being more mindful of what they watch and interact with? No. We have already run the case study where people on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media will seethe at mere screenshots of headlines and captions under a picture with zero need for verification. Here on HN we will pile into the comments to react to the title without even clicking the link to read it ourselves. Deepfakes feel like a drop in the bucket. What does it matter that you can deepfake a president when people will simply believe a claim about the president than spreads around social media? I don’t see it.

ilaksh 4y ago

I actually think that live, full body AI-generated realistic avatars (sometimes imitating celebrities to one degree or another) will become an everyday part of life for many people within the next 5-10 years. I assume that full-on impersonation will still be illegal, but certain looks that are sometimes quite similar to a real celebrity will trend now and then. The context for this is the continual improvement in the capabilities and comfort of VR/AR devices. The biggest one I think is going to be lightweight goggles and eventually glasses. But also the ability to stream realistic 3d scenes and people using AI compression (including erasing the goggles or glasses if desired) could make the concept of going to a physical place for an event or even looking exactly like yourself feel somewhat quaint.

bsenftner 4y ago
Nobody seems to realize, the value is in inserting ordinary people into media with celebrities! Perfect for brand name advertising, you with a celebrity telling you how smart you are for using they brand they pitch. I formally built an ad agency with a feature film VFX pipeline for actor replacement advertising - but I built it back in '08, years before "deep fakes" and nobody believed what I had working was possible.

bsenftner 4y ago

Back in '02-'04 I was a former games/graphics programmer working as a digital artist in feature film VFX. One area I specialized in was stunt double actor replacements. Working on Disney's "Ice Princess" I fixed a stunt double replacement shot and realized a method of making the entire process generic, at feature film quality. By '06 I had an MBA with a Masters Thesis on the creation of a new Advertising format where the viewer, their family and friends are inserted into brand advertising for online advertising. By '08 I had global patents and an operating demonstration VFX pipeline specific for actor replacements at scale. However, it was the financial crisis of '08 and nobody in the general public had ever conceived of automated actor replacements. This was 5-7 years before the term deep fake became known. VCs simply disbelieved the technology was possible, even when demonstrated before their eyes. Going the angel investor route, 3 different times I formed an investor pool only to have at some point them realize what the technology could do with pornography, and then the investors insist the company pursue porn. However, we had Academy Award winning people in the company, why would they do porn? We refused and that was the end of those investors. With an agency for full motion video actor replacement advertising not getting financing, the award winning VFX people left and the company pivoted to the games industry - making realistic 3D avatars of game players. That effort was fully built out by '10, but the global patents were expensive to maintain and the games industry producers and studios I met simply wanted the service for free. Struggled for a few years. We closed, sold the patents, and I went into facial recognition. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/blake-senftner https://patents.justia.com/inventor/blake-senftner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lELORWgaudU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lELORWgaudU I was bitter about this all for a long time.

autoexec 4y ago
> Going the angel investor route, 3 different times I formed an investor pool only to have at some point them realize what the technology could do with pornography, and then the investors insist the company pursue porn. I'm not sure there's a huge market for people wanting to insert their friends and family into porn, but if there was why not just try it? Seems like it'd have demonstrated the tech worked commercially which could have attracted investment in non-pron uses and it could have ended up just one more technology in a long list of tech made successful as a result of porn.

thrown_22 4y ago

>Anyone in the field spent time thinking on this or has had similar notions? Skepticism in general will only be applied to people we don't like and ignored for people we do. The continued lapping up of blatant Ukrainian propaganda in mains stream media for example doesn't even need photoshop to be believed, just the vague 'sources said'.

permo-w 4y ago

I really think there is absolutely nothing to worry about. put it this way: written text has always been extremely mutable and therefore falsifiable. video is simply going to become more like text. people will trust it based on the context and their own judgment rather than the content. I suspect most people already do this anyway