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Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

arstechnica.com

31–40 of 119 posts

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand this argument at all. We've been in this "post truth" world for a long time already for every form of media other than video. Text quotes, photos, and audio can all be easily faked. If I post a ridiculous quote here and say it's from Obama, you won't believe me. But if the NYTimes does the same thing, it carries a lot more weight. We've been here for a long time already, now those standards…

> But if the NYTimes does the same thing, it carries a lot more weight. Sure, and that's part of the danger. Convincing deep fakes will be used to delegitimize mainstream news organizations, as with what happened with Dan Rather - a trusted source presented faked documents.

That trusted source didn't bother to vet the faked documents and instead rushed it onto the air. That trusted source continued to push that narrative even going so far as to say, "fake but accurate," destroying all credibility and ultimately retiring.

The only difference is today, they don't retire out of shame, they just keep on doing it, keeping viewership via emotional draw rather than rational news. Real news has been dead since that incident in my view. It's mostly state propaganda, regardless of party.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#33

I mean. No. I understand the point of the article is “look how much I did with so little.” And it’s really good in terms of how much was done. But the final deliverable isn’t at all convincing. Clickbait title.

Made by a dude who has next to no experience in the field. Now imagine what a guy who knows what he's doing can do with a bit more money. That's what the allusion here is; the fact that a Reporter with 500$ even comes close should be an alarm signal to you.

This is also an impressive DeepFake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm3squcz7Aw

Voice actor reads a poem in voices of famous people; his face gets swapped with the actor's face; the combination of voice and face makes it very believable.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#35
post #4

A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…

What I find most worrying is the 2nd order consequence of not being able to trust pictures anymore.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#36
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand this argument at all. We've been in this "post truth" world for a long time already for every form of media other than video. Text quotes, photos, and audio can all be easily faked. If I post a ridiculous quote here and say it's from Obama, you won't believe me. But if the NYTimes does the same thing, it carries a lot more weight. We've been here for a long time already, now those standards…

If you post a ridiculous quote, say it’s from Obama, then provide a link to a video where Obama says that quote, more people believe you. People already believe tabloid journalism. Just because you might exclusively trust NYTimes doesn’t mean easily accessible mechanisms for fabricating evidence aren’t a problem for a massive chunk of the world population. And what about when this happens at a state-sponsored level (…

I don't think the argument is that deepfakes won't matter. It's that they don't represent a new paradigm, but are instead just an additional medium (video) which must be more scrutinized than before.

Long have documents and news been the subject of fraud. And for a few decades photo alterations have been common. Now we are adding video to the list.

But there is nothing new about the faking of libelous material (eg Killian documents 2004)

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#37
post #4

A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…

What I find most worrying is the 2nd order consequence of not being able to trust pictures anymore.

I feel like that ship sailed a while ago with Photoshop being around. I think the problem now is you can do the same with videos and the technology is more commoditized so you don’t have to be very knowledgeable to do these things.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean Snapchat filters?

Nope, pretty sure Instagram has their own as well.

They may also be referring to the third party ones that people use before posting to Insta. Facetune possibly being the most well known.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#39
post #4

A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…

I don't really understand this argument at all. We've been in this "post truth" world for a long time already for every form of media other than video. Text quotes, photos, and audio can all be easily faked. If I post a ridiculous quote here and say it's from Obama, you won't believe me. But if the NYTimes does the same thing, it carries a lot more weight. We've been here for a long time already, now those standards…

I was saying something like that for a long time now, but recently I started thinking that it's even more on an non-issue than I thought. I mean, what I was saying is that "yeah, this is all new and weird, but when everybody started using Photohop it was also weird, and yet we are moving on".

But recently I read "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and I thought that the point Borges was making could be easily described as critique of "fake-news post-realism of today", except it was 80 years ago. And while the notion of this problem not being new at first seemed weird to me, eventually I figured this is pretty natural: while 80 (or 800 for that matter) years ago there wasn't any such tools to manipulate information on that scale, nobody had the access to information on that scale in the first place. So anyone could be fooled by more powerful actor anyway. Offensive tools of any time are roughly the same as the defensive tools.

It's just that these 20 years at the turn of the century were somewhat the sweet spot, when we had this "Internet for people like us", so it was us who was fooling the less knowledgeable people, while keeping the belief that we are relatively safe from being maleficently disinformed by somebody else. And now we can clearly see it's not necessarily the case anymore, ao it feels like something new.

But it really isn't. As always.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#40
post #4

A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…

What I find most worrying is the 2nd order consequence of not being able to trust pictures anymore.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Likewise, a deepfake is worth a thousand lies.

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