13 ms·

Moon Disaster

290 points by plurby 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
darkerside 4y ago
It must be so tempting to end these things with, "Live from New York, it's Saturday night!"
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  Pan to audience where we see Henry Kissinger clapping while flanked by three supermodels on each arm.
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    That creates a very funny visual although you forgot to mention the rings, gold chain, and serpent cane.
    - zxcvbn4038 4y ago
      Or perhaps the magic pimp cane from Petey Wheatstraw?
wildrhythms 4y ago
This is amazing, though I think the voice is one of the hardest problems for deepfakes. I find there is a lot of inflection and tonality missing from synthesized voices. Even with a 'old TV broadcast' sound filter to mask some of that stuff, I think people are quite good at recognizing when a voice isn't totally human :) But the visuals in this production are incredibly convincing to me.
- cdolan 4y ago
  If you have seen the Apollo 11 movie that was released a few years ago, the footage is all very familiar (and real). They spliced the content in a way that is misleading
- imiric 4y ago
  This film is from 2019, and the tech has advanced substantially since then. E.g. have you heard the voices from https://play.ht/ https://play.ht/ ? Those capture inflection and tonality quite well, and are able to reproduce near-natural sounding laughter, pauses, and other human qualities. I wouldn't say it's perfect just yet, but give it another ~5 years and it will get there.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Wow. and they are multilingual as well. For me it was the first time to (afaik) to hear tts of this Quality in my native language (which is a major one)
mariuolo 4y ago
Nixon's voice sounds too gravelly.
sakarisson 4y ago
Very nicely directed and edited video! Though I must say that if the intention of the video was to make me doubt abilities to spot deep fakes, it didn't manage to achieve its goal. Both Nixon's face movements and voice felt highly unnatural and robotic to me. Although I'm sure it won't be many years until the results of such experiments will be come indistinguishable, we are not quite there yet.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  No, that was just Nixon. ;)
  - rainbowzootsuit 4y ago
    Wait until they do Mark Zuckerberg; he already dwells in the uncanny valley.
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      Zuck's been done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM&t=255 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM&t=255
    - midasuni 4y ago
      You can tell the fakes as they look far too human
      - rainbowzootsuit 4y ago
        He only wanted to become a real boy.
- driverdan 4y ago
  His face movements were excellent, they were much like Nixon's real mannerisms. The problem was the edges of his face were pretty bad. The voice was also bad, with obvious ghosting and glitches. That said as someone else pointed out this was done in 2019. If this was made today the face edges would be much better and audio clearer. I'd love to see this remade now.
mabbo 4y ago
It's not perfect. But it's crawling up the other side of the uncanny valley. Imagine where this tech will be in five years.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
  Eh, you mean in 2023?
jtvjan 4y ago
An animator used the voice cloning tech to make a "leaked episode" of a cartoon that ended years ago: https://youtu.be/shp9jzJ4MOw https://youtu.be/shp9jzJ4MOw It's funny how both that and this used "low sound quality" to mask the imperfections in the cloned voice. But I suppose it's only a matter of time before that's no longer necessary.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Much as everyone supposes it's just a matter of time before cars are truly driverless.
  - fuckelonmusk 4y ago
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Waymo is already doing this in multiple cities. What’s your point?
    - AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
hackeraccount 4y ago
I watched it without sound and it didn't seem to work as well. Hard to say but the body language didn't read right and there seemed to be artifacts. I'd have to watch Nixon's resignation speech and this without sound back to back.
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  Nixon's voice sounded synthesized and not very much like him. To be it was still reasonably compelling with sound though
codeflo 4y ago
Waste of time. 4 minutes of useless filler, followed by 2 minutes of bad voice synthesis. Not convincing at all, and all the padded content just serves to get your hopes up.
- Tepix 4y ago
  I'm sure Americans are more familiar with Nixons voice and appearance. It looked and sounded good to me.
  - aflag 4y ago
    I'm not american and I can't recall if I heard him before, but the voice definitely felt a bit robotic. Also, he seemed to move his head in unnatural ways (even if he has some sort of nervous tick). Finally, if you look at his neck, jaw and shadow movement, you'll see some weird clipping going on. Granted, if I was not looking for it, I may haven't noticed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wheelerof4te 4y ago
Is the video of the trip to the moon with the crew's comments genuine? I'm too young to tell.
- drivers99 4y ago
  There was a great IMAX documentary on the 50th anniversary of the mission made by searching and scanning all original footage. I highly recommend it! Amazon Prime Video link https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-Douglas-Miller/dp/B07RCZ661R/ref=tmm_aiv_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-Douglas-Miller/dp/B07R...
vivegi 4y ago
One could easily spot the weird "micronodding" in the video and the audio wasn't super great either.
AirStreamer27 4y ago
This was painfully easy. If you want to fool people into believing deepfakes, you’ll need to do a better job
jethkl 4y ago
This project is from 2019. The tools to do this are now more widely available and the realism has advanced considerably since then. This project was an early example that illustrated to a wide audience that audio and video are no longer reliable sources of truth. By comparison, the techniques used in Forrest Gump (1994) look crude.
- voidz 4y ago
  Isn't it amazing how much things improve in so little time. Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially faster.
  - lagrange77 4y ago
    Yeah it's really amazing. > Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially faster. Going slow at the beginning is actually part of exponentials.
    - couchand 4y ago
      Well it's only the beginning and slow relative to what comes after. Relative to what came before, it's much later and faster!
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"
    - HPMOR 4y ago
      As a corollary, it takes decades where nothing observable happens to have the weeks where decades happen.
      - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
        Like an overnight success 30 years in the making
Hard_Space 4y ago
Ugh, an embedded player with no volume control.
- canadianfella 4y ago
- SpaghettiCthulu 4y ago
  And it doesn't work for me on Chrome for Android at all.
fortran77 4y ago
Of course today, half the population would start thinking this was some vast conspiracy (the astronauts were just sent to a soundstage in arizona) and the other half would be tweeting "I don't care about 3 overprivileged men"
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Whitey on the Moon poem by Gil Scott Heron (1970): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwkXZ0SmTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwkXZ0SmTs
  - fortran77 4y ago
    There were also protests of the Apollo launches in Florda. But in 2022, it wouldn't be actual oppressed people making a statement; it would be rich white college students!
simonjgreen 4y ago
If you haven't seen "For All Mankind" now is the time to watch the first episode.
- orf 4y ago
  Why? It’s not particularly good.
  - mbernstein 4y ago
    The majority of people and critics reviewing it disagree with you as do I :). Personal preferences aside, the recreated Nixon footage and conversations are well done and quite convincing, which was the point of watching it I believe.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    In the spirit of your comment: Because. It’s actually very good.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      The show’s premise is a nuanced, optimistic take on what humanity might have achieved had we continued the space race. It focuses on historical plausibility, a bit like The West Wing. The main characters “pay the price” for this early progress in the way you imagine a hero astronaut/cosmonaut might - with their lives and/or livelihoods. I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn’t shut up about “wokeness” (we disagree on a few things). The show is effectively an imagining of “America, made great in the first place”, and at least the core premise - that we lost our hunger for exploration after winning the space race, _used to be_ a bipartisan talking point. Absolutely recommend it. Also, the imagined space shuttles they get to come up with are amazing.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        > I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn’t shut up about “wokeness” I thought it was leaning a bit too heavily on what we consider modern issues. But then it turns out that some of the characters in the story where real and lived through this or something close to this (I forget now, but one of the women astronauts that never got to fly was a real person)
doodlebugging 4y ago
The audio and video of Nixon was obviously fake. I knew the text of the speech was real since it was released years ago and though I couldn't remember all of it, I do remember how he tried to set the narrative of heroes lost. I was a kid back then and I watched the TV broadcasts as they happened or as they were first reported so I was already familiar with those short videos though I originally saw them all on a black and white television. I have seen the same footage in color a number of times over the years since. Growing up during this time period there was a sense of wonder, awe, hope, and we could look forward to even more missions and discoveries. It was a great time to be an American and there was some enhanced prestige associated with being a Texan since a lot of this happened because NASA was in Houston. Texas schools focused on science, technology, mathematics, and kids fitness was still encouraged through programs like the President's Physical Fitness tests. Even today I weigh only 30 lbs (13.6 kg, 2.14 stone) more than I weighed when I graduated high school. That part of the message stuck with me. The video had too many repeat sections that were obvious fakes since it was too jerky. Live video and audio never sounded or looked that bad even when you were watching with a tuned rabbit ear antenna. I have a feeling that the audio portion of the astronaut dialog designed to lead the viewer to believe that they had seen bad things happen was fake too and it used manipulated footage to build the mental image. It was good seeing Walter Cronkite again. We watched Chet Huntley and David Brinkley a lot too. I think they were NBC news. Journalism has sure fallen on hard times over the last 40 years after we (the hearts and minds of the American people) were sold out to corporate pigs by a change in regulations that allowed one corporate entity to control all forms of media available locally. Independent local newsrooms could not compete with a well-funded national operation that could pump news stories into your homes over television, radio, and through a competing newspaper. Local newspapers sold out to national interests who used (and still use) partisan editorial control to sell their narrative. If you are under 40 your news has been a feed of carefully curated stories delivered by pretty faces intended to keep you engaged. Using those pretty faces to create a facade of attractive people with nearly plastic features evidently works. One network in particular uses so much makeup even on the male personnel that could all be wearing silicone masks during the broadcasts. This is intended to distract you from the message and to keep you watching their channel. Remember that Huntley, Cronkite, and other journalists on television every night weren't chosen for their looks. They were pretty ordinary looking men who would probably be a 5/10 where today's anchors are gussied up to try to hit an 8/10 appearance. You won't see any two-baggers on TV nowadays. Unfortunately, all this new deep fake technology will be convincing enough to fool a lot of people. Propaganda is a huge problem today in all media forms without resorting to totally faked broadcasts delivering invented "truths". Our educational system is failing the people of the United States in many areas as religion goes back into classrooms, charter schools rob the public school systems, and private schools increasingly become a pathway for wealthier parents to pass their own political, religious, or social beliefs on to their kids with the assistance of others in their social circles. It is a tool for siloing the next generation so that they have none of the normal social interactions with people from different backgrounds that they would have had in a public school setting. This helps the older generation maintain social problems like racism, homophobia (through some religious-based private schools), women's place in society, etc. A long time ago I thought we were getting close to solving problems like racism. As an older adult I see that we lost our way, not because it is intractable but because we were intentionally led back to the well-traveled path by bad actors after we had initially collectively chosen the less-traveled branch which offered a solution. Picking the less-traveled branch of the trail required us to be courageous, to be open-minded, empathetic, and civil to each other. Instead, while navigating this difficult path we chose leaders who did not deserve our confidence and who consistently, and intentionally in some cases, failed us eventually steering us back on to the original track where we are today. Since life moves in cycles we will always encounter those branches in the trail that present opportunity and require courage. Thus there can always be hope that we will either willing choose to trace an alternate cycle or accidentally stumble onto the less-worn path and decide that it is more interesting and then decide collectively that we should continue that adventure. And so it goes...
photochemsyn 4y ago
What are some ways to verify video integrity? 1) Multiple camera angles. A simultaneous left / front / right view of a person speaking would be much harder to fake. 2) Higher-resolution video and high-quality audio are harder to fake, although this might not be a problem for entities with sufficient resources and motivation. 3) Attribution to a real person. While this raises problems for people who want to remain anonymous due to very reasonable fears of retaliation, it also makes it harder to push fakes out to social media. Note many fake 'breaking news' videos are just stiched together old footage, no AI deepfake required. This has been noticeable across multiple platforms wrt Ukraine, for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/60867414 https://www.bbc.com/news/60867414
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Unfortunately, while those are good ideas, they’re also cat and mouse games. It’s a bit like saying that client side anti-cheat software makes it harder to cheat in videogames. It does, but you’re looking for an unbeatable test, which doesn’t exist. Nothing exemplified this problem more than the recent Twitter takeover. On tiktok, fake news was running rampant, and I saw it happen in real time. At one point someone said that a Twitter employee banned Elon on his way out, while showing a screenshot of the “eIon musk” fake account: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRx6G9mG/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRx6G9mG/ There were also actual deepfakes of Elon’s voice that fooled me. I wish I saved it, since it’s highly relevant to this thread. But it only became clear it was a fake when it started saying ridiculous things. They even had a video of Elon talking, and they didn’t have to bother syncing his lips with the audio. Viral clips just need a veneer of authenticity to short circuit our monkey brains. It wasn’t till I fell for that deepfake that I started realizing how much of a problem we might be facing. The next few presidential candidates might need to put out statements saying “X wasn’t true,” while the majority of people already believe X because they saw it happen live on tiktok.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Yeah, that's all true. This might lead to a revival of professional journalism and actual reporting, however - i.e. if a known reporter with a good track record writes, 'today this presidential candidate said X, and I heard it myself', then that might become a more reliable information source than any audio or video clip.
junon 4y ago
Err, what? The site says it's both real and fake. It glitched and let me press both to see the answers. On "fake" it says "nice try, but real". On "real" it says "nice try, but it's fake, we edited the mouth". So... which is it? Did I miss something?
- fourthark 4y ago
  The text and Apollo footage were real; Nixon’s face and voice were fake.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The technology has came a long way since the music video for "Up with People" by Lambchop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PxY_RPBeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PxY_RPBeM
_jal 4y ago
How British spooks have verified video: http://hummingbirdclock.info/about http://hummingbirdclock.info/about "The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound, yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has edited the recording."
temptemptemp111 4y ago
robinsonb5 4y ago
Every few years I re-watch the Running Man - and it gets scarier every time. Last time I watched it we only nearly had the video forgery technology from the movie (in civilian hands, at least). Now it actually exists.
IAmGraydon 4y ago
All of the comments on how easy this was to spot are laughable. Of course it was easy to spot. The moon landing DID in fact happen and we all know it. Let’s see you try again when you have no idea you could be looking at a deepfake.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zamadatix 4y ago
  The questions at the end don't ask whether you think the moon landing happened they ask whether you could tell if individual components of the video were faked or real.
permo-w 4y ago
one thing I’ll say is that that speech was really well-written. if GPT-3 could do that, the profession of speech-writing would be on its way out
w_for_wumbo 4y ago
What's amazing to me is the possibility to experience the "What-if" scenario, for a second. I now have a memory of watching the moon landing fail, even though this never happened, it's still a real memory that I can attach thought and emotion to.
Netcob 4y ago
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1484/ https://xkcd.com/1484/
dools 4y ago
It seems like this may actually be a useful application of blockchain technology. If you see a video of someone on a link that hasn’t been minted by them, then it’s not genuine.
stevespang 4y ago
atleta 4y ago
One of the problems with deep fakes is that they open the door for plausible deniability in case of hidden cam/mic recordings of wrongdoings of public figures. (Think celebrities, politicians.)
stevage 4y ago
I'm really confused by the intended narrative here. There is some kind of disaster on route to the moon, then suddenly Nixon's speech that Armstrong and Aldrin are stranded on the moon. We skipped the landing?

Moon Disaster

290 points by plurby 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

darkerside 4y ago

It must be so tempting to end these things with, "Live from New York, it's Saturday night!"

zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Pan to audience where we see Henry Kissinger clapping while flanked by three supermodels on each arm.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  That creates a very funny visual although you forgot to mention the rings, gold chain, and serpent cane.
  - zxcvbn4038 4y ago
    Or perhaps the magic pimp cane from Petey Wheatstraw?

wildrhythms 4y ago

This is amazing, though I think the voice is one of the hardest problems for deepfakes. I find there is a lot of inflection and tonality missing from synthesized voices. Even with a 'old TV broadcast' sound filter to mask some of that stuff, I think people are quite good at recognizing when a voice isn't totally human :) But the visuals in this production are incredibly convincing to me.

cdolan 4y ago
If you have seen the Apollo 11 movie that was released a few years ago, the footage is all very familiar (and real). They spliced the content in a way that is misleading
imiric 4y ago
This film is from 2019, and the tech has advanced substantially since then. E.g. have you heard the voices from https://play.ht/ https://play.ht/ ? Those capture inflection and tonality quite well, and are able to reproduce near-natural sounding laughter, pauses, and other human qualities. I wouldn't say it's perfect just yet, but give it another ~5 years and it will get there.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Wow. and they are multilingual as well. For me it was the first time to (afaik) to hear tts of this Quality in my native language (which is a major one)

mariuolo 4y ago

Nixon's voice sounds too gravelly.

sakarisson 4y ago

Very nicely directed and edited video! Though I must say that if the intention of the video was to make me doubt abilities to spot deep fakes, it didn't manage to achieve its goal. Both Nixon's face movements and voice felt highly unnatural and robotic to me. Although I'm sure it won't be many years until the results of such experiments will be come indistinguishable, we are not quite there yet.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago
No, that was just Nixon. ;)
- rainbowzootsuit 4y ago
  Wait until they do Mark Zuckerberg; he already dwells in the uncanny valley.
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Zuck's been done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM&t=255 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM&t=255
  - midasuni 4y ago
    You can tell the fakes as they look far too human
    - rainbowzootsuit 4y ago
      He only wanted to become a real boy.
driverdan 4y ago
His face movements were excellent, they were much like Nixon's real mannerisms. The problem was the edges of his face were pretty bad. The voice was also bad, with obvious ghosting and glitches. That said as someone else pointed out this was done in 2019. If this was made today the face edges would be much better and audio clearer. I'd love to see this remade now.

mabbo 4y ago

It's not perfect. But it's crawling up the other side of the uncanny valley. Imagine where this tech will be in five years.

unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
Eh, you mean in 2023?

jtvjan 4y ago

An animator used the voice cloning tech to make a "leaked episode" of a cartoon that ended years ago: https://youtu.be/shp9jzJ4MOw https://youtu.be/shp9jzJ4MOw It's funny how both that and this used "low sound quality" to mask the imperfections in the cloned voice. But I suppose it's only a matter of time before that's no longer necessary.

foobarbecue 4y ago
Much as everyone supposes it's just a matter of time before cars are truly driverless.
- fuckelonmusk 4y ago
- bergenty 4y ago
  Waymo is already doing this in multiple cities. What’s your point?
  - AndrewUnmuted 4y ago

hackeraccount 4y ago

I watched it without sound and it didn't seem to work as well. Hard to say but the body language didn't read right and there seemed to be artifacts. I'd have to watch Nixon's resignation speech and this without sound back to back.

forgotusername6 4y ago
Nixon's voice sounded synthesized and not very much like him. To be it was still reasonably compelling with sound though

codeflo 4y ago

Waste of time. 4 minutes of useless filler, followed by 2 minutes of bad voice synthesis. Not convincing at all, and all the padded content just serves to get your hopes up.

Tepix 4y ago
I'm sure Americans are more familiar with Nixons voice and appearance. It looked and sounded good to me.
- aflag 4y ago
  I'm not american and I can't recall if I heard him before, but the voice definitely felt a bit robotic. Also, he seemed to move his head in unnatural ways (even if he has some sort of nervous tick). Finally, if you look at his neck, jaw and shadow movement, you'll see some weird clipping going on. Granted, if I was not looking for it, I may haven't noticed.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wheelerof4te 4y ago

Is the video of the trip to the moon with the crew's comments genuine? I'm too young to tell.

drivers99 4y ago
There was a great IMAX documentary on the 50th anniversary of the mission made by searching and scanning all original footage. I highly recommend it! Amazon Prime Video link https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-Douglas-Miller/dp/B07RCZ661R/ref=tmm_aiv_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-Douglas-Miller/dp/B07R...

vivegi 4y ago

One could easily spot the weird "micronodding" in the video and the audio wasn't super great either.

AirStreamer27 4y ago

This was painfully easy. If you want to fool people into believing deepfakes, you’ll need to do a better job

jethkl 4y ago

This project is from 2019. The tools to do this are now more widely available and the realism has advanced considerably since then. This project was an early example that illustrated to a wide audience that audio and video are no longer reliable sources of truth. By comparison, the techniques used in Forrest Gump (1994) look crude.

voidz 4y ago
Isn't it amazing how much things improve in so little time. Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially faster.
- lagrange77 4y ago
  Yeah it's really amazing. > Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially faster. Going slow at the beginning is actually part of exponentials.
  - couchand 4y ago
    Well it's only the beginning and slow relative to what comes after. Relative to what came before, it's much later and faster!
- mhh__ 4y ago
  "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"
  - HPMOR 4y ago
    As a corollary, it takes decades where nothing observable happens to have the weeks where decades happen.
    - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
      Like an overnight success 30 years in the making

Hard_Space 4y ago

Ugh, an embedded player with no volume control.

canadianfella 4y ago
SpaghettiCthulu 4y ago
And it doesn't work for me on Chrome for Android at all.

fortran77 4y ago

Of course today, half the population would start thinking this was some vast conspiracy (the astronauts were just sent to a soundstage in arizona) and the other half would be tweeting "I don't care about 3 overprivileged men"

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Whitey on the Moon poem by Gil Scott Heron (1970): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwkXZ0SmTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwkXZ0SmTs
- fortran77 4y ago
  There were also protests of the Apollo launches in Florda. But in 2022, it wouldn't be actual oppressed people making a statement; it would be rich white college students!

simonjgreen 4y ago

If you haven't seen "For All Mankind" now is the time to watch the first episode.

orf 4y ago
Why? It’s not particularly good.
- mbernstein 4y ago
  The majority of people and critics reviewing it disagree with you as do I :). Personal preferences aside, the recreated Nixon footage and conversations are well done and quite convincing, which was the point of watching it I believe.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  In the spirit of your comment: Because. It’s actually very good.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    The show’s premise is a nuanced, optimistic take on what humanity might have achieved had we continued the space race. It focuses on historical plausibility, a bit like The West Wing. The main characters “pay the price” for this early progress in the way you imagine a hero astronaut/cosmonaut might - with their lives and/or livelihoods. I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn’t shut up about “wokeness” (we disagree on a few things). The show is effectively an imagining of “America, made great in the first place”, and at least the core premise - that we lost our hunger for exploration after winning the space race, _used to be_ a bipartisan talking point. Absolutely recommend it. Also, the imagined space shuttles they get to come up with are amazing.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn’t shut up about “wokeness” I thought it was leaning a bit too heavily on what we consider modern issues. But then it turns out that some of the characters in the story where real and lived through this or something close to this (I forget now, but one of the women astronauts that never got to fly was a real person)

doodlebugging 4y ago

The audio and video of Nixon was obviously fake. I knew the text of the speech was real since it was released years ago and though I couldn't remember all of it, I do remember how he tried to set the narrative of heroes lost. I was a kid back then and I watched the TV broadcasts as they happened or as they were first reported so I was already familiar with those short videos though I originally saw them all on a black and white television. I have seen the same footage in color a number of times over the years since. Growing up during this time period there was a sense of wonder, awe, hope, and we could look forward to even more missions and discoveries. It was a great time to be an American and there was some enhanced prestige associated with being a Texan since a lot of this happened because NASA was in Houston. Texas schools focused on science, technology, mathematics, and kids fitness was still encouraged through programs like the President's Physical Fitness tests. Even today I weigh only 30 lbs (13.6 kg, 2.14 stone) more than I weighed when I graduated high school. That part of the message stuck with me. The video had too many repeat sections that were obvious fakes since it was too jerky. Live video and audio never sounded or looked that bad even when you were watching with a tuned rabbit ear antenna. I have a feeling that the audio portion of the astronaut dialog designed to lead the viewer to believe that they had seen bad things happen was fake too and it used manipulated footage to build the mental image. It was good seeing Walter Cronkite again. We watched Chet Huntley and David Brinkley a lot too. I think they were NBC news. Journalism has sure fallen on hard times over the last 40 years after we (the hearts and minds of the American people) were sold out to corporate pigs by a change in regulations that allowed one corporate entity to control all forms of media available locally. Independent local newsrooms could not compete with a well-funded national operation that could pump news stories into your homes over television, radio, and through a competing newspaper. Local newspapers sold out to national interests who used (and still use) partisan editorial control to sell their narrative. If you are under 40 your news has been a feed of carefully curated stories delivered by pretty faces intended to keep you engaged. Using those pretty faces to create a facade of attractive people with nearly plastic features evidently works. One network in particular uses so much makeup even on the male personnel that could all be wearing silicone masks during the broadcasts. This is intended to distract you from the message and to keep you watching their channel. Remember that Huntley, Cronkite, and other journalists on television every night weren't chosen for their looks. They were pretty ordinary looking men who would probably be a 5/10 where today's anchors are gussied up to try to hit an 8/10 appearance. You won't see any two-baggers on TV nowadays. Unfortunately, all this new deep fake technology will be convincing enough to fool a lot of people. Propaganda is a huge problem today in all media forms without resorting to totally faked broadcasts delivering invented "truths". Our educational system is failing the people of the United States in many areas as religion goes back into classrooms, charter schools rob the public school systems, and private schools increasingly become a pathway for wealthier parents to pass their own political, religious, or social beliefs on to their kids with the assistance of others in their social circles. It is a tool for siloing the next generation so that they have none of the normal social interactions with people from different backgrounds that they would have had in a public school setting. This helps the older generation maintain social problems like racism, homophobia (through some religious-based private schools), women's place in society, etc. A long time ago I thought we were getting close to solving problems like racism. As an older adult I see that we lost our way, not because it is intractable but because we were intentionally led back to the well-traveled path by bad actors after we had initially collectively chosen the less-traveled branch which offered a solution. Picking the less-traveled branch of the trail required us to be courageous, to be open-minded, empathetic, and civil to each other. Instead, while navigating this difficult path we chose leaders who did not deserve our confidence and who consistently, and intentionally in some cases, failed us eventually steering us back on to the original track where we are today. Since life moves in cycles we will always encounter those branches in the trail that present opportunity and require courage. Thus there can always be hope that we will either willing choose to trace an alternate cycle or accidentally stumble onto the less-worn path and decide that it is more interesting and then decide collectively that we should continue that adventure. And so it goes...

photochemsyn 4y ago

What are some ways to verify video integrity? 1) Multiple camera angles. A simultaneous left / front / right view of a person speaking would be much harder to fake. 2) Higher-resolution video and high-quality audio are harder to fake, although this might not be a problem for entities with sufficient resources and motivation. 3) Attribution to a real person. While this raises problems for people who want to remain anonymous due to very reasonable fears of retaliation, it also makes it harder to push fakes out to social media. Note many fake 'breaking news' videos are just stiched together old footage, no AI deepfake required. This has been noticeable across multiple platforms wrt Ukraine, for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/60867414 https://www.bbc.com/news/60867414

sillysaurusx 4y ago
Unfortunately, while those are good ideas, they’re also cat and mouse games. It’s a bit like saying that client side anti-cheat software makes it harder to cheat in videogames. It does, but you’re looking for an unbeatable test, which doesn’t exist. Nothing exemplified this problem more than the recent Twitter takeover. On tiktok, fake news was running rampant, and I saw it happen in real time. At one point someone said that a Twitter employee banned Elon on his way out, while showing a screenshot of the “eIon musk” fake account: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRx6G9mG/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRx6G9mG/ There were also actual deepfakes of Elon’s voice that fooled me. I wish I saved it, since it’s highly relevant to this thread. But it only became clear it was a fake when it started saying ridiculous things. They even had a video of Elon talking, and they didn’t have to bother syncing his lips with the audio. Viral clips just need a veneer of authenticity to short circuit our monkey brains. It wasn’t till I fell for that deepfake that I started realizing how much of a problem we might be facing. The next few presidential candidates might need to put out statements saying “X wasn’t true,” while the majority of people already believe X because they saw it happen live on tiktok.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Yeah, that's all true. This might lead to a revival of professional journalism and actual reporting, however - i.e. if a known reporter with a good track record writes, 'today this presidential candidate said X, and I heard it myself', then that might become a more reliable information source than any audio or video clip.

junon 4y ago

Err, what? The site says it's both real and fake. It glitched and let me press both to see the answers. On "fake" it says "nice try, but real". On "real" it says "nice try, but it's fake, we edited the mouth". So... which is it? Did I miss something?

fourthark 4y ago
The text and Apollo footage were real; Nixon’s face and voice were fake.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

The technology has came a long way since the music video for "Up with People" by Lambchop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PxY_RPBeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PxY_RPBeM

_jal 4y ago

How British spooks have verified video: http://hummingbirdclock.info/about http://hummingbirdclock.info/about "The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound, yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has edited the recording."

temptemptemp111 4y ago

robinsonb5 4y ago

Every few years I re-watch the Running Man - and it gets scarier every time. Last time I watched it we only nearly had the video forgery technology from the movie (in civilian hands, at least). Now it actually exists.

IAmGraydon 4y ago

All of the comments on how easy this was to spot are laughable. Of course it was easy to spot. The moon landing DID in fact happen and we all know it. Let’s see you try again when you have no idea you could be looking at a deepfake.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zamadatix 4y ago
The questions at the end don't ask whether you think the moon landing happened they ask whether you could tell if individual components of the video were faked or real.

permo-w 4y ago

one thing I’ll say is that that speech was really well-written. if GPT-3 could do that, the profession of speech-writing would be on its way out

w_for_wumbo 4y ago

What's amazing to me is the possibility to experience the "What-if" scenario, for a second. I now have a memory of watching the moon landing fail, even though this never happened, it's still a real memory that I can attach thought and emotion to.

Netcob 4y ago

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1484/ https://xkcd.com/1484/

dools 4y ago

It seems like this may actually be a useful application of blockchain technology. If you see a video of someone on a link that hasn’t been minted by them, then it’s not genuine.

stevespang 4y ago

atleta 4y ago

One of the problems with deep fakes is that they open the door for plausible deniability in case of hidden cam/mic recordings of wrongdoings of public figures. (Think celebrities, politicians.)

stevage 4y ago

I'm really confused by the intended narrative here. There is some kind of disaster on route to the moon, then suddenly Nixon's speech that Armstrong and Aldrin are stranded on the moon. We skipped the landing?