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Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

arstechnica.com

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

#91

Post by larnmar »

enraged_camel wrote: post #74
panarky wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People predicted that Photoshop was the end of truth, that journalism could no longer be trusted, that photographic evidence at criminal trials would be inadmissible. None of that actually happened because people learned to be skeptical, and to care about who took the photo, the chain of custody, and the controls to prevent digital alteration. Maybe we need something similar but more rigorous for video. The camera it…

>>None of that actually happened because people learned to be skeptical, and to care about who took the photo, the chain of custody, and the controls to prevent digital alteration. This may be true in courts of law, but it absolutely is not when it comes to general public consumption of pictures.

Can you think of some examples of photoshopped pictures which have changed history in significant ways?

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

#92

Post by ojosilva »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #8
simias wrote: 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…

The problem of fake news is not actually that you (a rhetoric "you"), with a presumably above average intelligence, is able select or be skeptical about your sources of truth, but:

1) The researched human behavior where "1000 lies must be equal to 1 truth".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256486791_Credibili...

2) Monopolizing the information stream: the attention grabbing effectiveness of deepfake videos to convey fake messages and its novelty incentive to share them on social media, added to the fear-of-missing-out they generate on viewers and the fact that "the effort required to refute b* is 10 times greater than the effort required to produce it":

https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/social-media-fatigue-an...

3) voter apathy caused by news fatigue due to the sheer volume of fake news, to which deepfake adds a new vector:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/polls-media-fake-news....,

https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2019/07/04/chronicle-fati...

4) A majority of youngsters can't really spot (or care) about fake anymore:

https://qz.com/1750839/most-young-2020-us-election-voters-ca...

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

#93

Post by larnmar »

adrianN wrote: post #18
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is this the danger now in a way that it hasn't been previously? You could have presented fake documents for hundreds of years now, but it's not like we don't have any credible news organizations as a result.

It gets increasingly cheap to manufacture convincing fakes, but it doesn't get any cheaper to do quality journalism. The risk as I see it is that there is such an overwhelming tsunami of manufactured reality that it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction.

The funny part is that Dan Rather and his producers were fooled by a deeply unconvincing fake — a supposedly Vietnam-era typewritten document that was obviously made using Microsoft Word using default settings. Furthermore, many many people continued to defend it as real for a long time after partisans on the other side had thoroughly debunked it.

If 2004 news could be fooled by a fake that took a couple of minutes to make, I’m not that worried that today’s news is any better.

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

#94

Post by NeedMoreTea »

simias wrote: post #76
lm28469 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-... Photo editing has been used pretty much since the beginning of mainstream photography. You should never "trust" pictures for anything serious if you don't have absolute trust in the source.

I don't completely agree, good quality photo editing, even in this day and age, is not that mainstream. You need a decent amount of skill to edit a good quality picture in a way that won't look obviously fake. Pre-digital-photography it was only possible for skilled people with a significant amount of resources (like the Soviet government, no doubt). Besides it's one thing to edit a still image and a whole other to f…

Pre-digital it may have been destined for old-school newspaper pictures with the varying density dots - monochrome of course. That would mask a multitude of sins and shoddy brushwork.

The Daily Mail was at it from around WW1, perhaps earlier. Though their main WW1 fake was, of course, the cadaver factories. Surprisingly the Times bought that tale too.

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

#95

Post by glglwty »

thepete2 wrote: post #35
simias wrote: 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.

Why don't cameras sign the photos at sensor?

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

#96

Post by Clubber »

ceejayoz wrote: post #83
Clubber wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're mixing up Rather with the trusted source. Rather received documents from what was apparently a long-term, trusted source. CBS certainly screwed the pooch in that incident, but a long-term relationship with a well-placed source is inherently a form of vetting.

Sorry, I was meaning Dan Rather being the trusted source of news for the populace. He was the successor to Walter Cronkite after all.

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

#97

Post by LolWolf »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #81
LolWolf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UMAP is, sadly, extraordinarily slow, plus the inverse mapping is not clear.

There are GPU implementations...

Still doesn't fix the inverse mapping problem, which is done immediately by Autoencoders, by definition.

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

#98

Post by pixl97 »

glglwty wrote: post #95
thepete2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why don't cameras sign the photos at sensor?

And why dont I hack the key out of the encryption chip and make as many shops as I like?

And why doesn't the government keep track of the cameras and security keys so they can trace back any images they do not approve of?

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

#99

Post by afpx »

tux1968 wrote: post #82
simias wrote: 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…

> We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world. Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in general. This very well might lead to a better understanding of truth, and our personal responsibility in understanding it. At the very least, it's not a foregone conclusion that this will lead to worse outcomes than what we have today. It might be what tips us…

The next step in authenticity will probably be devices that cryptographically sign media with the device id, author, time and place.

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

#100

Post by ufmace »

ceejayoz wrote: post #13
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #8

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.

The delegitimization didn't come so much from the forged documents themselves. It came more from, after the whole scandal erupted and it became blatantly obvious that they were faked, not only CBS and Rather, but the entire Mainstream Media doubled down on them being real, and the narrative being real. They all still, to this day, insist that they were real. That's what couldn't be engineered or tricked.
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