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Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

nytimes.com

81–90 of 107 posts

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#81
post #5

The era of verifiability-- when photographic and video evidence could plausibly be trusted-- is over. Photos have been dubious since photoshop, but still required expertise and artistry to use. Fake moving pictures required considerably more extensive expertise, lots of time, and usually specialized equipment. None of that is true anymore. We are back to a pre-industrial age of discourse, where rumor and hearsay and…

Yeah, this is an interesting issue, but CCTVs are kind of invasive anyways privacy wise so maybe that's a good thing. They're still useful for realtime monitoring though, which is good for security.

With powerful enough machines, could you generate fake video in near-realtime? Not today, I guess...next year?

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#83
Fake videos is nothing new. For those interested, you can look into how the BBC was (is still) using footage from the 1st war in Afghanistan to illustrate their coverage of the second one. Or how CNN used footage of an Indian porn movie to accuse pakistani soliders of rape. I'm sure there are many more examples of such misuse of videos ...

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one mention here: “Following the ban, many of the users moved to the /deepfakes/ board on 8chan[18] and the /v/DeepFakes community on Voat.[17]” [0] [0] - http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/deepfakes?full=1

This is so frustrating and depressing. I'm come from the hobby indie movie production side of things and something like this would be so amazing. I came here all excited to see where I can dip into the technology and this is what I find...two asshole corners of the internet I would never frequent. Can you imagine Reddit banning Photoshop and all other photo editing technology because a bunch of guys used it to post b…

Chans and voat can be very interesting. Don't label them asshole corners because the 'good guys' told you so. They are orders of magnitudes less censored as HN/reddit/twitter and offer a far wider range of opinions as well as information.

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#85

10+ years ago we started getting the technologies for facial land mark detection, and now we have facial swapping. Currently we have the beginnings of good full-body pose derection, and I imagine soon we’ll eventually have full body swapping (maybe along with clothes). That raises interesting questions. As legitimate looking sources become harder to trust, what other ways can we verify them? One idea that was floatin…

Couldn't blockchain be a great tool here? The original hash is uploaded to the blockchain at the time of the recording, then you can verify that nothing has changed since then.

I think this is part of what KODAKCoin is suggested to provide. But video footage goes through so many post processing steps that I’m not sure how that helps (or if it even matters) since the viewing audience likely won’t care about these things if a video supports their narrative.

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The era of verifiability-- when photographic and video evidence could plausibly be trusted-- is over. If ease of producing convincing fakes of X means that the era of X as convincing proof is over, then why are signatures and written documents still taken as proof? I think it just means that things will be scrutinized more carefully from now on, and that there will need to be a stronger document trail. > We are bac…

For any important document, the signing is almost always witnessed by someone else. My understanding is that the act of signing is primarily the legal act of accepting the document, not a security mechanism. The signature provides a quick reassurance that a document has been accepted, but if there were a real dispute, the witness could be asked to testify.

Yes, almost always signatures are only going to be relevant to civil cases, which are decided on the balance of probabilities. So all the evidence introduced is about pushing those probabilities around. A signature is neither necessary (except in some special cases) nor sufficient but it will usually be evidence for "acceptance", one of the main parts of a contract in law. A witness would shore up that piece of evidence but it rarely comes up. In most cases acceptance is not disputed because doing things you contracted to do is also pretty good evidence for acceptance and that's usual. e.g. if you're in court over a car lease, the fact you paid the first three months and drove the car is usually going to be more than enough "acceptance" for a court even if the signed document has been lost.

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#87
I think the effects of "fake" journalism would be mitigated somewhat if we didn't have laws against slander, libel, and false advertising.

The media-consuming public in the United States still believes that "if it is in print, it must be true" - they haven't been inoculated against falsehood like they would have been otherwise. Presumably, if there were no expectations of truth in print/media to be enforced by some magical (and actually sort-of non existent) federal authority, media outside the "trusted" sources would be automatically suspect unless reviewed by some other trusted third party.

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#89
post #83

Fake videos is nothing new. For those interested, you can look into how the BBC was (is still) using footage from the 1st war in Afghanistan to illustrate their coverage of the second one. Or how CNN used footage of an Indian porn movie to accuse pakistani soliders of rape. I'm sure there are many more examples of such misuse of videos ...

Except now it can be used to target specific individuals for blackmail...

Re: Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

#90
post #52
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh - https://vimeo.com/257360045 Definitely not perfect, but this is hobbyist grade work. With the recent work around parallelized WaveNet synthesizing 10 seconds of audio for every second of wall clock time, a live fake that fools 50% of regular people is probably a couple of years away at most. Particularly if you can control the setting to ensure lighting/angles/etc match up reasonably well.

Wouldn't have even thought that looked like him, still have trouble seeing it.

I am starting to wonder if this concept simply works better for some viewers than others. I seem to always very deeply notice that the shape of the head is always sort of wrong... I'm wondering if I use "shape of head and typical hairstyle" as a major way I recognize people. Maybe other people are really focussing on facial features like "lips eyes and nose"? Honestly, what I keep thinking when I see stuff like this is "this just looks like Paul Rudd wearing a lot of makeup" not "this looks like Jimmy Fallon with a narrower head and a different hairstyle".
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