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One black hat thing I'm curious about though is whether or not this tag can be weaponized. If I upload a real event and tag it as AI, will it reduce user trust

• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The AI tags are fundamentally useless. The premise is that it would prevent someone from misleading you by thinking that something happened when it didn't, but someone who wants to do that would just not tag it then. Which is where the real abuse comes in: You post footage of a real event and they say it was AI, and ban you for it etc., because what actually happened is politically inconvenient. And the only way to prevent that would be a reliable way to detect AI-generated content which, if it existed, would obviate any need to tag anything because then it could be automated.
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  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    Not convinced by this. Camera sensors have measurable individual noise, if you record RAW that won't be fakeable without prior access to the device. You'd have a straightforward case for defamation if your real footage were falsely labeled, and it would be easy to demonstrate in court.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > Camera sensors have measurable individual noise, if you record RAW that won't be fakeable without prior access to the device. Which doesn't help you unless non-AI images are all required to be RAW. Moreover, someone who is trying to fabricate something could obviously obtain access to a real camera to emulate. > You'd have a straightforward case for defamation if your real footage were falsely labeled, and it would be easy to demonstrate in court. Defamation typically requires you to prove that the person making the claim knew it was false. They'll, of course, claim that they thought it was actually fake. Also, most people don't have the resources to sue YouTube for their screw ups.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
        Moreover, someone who is trying to fabricate something could obviously obtain access to a real camera to emulate. Yes, but not to your camera. Sorry for not phrasing it more clearly: individual cameras have measurable noise signatures distinct from otherwise identical models. On the lawsuit side, you just need to aver that you are the author of the original footage and are willing to prove it. As long as you are in possession of both the device and the footage, you have two pieces of solid evidence vs. someone elses feels/half-assed AI detection algorithm. There will be no shortage of tech-savvy media lawyers willing to take this case on contingency.
        • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
          > Yes, but not to your camera. But who is the "you" in this case? There can be footage of you that wasn't taken with your camera. The person falsifying it would just claim they used their own camera. Which they would have access to ahead of time in order to incorporate its fingerprint into the video before publishing it.
    • Gregaros 3y ago
      DMCA abuse begs to differ.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
        That's because of safe harbor provisions, which don't exist in this context.
    • VelesDude 3y ago
      Unfortunately video codecs love to crush that fine detail.
    • nomel 3y ago
      Most consumer cameras require access menus to enable raw because dealing with RAW is a truly terrible user experience. The vast majority of image/video sensors out there don't even support raw recordings, out of the box.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
        Anyone with a mid-to-upper range phone or better-than-entry level DSLR/bridge camera has access to this, and anyone who uses that camera to make a living (eg shooting footage of protests) understands how to use RAW. I have friends who are complete technophobes but have figured this out because they want to be able to sell their footage from time to time.
      • fennecbutt 3y ago
        "Dealing with raw" is one of the major reasons to use an actual camera these days.
  • MBCook 3y ago
    That’s what I was thinking. Why don’t we just ask all scam videos to label themselves as scams while we’re at it? It’s nice honest users will do that but they’re not really the problem are they.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      > Why don’t we just ask all scam videos to label themselves as scams while we’re at it? We do, we ask paid endorsements to be disclaimed.
  • mazlix 3y ago
    I think you have a bit backwards. If you want to publish pixels on a screen there should be no assumption that they represent real events. If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake. Also since no one likes RAW footage it should probably just be you post your edited version which may have "AI" upscaling / de-noising / motion blur fixing etc, AND you can post a link to your cryptographically signed verifiable RAW footage. Of course there's still ways around that like your footage could just be a camera being pointed at an 8k screen or something but at least you make some serious hurdles and have a reasonable argument to the video being a result of photons bouncing off real objects hitting your camera sensor.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake. At which point nobody could verify anything that happened with any existing camera, including all past events as of today and all future events captured with any existing camera. Then someone will publish a way to extract the key from some new camera model, both allowing anyone to forge anything by extracting a key and using it to sign whatever they want, and calling into question everything actually taken with that camera model/manufacturer. Meanwhile cheap cameras will continue to be made that don't even support RAW, and people will capture real events with them because they were in hand when the events unexpectedly happened. Which is the most important use case because footage taken by a staff photographer at a large media company with a professional camera can already be authenticated by a big corporation, specifically the large media company.
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        I think at minimum YouTube could tag existing footage uploaded before 2015 as very unlikely to be AI generated.
  • kube-system 3y ago
    > The premise is that it would prevent someone from misleading you by thinking that something happened when it didn't, but someone who wants to do that would just not tag it then. And when they do that, the video is now against Google's policy and can be removed. That's the point of this policy.
  • towelpluswater 3y ago
    I mean they’re building the labeled dataset right now by having creators label it for them. I would suspect this helps make moderation models better at estimating confidence levels of ai generated content that isn’t labeled as such (ie for deception). Surprised we aren’t seeing more of this in labeling datasets for this new world (outside of captchas)
  • mr_toad 3y ago
    > The AI tags are fundamentally useless. To the extent that they allow Google to exclude AI video from training sets they’re obviously useful to Google.
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    AI tags are to cover issues in the other direction: you publish an event as real, but they can prove it wasn't. If you didn't put the tag on it, malice can be inferred from your post (and further legal proceeding/moderation can happen) It's the same as paid reviews: tags and disclaimers exist to make it easier to handle cases where you intentionally didn't put them. It's not perfect and can be abused in other ways, but at least it's something.
  • cottsak 3y ago
    agreed! this is another censorship tool.
  • valval 3y ago
    They’re just gathering training data to train their AI-detection models.
  • themoonisachees 3y ago
    The do have some use. Take for example the AI images of the pope wearing luxury brands that someone made about last year. They clearly wanted to make it as a joke, not to purposefully misinform people, and as long as everybody is in on the joke then I see no issue with that. But some people who weren't aware of current AIgen capabilities took it as real and an AI tag would have avoided the discussion of "has AI art gone too far" while still allowing that person to make their joke.
• sangnoir 3y ago
  I suspect we're headed into a world of attestation via cryptographically signed videos. If you're the sole witness, then you can reduce the trust in the event, however, if it's a major event, then we can fall back on existing news-gathering machinery to validate and counter your false tagging (e.g. if a BBC camera captured the event, or there is some other corroboration & fact checking).
  • smt88 3y ago
    How does the signature help? It only proves that the video hasn't been altered since [timestamp]. It doesn't prove that it wasn't AI-generated or manipulated.
    • leoqa 3y ago
      If I have a CCTV camera that is in a known location and a TPM that signs its footage, I could probably convince a jury that it’s legit in the face of a deepfake defense. That’s the bar- it’s not going to be infallible but if you don’t find evidence of tampering with the hardware then it’s probably going to be fine.
      • Gigachad 3y ago
        This might be worse than nothing. It's exactly the same tech as DRM, which is good enough to stop the average person, but where tons of people have private exploits stashed away to crack it. So the judge and general public trust the system to be basically foolproof, while criminals can forge fake signatures using keys they extracted from the hardware.
    • sangnoir 3y ago
      Signatures are also able to (mostly) signal that a specific device (and/or application on that device) captured the video. It would be possible to check if a video was encoded by a specific instance of an iOS Camera app or AfterEffects on PC. Everything else - corroboration, interviews, fact checking will remain as they are today and can't be replaced by technology. So I imagine a journalist would reach out to person who recorded thr video, ask them to show their device's fingerprint and ask about their experience when (event) occured, and then corroborate all that information from other sources. When the news org publishes the video, they may sign it with their own key and/or vouch for the original one so viewers of clips on social media will know that Fox News (TM) is putting their name and reputation behind the video, and it hasn't been altered from the version Fox News chose to share, even though the "ModernMilitiaMan97" account that reshared it seems dubious. Currently, there's no way to detect alterations or fabrications of both the "citizen-journalist" footage and post-broadcast footage.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  I fear that we're barrelling fast toward a future when nobody can trust anything at all anymore, label or not.
  • nonethewiser 3y ago
    We have to expect people to think for themselves. People are flawed and will be deceived but trying to centralize critical thinking will have far more disastrous results. Its always been that way. Im not saying Youtube shouldn’t have AI labels. Im saying we shouldn’t assume they’re reliable.
    • Barrin92 3y ago
      >but trying to centralize critical thinking will have far more disastrous results No. Having sources of trust is the basis of managing complexity. When you turned the tap water on and bought a piece of meat at the butcher you didn't yourself verify whether its healthy right? You trust the medicine you buy contains exactly what is says on the label and didn't take a chemistry class. That's centralized trust. You rely on it ten thousand times a day implicitly. There need to be measures to make sure media content is trustworthy, because the smartest person on the earth doesn't have enough resources to critically judge 1% of what they're exposed to every day. It is simply a question of information processing. It's a mathematical necessity. Information that is collectively processed constantly goes up, individiual bandwith does not, therefore you need more division of labor, efficieny and higher forms of social organisation.
      • nonethewiser 3y ago
        > Having sources of trust is the basis of managing complexity. This is a false equivalence that I’ve already addressed. > When you turned the tap water on and bought a piece of meat at the butcher you didn't yourself verify whether its healthy right? To a degree, yeah, you do check. Especially when you get it from somewhere with prior problems. And if you see something off you check further and adjust accordingly. Why resort to anology? Should we blindly trust YouTube to judge whats true or not? I stated that labeling videos is fine but what’s not fine is blindly trusting it. Additionally, comparing to meat dispenses with all the controversy because food safety is a comparatively objective standard. Compare, “is this steak safe to eat or not?” To “is this speech safe to hear or not?”
• Aeolun 3y ago
  Having the tag weaponizes it by itself, because people will now consider any content without the tag real, whether it actually is or not.
• drexlspivey 3y ago
  The labels collected by google will certainly be used to train classifiers to detect AI created content so I think that’s a legit concern.
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  If you upload a real event but you're the only source, it'll be doubted anyway; see also, most UFO sightings.
• jonathankoren 3y ago
  Absolutely. Mass reporting for content violations to attack someone has been a tactic decades.
• deadbabe 3y ago
  This isn’t strictly some blackhat thing, people will attempt to hand wave inconvenient evidence against them as AI generated and build reasonable doubt.