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Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

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Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#41

Post by uptown »

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here:

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608

His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in order to form a comprehensive viewpoint on anything, one much choose whom to trust. And that it's this part of the process of "understanding" which has been exploited. That people have been encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence.

In this light point, when facts are irrelevant -- and if fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust then I fear for those advocating fact-backed positions. It's clear they'll face an uphill battle.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#42

Post by rossdavidh »

lolc wrote: post #25

There will be a plethora of "Deepfake" apps for your pocket computer tomorrow. People will learn quickly not to trust video. They will have no choice because they don't want to fall for pranks. Humanity will stand through this.

My thought is that it is much like what to do about any new technological threat, for example too many calories or too much information or too many distractions while driving. Bad things happen, and after about a generation coping mechanisms get developed, and some people adopt them more successfully than others. One is reminded of how populations adapt to new diseases.

One valid question, though, is whether or not the pace of introducing new technological threats to society has increased, such that we see something less like the Old World adaptation to the Black Death or malaria, and something more like the New World indigenous populations failure to adapt to getting all the Old World diseases introduced one after the other in quick succession.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#43

Post by billylindeman »

SteveJS wrote: post #36
fenwick67 wrote: post #23

We've been able to make convincing fake video since the 60s (see Kubric). Even impersonators with good makeup can get pretty close. I don't see how new tech changes anything.

It lowers the cost and effort, on an incredibly effective form of lying. It is effective because it engages a set of senses we have a harder time questioning ... and for good reason ... it’s (currently) easy to spot these unless you are really distracted. That’s because our brains blind us to how it constructs what we see ... we don’t get to continuously deconstruct our consciousness of red or blue, or a three dimens…

I'm interested on how society will adapt to this in criminal cases. I think soon we'll need better ways to authenticate and validate video / audio evidence.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#44

Post by gameswithgo »

dosycorp wrote: post #6

But not fake narratives, fake writing or fake news. Convenient that new media celebrities and individuals have greatest audience creation power through video, whereas traditional media still holds sway in print / news. So clearly, understand the origins of the narrative that "fake video" is more dangerous: creator videos are stealing mindshare from traditional media. So of course trad media wants to believe it's dang…

>Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience

My own experience wouldn't inform any democratic actions I might take at all except how to vote about net neutrality.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#45

Post by snowwrestler »

It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet.

Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal website is going to be believed much more readily than an article by "Barack Obama" on some random blog.

The same thing will happen with video. Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet, will generally not be believed until they're authenticated by some trustworthy source. This already happens with "amazing" web videos; they attract "this is fake!" comments unless they're vetted and vouched for by (for example) a news service.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#46

Post by 3pt14159 »

threatofrain wrote: post #11

People don't underestimate it, they just don't know what to do about it. That's arguably more of a technological problem than a policy problem, the technical and philosophical problem of how to detect fakes.

Well I'll tell them what to do:

Throw billions of dollars at data science prizes to create open sourced ways of detecting deep fakes. Have western intelligence agencies keep some methods private too, so we can detect it when someone has a way of getting through the open sourced scanners. Figure out how then did it, then open source a third way of detecting what they did while keeping the private scanners private.

This is so obviously a problem to everything that we simply cannot allow this threat to be tolerated. Truth itself cannot be under attack. We simply must be able to trust video.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#47

Post by ajross »

snowwrestler wrote: post #45

It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet. Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal…

> Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it.

That's just stunningly naive. Imagine if Pizzagate or some other such nonsense was accompanied by a video of Podesta mumbling something about sex slaves. Fake News is a a real thing even without video corroboration.

> Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet,

You honestly think Breitbart of FOX wouldn't have run that in a heartbeat?

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#48

Post by gameswithgo »

uptown wrote: post #41

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in orde…

>That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure to

In the case of climate change it is actually possible to self-inform yourself about some of the key aspects of climate change. Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors".

This was part of my path into figuring out who to trust, and it did take a while. Not everyone is going to have the time or inclination, and this is only 1 of a few dozen important political issues to understand!

By the way my conclusion was that yes, global warming is absolutely a real thing, and absolutely caused by human activities.

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#49

Post by carapace »

uptown wrote: post #41

There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608 His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in orde…

> matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to

But in the case of climate change anyone over thirty-five or so knows damn well the weather has gone funny.

People are scared, way deep down where it's hard to think about, because they know on a cellular billion-year-old level that you cannot escape the weather.

Once you grasp that, climate denialism is an obvious coping mechanism to prevent mass blind panic. It is a terrible thing to face the destruction of all that you love.

- - - - -

In any event, deepfakes are a shocking thing to have to deal with and we are sooooo unprepared. The only thing I can think of is to spread the word about it far and wide and hope for the best (meaning hopefully people and society will "innoculate" themselves against the onslaught of concrete dreams.)

Re: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#50

Post by hanbura »

threatofrain wrote: post #11

People don't underestimate it, they just don't know what to do about it. That's arguably more of a technological problem than a policy problem, the technical and philosophical problem of how to detect fakes.

Technological solutions will help, but software to spot fake videos will lead to an arms race between video creation and video classification.

The more promising angle is imho the society angle. Most people view their memory as the best source of truth, when in reality it's well established in psychology that our memory is incredibly unreliable. Previously this was mostly a problem for the justice system, now we risk entire nations being gaslighted. What we should be doing is trusting our written word, not our memory. Basically writing diaries and keeping newsletter articles, and checking both from time to time to keep wrong memories from manifesting

All of that is very teachable

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