10 ms·

A.I. Muddies Israel-Hamas War in Unexpected Way

37 points by zzzeek 3y ago

webmaven 3y ago
https://archive.ph/vB2mt https://archive.ph/vB2mt
jruohonen 3y ago
“Even by the fog of war standards that we are used to, this conflict is particularly messy,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert in digital forensics, A.I. and misinformation. “The specter of deepfakes is much, much more significant now — it doesn’t take tens of thousands, it just takes a few, and then you poison the well and everything becomes suspect.” "And now, experts say that malicious agents are taking advantage of A.I.’s availability to dismiss authentic content as fake — a concept known as the liar’s dividend." “Proving what’s fake is going to be a pointless endeavor and we’re just going to boil the ocean trying to do it,” said Chester Wisniewski, an executive at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. “It’s never going to work, and we need to just double down on how we can start validating what’s real.”
- tgv 3y ago
  Well, the people who worked on these systems can be proud of themselves. And those that deployed them to the masses to earn a quick buck. After revenge porn, they can now add a deeper social division, hatred and incitement to open war to their accomplishments. Yes, there is such a thing as ethics, also in tech.
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    Were it not for the new AI tools; these lies would not be told; honesty would reign supreme throughout human interaction. Nobody ever photoshopped pix by hand before this, in furtherance of a faked story. Right? Perhaps the ethics are more complicated than that.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      People lie. Helping people lie more convincingly is still a thing that should raise ethical red flags.
      - h2odragon 3y ago
        OK. Only the professionals should have access to these tools, then?
        AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        No. "Professional" and "ethical" are, too often, orthogonal to each other. Ideally, you'd like these tools to only be in the hands of ethical people. But that seems unlikely to be realistic.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Perhaps Bic should be chastised for making writing easier? Microsoft Word and Powerpoint are ethical nightmares as well. At some point, you're making a generally useful tool and some people choose to use it to create lies. We don't want to go back to the days of quill feathers and movable type just to make lying more expensive.
        galangalalgol 3y ago
        And interestingly no one seemed to care when it took "tens of thousands" to deceive everyone. Only once that power is handed to all of us does it suddenly become unethical. We could never trust anything we learned except to the extent we trust the person who conveyed the facts to us. The misplaced trust in state and/or corporate media made things kind of work, but that doesn't make it right or ethical. Now that it is obvious that in addition to our benevolent oligarchs, that evil hacker kid your cousin told you about might be feeding you untruths, it doesn't work anymore. Media is pointless, elections are pointless. You can still trust people you see with your eyes on a regular basis to observe the ethics of their behavior. Until they start hacking our eyes, but we have a bit I think? I think this is one more supporting datapoint for a hierarchical representative democracy where people only have to select from people they know well. Dunbar's number makes the math hard, but if most people know 100 people well, that puts elected positions at 1% at the first tier, .01 for the next. Each tier gets to know those they work with, well, electing one to the next level who must be backfilled locally. Not sure how to bootstrap the system.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Yes, I agree. Let’s all shame the inventors of electricity, the transistor, and the programming language. For shame!
    - tgv 3y ago
      Electricity is only used very indirectly in damaging practices, and in a way its promoters could not have foreseen. It is also (indirectly) used for good. AI image deepfakes have no good in them, and its bad use was clear before it was released. They are not the same.
endominus 3y ago
I'm sorry, "unexpected"? Did no one in the team at the New York Times understand what was meant by the term "post-truth world"? People on this site alone were talking about how the advancement of AI tools would make the idea of video evidence of crimes obsolete years ago! Anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention to the capabilities of these tools and their immediate, obvious consequences has been anticipating this for a long time. Even the very idea of video and photographic evidence being fakable is going to result in people rejecting it when it conflicts with their narratives. And it's hard to fault them; we're living in Descartes' world now.
- zadler 3y ago
  What was descartes’ works, for the lazy and uninformed?
  - tgv 3y ago
    I think the comment refers to Descartes idea of solipsism, where we can't know the truth, because something might be beguiling our senses. From there, Descartes derives his famous "cogito ergo sum." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Discourse_on_the_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Discourse_on_...
  - ben30 3y ago
    “Descartes’ world” implies radical doubt, even doubting what seems obvious. Relevant to AI and fake videos undermining trust in evidence.
  - nightpenguin 3y ago
    I think he means the mind experiment from Descartes where he assumes everything around him has been created by some demon to fool him and in that case the only thing he can be certain about is that he is thinking (or you exist, I'm not sure). I'm also not an expert but that's what I understood from the original comment. Hope this helps
  - postpawl 3y ago
    “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” -René Descartes
krapp 3y ago
It seems like this muddles things in precisely the way everyone expected, and quite a few even wanted, no?
somenameforme 3y ago
IMO this has little to do with AI, and a lot more to do with people becoming more accustomed to the fact that war is filled with propaganda, and not just from 'the other side.' For instance literally all of the evidence for the Iraq War was fake. The high level insider was a taxi driver and thief [1], the rock solid evidence (receipts) of Iraq trying to purchase 'yellowcake' uranium in Niger was a forgery [2], and of course the "mobile biological weapons laboratories" were run of the mill hydrogen balloon refilling stations. [3] Literally all of the "Irrefutable and Undeniable" [4] evidence was fake. But who'd have had the audacity to make such claims back then? Now it's a lot more justifiable to immediately doubt any piece of evidence, or even multiple pieces. And so when ever more people see some emotionally charged damning evidence, their reaction is no longer to race to the desired opinion. Even if AI image generation didn't exist, there'd be plenty of people doubting this right now, for good reason. And I think this is a very good thing. This is perhaps the one and only nice benefit of a low fertility rate. With an ever aging population more and more people are going to have the wisdom of having lived through these events. With any luck it might even help keep us out of WW3. --- [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_Iraqi_mobile_weapons_laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_Iraqi_mobile_we... [4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-undeniable.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Hah. Sorry for the empty comment, but it’s so funny that you and I both simultaneously pointed out the Iraq war was based on fake information. And I just realized that 20-somethings today didn’t get to experience what that was like firsthand. Your point about lived experience is fantastic; hats off to you.
  - suunsuun 3y ago
    what was it like to experience it firsthand?
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Watching this play out on Twitter has been fascinating. For days after the attack, there was almost unanimous support for Israel. Then the Harvard letter came out saying that the blame was entirely on Israel, infuriating most of Twitter. But then over the next few days, a steady stream of posts have been bubbling up which all carry the theme of making the reader question whether Israel is justified in its reaction. It’s hard to say whether deepfakes are to blame. Certainly it’s a factor. But the underlying reason seems to be that people are willing to believe that Israel is overreacting. Before deepfakes, there was good old fashioned propaganda. Both are lies, and it’s hard to tell what to believe. What’s changed is that information travels far faster now, and more widely. One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor. Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk...
- hypeit 3y ago
  > It’s hard to say whether deepfakes are to blame. Certainly it’s a factor. I don't think that's certain at all. It's really as simple as people not wanting to bomb densely populated areas. The longer that goes on, the more the tide will turn on Israel. I think there's also an element of education, most people in the west don't know the history of Israel. Once people start looking into what happened in 1948, they start to see the reality of an occupying force and colonization. Mainstream media has lost control of the narrative.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ok123456 3y ago
[flagged]
anselm 3y ago
It’s too bad there’s no way at all to know if any media whatsoever is plausibly real, say such as by a cryptographic web of trust. Even though similar mechanisms are used to secure services such as domain name resolution clearly nothing similar can be applied here. I guess we’re just doomed to be fed a diet of adulterated content.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  It's simply called using common sense and relying on trusted sources. "Cryptographic trust" is never going to prove anything. Even if a camera can encrypt a photograph to try to prove a particular photograph was taken at a particular place and time, nothing is preventing someone from spoofing a GPS signal and snapping a photo of a doctored photograph with the camera. Adulterated content has been around for basically as long as the printing press.
  - anselm 3y ago
    Your idea only works for tiny networks and doesn’t scale. Enjoy your completely unfiltered social network. It’s not my problem if you can’t see any benefit whatsoever to any kind of trust filtering.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      I never said anything about unfiltered social networks. I already have trust filtering, just by following specific journalists whose reporting I trust. They do the work of verifying photographs, because it's part of their area of professional expertise, and I appreciate it.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Have you noticed that any time anyone says anything about common sense, it's after common sense has already failed?
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      ...no? Where has common sense already failed?
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
jacknews 3y ago
There's nothing unexpected about this, and the clue is in the title, it's an old technique called 'mudying the waters'. When people can't trust some of the news, it erodes their trust in all of it, and then they can't know for sure what's actually going on. But why bother with such subtle techniques when you can just cut communications entirely on the eve of your assualt, and then act with impunity.
- xg15 3y ago
  This. Even the current variant with generative AI in the mix isn't unexpected since the moment Musk tried to argue that basically video evidence as a category should be disallowed as, in theory, any video everywhere could be fake. Thankfully he got laughed out of the courtroom for that. Yet. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174132413/people-are-trying-to-claim-real-videos-are-deepfakes-the-courts-are-not-amused https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174132413/people-are-trying-...
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Elon Musk exaggerates because he's Elon Musk, but it is generally a problem. If you have a clip of someone saying something in a news story from 2003, on the website of a news organization, with a publication date in 2003, to claim it's a deepfake would require you to claim the news organization forged the publication date. Every news organization that contemporaneously published the same video. But if we don't have reliable means to identify deepfakes (the high quality ones, not just the bad ones), well, sometimes the video in question wasn't widely published in a year before deepfakes were a thing. So what now? If you can't tell the difference in a large number of cases then your choices are admitting the forgeries into evidence or excluding the legitimate videos.
j4yav 3y ago
What I can say for sure is that it seems for years now like every individual person is 100% convinced that all the real, non-fabricated evidence confirms their priors and validates that they are totally correct and morally superior, and the people they disagree with are sheeple, hateful, or just plain evil. AI may allow for creating infinite stuff to validate your biases available, but people are already sorting themselves out just fine without it.

37 points by zzzeek 3y ago

https://archive.ph/vB2mt https://archive.ph/vB2mt

“Even by the fog of war standards that we are used to, this conflict is particularly messy,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert in digital forensics, A.I. and misinformation. “The specter of deepfakes is much, much more significant now — it doesn’t take tens of thousands, it just takes a few, and then you poison the well and everything becomes suspect.” "And now, experts say that malicious agents are taking advantage of A.I.’s availability to dismiss authentic content as fake — a concept known as the liar’s dividend." “Proving what’s fake is going to be a pointless endeavor and we’re just going to boil the ocean trying to do it,” said Chester Wisniewski, an executive at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. “It’s never going to work, and we need to just double down on how we can start validating what’s real.”

tgv 3y ago
Well, the people who worked on these systems can be proud of themselves. And those that deployed them to the masses to earn a quick buck. After revenge porn, they can now add a deeper social division, hatred and incitement to open war to their accomplishments. Yes, there is such a thing as ethics, also in tech.
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Were it not for the new AI tools; these lies would not be told; honesty would reign supreme throughout human interaction. Nobody ever photoshopped pix by hand before this, in furtherance of a faked story. Right? Perhaps the ethics are more complicated than that.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    People lie. Helping people lie more convincingly is still a thing that should raise ethical red flags.
    - h2odragon 3y ago
      OK. Only the professionals should have access to these tools, then?
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        No. "Professional" and "ethical" are, too often, orthogonal to each other. Ideally, you'd like these tools to only be in the hands of ethical people. But that seems unlikely to be realistic.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Perhaps Bic should be chastised for making writing easier? Microsoft Word and Powerpoint are ethical nightmares as well. At some point, you're making a generally useful tool and some people choose to use it to create lies. We don't want to go back to the days of quill feathers and movable type just to make lying more expensive.
      - galangalalgol 3y ago
        And interestingly no one seemed to care when it took "tens of thousands" to deceive everyone. Only once that power is handed to all of us does it suddenly become unethical. We could never trust anything we learned except to the extent we trust the person who conveyed the facts to us. The misplaced trust in state and/or corporate media made things kind of work, but that doesn't make it right or ethical. Now that it is obvious that in addition to our benevolent oligarchs, that evil hacker kid your cousin told you about might be feeding you untruths, it doesn't work anymore. Media is pointless, elections are pointless. You can still trust people you see with your eyes on a regular basis to observe the ethics of their behavior. Until they start hacking our eyes, but we have a bit I think? I think this is one more supporting datapoint for a hierarchical representative democracy where people only have to select from people they know well. Dunbar's number makes the math hard, but if most people know 100 people well, that puts elected positions at 1% at the first tier, .01 for the next. Each tier gets to know those they work with, well, electing one to the next level who must be backfilled locally. Not sure how to bootstrap the system.
- brookst 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. Let’s all shame the inventors of electricity, the transistor, and the programming language. For shame!
  - tgv 3y ago
    Electricity is only used very indirectly in damaging practices, and in a way its promoters could not have foreseen. It is also (indirectly) used for good. AI image deepfakes have no good in them, and its bad use was clear before it was released. They are not the same.

endominus 3y ago

I'm sorry, "unexpected"? Did no one in the team at the New York Times understand what was meant by the term "post-truth world"? People on this site alone were talking about how the advancement of AI tools would make the idea of video evidence of crimes obsolete years ago! Anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention to the capabilities of these tools and their immediate, obvious consequences has been anticipating this for a long time. Even the very idea of video and photographic evidence being fakable is going to result in people rejecting it when it conflicts with their narratives. And it's hard to fault them; we're living in Descartes' world now.

zadler 3y ago
What was descartes’ works, for the lazy and uninformed?
- tgv 3y ago
  I think the comment refers to Descartes idea of solipsism, where we can't know the truth, because something might be beguiling our senses. From there, Descartes derives his famous "cogito ergo sum." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Discourse_on_the_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Discourse_on_...
- ben30 3y ago
  “Descartes’ world” implies radical doubt, even doubting what seems obvious. Relevant to AI and fake videos undermining trust in evidence.
- nightpenguin 3y ago
  I think he means the mind experiment from Descartes where he assumes everything around him has been created by some demon to fool him and in that case the only thing he can be certain about is that he is thinking (or you exist, I'm not sure). I'm also not an expert but that's what I understood from the original comment. Hope this helps
- postpawl 3y ago
  “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” -René Descartes

krapp 3y ago

It seems like this muddles things in precisely the way everyone expected, and quite a few even wanted, no?

somenameforme 3y ago

IMO this has little to do with AI, and a lot more to do with people becoming more accustomed to the fact that war is filled with propaganda, and not just from 'the other side.' For instance literally all of the evidence for the Iraq War was fake. The high level insider was a taxi driver and thief [1], the rock solid evidence (receipts) of Iraq trying to purchase 'yellowcake' uranium in Niger was a forgery [2], and of course the "mobile biological weapons laboratories" were run of the mill hydrogen balloon refilling stations. [3] Literally all of the "Irrefutable and Undeniable" [4] evidence was fake. But who'd have had the audacity to make such claims back then? Now it's a lot more justifiable to immediately doubt any piece of evidence, or even multiple pieces. And so when ever more people see some emotionally charged damning evidence, their reaction is no longer to race to the desired opinion. Even if AI image generation didn't exist, there'd be plenty of people doubting this right now, for good reason. And I think this is a very good thing. This is perhaps the one and only nice benefit of a low fertility rate. With an ever aging population more and more people are going to have the wisdom of having lived through these events. With any luck it might even help keep us out of WW3. --- [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_Iraqi_mobile_weapons_laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_Iraqi_mobile_we... [4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-undeniable.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Hah. Sorry for the empty comment, but it’s so funny that you and I both simultaneously pointed out the Iraq war was based on fake information. And I just realized that 20-somethings today didn’t get to experience what that was like firsthand. Your point about lived experience is fantastic; hats off to you.
- suunsuun 3y ago
  what was it like to experience it firsthand?

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Watching this play out on Twitter has been fascinating. For days after the attack, there was almost unanimous support for Israel. Then the Harvard letter came out saying that the blame was entirely on Israel, infuriating most of Twitter. But then over the next few days, a steady stream of posts have been bubbling up which all carry the theme of making the reader question whether Israel is justified in its reaction. It’s hard to say whether deepfakes are to blame. Certainly it’s a factor. But the underlying reason seems to be that people are willing to believe that Israel is overreacting. Before deepfakes, there was good old fashioned propaganda. Both are lies, and it’s hard to tell what to believe. What’s changed is that information travels far faster now, and more widely. One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor. Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk...

hypeit 3y ago
> It’s hard to say whether deepfakes are to blame. Certainly it’s a factor. I don't think that's certain at all. It's really as simple as people not wanting to bomb densely populated areas. The longer that goes on, the more the tide will turn on Israel. I think there's also an element of education, most people in the west don't know the history of Israel. Once people start looking into what happened in 1948, they start to see the reality of an occupying force and colonization. Mainstream media has lost control of the narrative.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ok123456 3y ago

[flagged]

anselm 3y ago

It’s too bad there’s no way at all to know if any media whatsoever is plausibly real, say such as by a cryptographic web of trust. Even though similar mechanisms are used to secure services such as domain name resolution clearly nothing similar can be applied here. I guess we’re just doomed to be fed a diet of adulterated content.

crazygringo 3y ago
It's simply called using common sense and relying on trusted sources. "Cryptographic trust" is never going to prove anything. Even if a camera can encrypt a photograph to try to prove a particular photograph was taken at a particular place and time, nothing is preventing someone from spoofing a GPS signal and snapping a photo of a doctored photograph with the camera. Adulterated content has been around for basically as long as the printing press.
- anselm 3y ago
  Your idea only works for tiny networks and doesn’t scale. Enjoy your completely unfiltered social network. It’s not my problem if you can’t see any benefit whatsoever to any kind of trust filtering.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I never said anything about unfiltered social networks. I already have trust filtering, just by following specific journalists whose reporting I trust. They do the work of verifying photographs, because it's part of their area of professional expertise, and I appreciate it.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Have you noticed that any time anyone says anything about common sense, it's after common sense has already failed?
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    ...no? Where has common sense already failed?

steve76 3y ago

[dead]

jacknews 3y ago

There's nothing unexpected about this, and the clue is in the title, it's an old technique called 'mudying the waters'. When people can't trust some of the news, it erodes their trust in all of it, and then they can't know for sure what's actually going on. But why bother with such subtle techniques when you can just cut communications entirely on the eve of your assualt, and then act with impunity.

xg15 3y ago
This. Even the current variant with generative AI in the mix isn't unexpected since the moment Musk tried to argue that basically video evidence as a category should be disallowed as, in theory, any video everywhere could be fake. Thankfully he got laughed out of the courtroom for that. Yet. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174132413/people-are-trying-to-claim-real-videos-are-deepfakes-the-courts-are-not-amused https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174132413/people-are-trying-...
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Elon Musk exaggerates because he's Elon Musk, but it is generally a problem. If you have a clip of someone saying something in a news story from 2003, on the website of a news organization, with a publication date in 2003, to claim it's a deepfake would require you to claim the news organization forged the publication date. Every news organization that contemporaneously published the same video. But if we don't have reliable means to identify deepfakes (the high quality ones, not just the bad ones), well, sometimes the video in question wasn't widely published in a year before deepfakes were a thing. So what now? If you can't tell the difference in a large number of cases then your choices are admitting the forgeries into evidence or excluding the legitimate videos.

j4yav 3y ago

What I can say for sure is that it seems for years now like every individual person is 100% convinced that all the real, non-fabricated evidence confirms their priors and validates that they are totally correct and morally superior, and the people they disagree with are sheeple, hateful, or just plain evil. AI may allow for creating infinite stuff to validate your biases available, but people are already sorting themselves out just fine without it.