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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

#101

Post by abathur »

tux1968 wrote: post #87
fernandopj wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not agree this _might_ leads us in a better direction. What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipul…

The problem is that we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us, we've mostly blindly accepted the story from the social truthmakers. We've had no reason to question them. This will lead to humanity doing a lot more questioning. I think this very well might lead to some very positive outcomes. The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers to…

I'm not really posting to refute. Just a few scattered thoughts, I guess.

Anywhere you have trust, there's a potential for abuse. A seemingly natural response to abuse of trust is to find a lapse in the victim's vigilance and start strapping on your own armor. I listened to a podcast this fall (sorry, I don't recall for certain--my best guess is that it was peter pomerantsev on Ezra Klein's podcast) where the guest suggests that some institutions/relations (like markets) depend on trust to produce value and may be undermined or degraded if enough participants take an individualist caveat emptor approach.

It is hard to know, in a complex adaptive system, what new equilibria will emerge downstream from a big disruption. We certainly could emerge through the other side with better epistemologies. But I don't see it as a given. Thinking is hard. Proving anything is harder. Skepticism can be good (and I suspect we need more--though I don't think it's terribly well distributed or applied at the moment...), but it's also easy; it requires no trust, knowledge, thinking, rigor, logic, or proof.

So, I'm troubled by the possibility we'll dig ourselves into a deep world-shrinking skepticism (a callous) of anything we didn't/can't personally experience. It can be well-founded on real abuses of trust. It may even be the sum of individual rational choices.

Neither would necessarily keep it from unmooring things we mistook for solid ground. And, when someone finally notices one drifting, there may not be enough trust left to agree on fundamentals like: is it adrift? is that a problem? was it ever tied down? is there anything we can do? should we wait for a bit to see if it drifts closer first? should we act?

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

#102

Post by cwkoss »

gnicholas wrote: post #65
xedeon wrote: post #9

That's a terrible Deepfake to be honest. This is a much better example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPhUhypV27w

Agreed. The eyes in this video look weirdly bloodshot and unnatural. Even before it started playing I thought it looked bizarre.

Might be because of the original, Zuck was widely criticized for his congressional testimony for his eyes looking weirdly bloodshot and generally looking very unnatural.

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

#103

Post by antielectronite »

panarky wrote: post #58
trianglem wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

It's interesting is how much better people have gotten at identifying doctored pictures overtime.

The 9/11 Tourist Guy picture that duped a lot of people 18 years ago looks like a ridiculous MS paint edit today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

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

#104

Post by goatinaboat »

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'm sure that a decade from now you'll be able to do a much more convincing fake in a fraction of the time. We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world.

Maybe I’m being paranoid but it seems that the public is being conditioned to believe deepfakes are so good prior to a certain cache of video recordings being made public

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

#105

Post by gdubs »

viggity wrote: post #14
darkcha0s wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're exactly right. Look at the work of someone who does a lot of these and it's pretty damn impressive. I like Ctrl+Alt+Face on YouTube. ex - Bill Hader/Tom Cruise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrhRBb-1Ig I think one thing that could have helped the reporter is if they had reencoded the original Zuckerberg footage into something with a lower bitrate. The fine details/imperfections on his forehead contrasted w…

Oh man; I’ve watched a bunch of Ctrl+Alt+Face videos, but I’d never seen that Tom Cruise one. Thanks — hilarious. Also, I love how they fade in Seth Rogan for, like, two seconds — especially considering the effort required to put together the training data, run the app, etc.

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

#106

Post by tux1968 »

abathur wrote: post #101
tux1968 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us, we've mostly blindly accepted the story from the social truthmakers. We've had no reason to question them. This will lead to humanity doing a lot more questioning. I think this very well might lead to some very positive outcomes. The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers to…

I'm not really posting to refute. Just a few scattered thoughts, I guess. Anywhere you have trust, there's a potential for abuse. A seemingly natural response to abuse of trust is to find a lapse in the victim's vigilance and start strapping on your own armor. I listened to a podcast this fall (sorry, I don't recall for certain--my best guess is that it was peter pomerantsev on Ezra Klein's podcast) where the guest s…

I agree with everything you said, and I don't have any special insight about how things are going to play out.

But i'm terrified of the current loud support toward censorship and authoritarian suppression of incorrect ideas. We have a lot of historical evidence of just how bloody that always turns out. So I choose to believe in the power of openness and competition of ideas.

As others have posted above, we will never have a time where it's possible or desirable for each of us to validate the truth of every claim, so that means we will have to find trustworthy arbiters of truth. I think that this should happen by people showing they are trustworthy and earning respect, rather than using authoritarian control to shut down those with differing ideas.

Much of the media today has lost such respect, and deservedly so. You can not fix this by suppression of free-speech, but only by creating honest organizations that aren't afraid to respectfully show the ideas of those who see things differently -- even if it's just refute them. Organizations that _trust_ the viewer to decide between fairly articulated positions.

The contempt for our fellow man when we say that bad ideas must never see the light of day or enjoy the same platform as government-approved ideas is a deeply paternalistic and ultimately anti democratic idea. It's elitism at its worst.

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

#107

Post by ceejayoz »

ufmace wrote: post #100
ceejayoz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> They all still, to this day, insist that they were real.

This is, itself, "fake news". I can't find any indication that other mainstream media outlets defend the documents "to this day". The reporting largely seems to be "certainly smells like bullshit, and we can point to specific issues with them that seem to support that".

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/those-discredited... cites a wide variety of news organizations looking into them and finding problems, stating "When the mainstream press checked the sources mentioned or ignored by '60 Minutes II,' the story came apart." and noting Newsweek specifically calling them "discredited".

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

#108

Post by cosmodisk »

creaghpatr wrote: post #67
Pandabob wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding (and experience) that Snapchat filters are even more impressive and that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has pretty much bet the company on AR [1]. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/22/20927521/snap-growth-ear...

The snapchat filters have been pretty mindblowing. I don't use them often but it's wild how far they've come in a few months.

Agree.One of my slightly younger colleges introduced me to Snapchat filters: that's damn impressive!

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

#109

Post by setr »

adrianN wrote: post #86
setr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images. And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None of that is new. Overwhelmed by content is/was/will be a problem that is solved very simply: people limit the distribution lanes they consume, and naturally establish "trust networks" and hierarchies. Nyt didn't become "trusted" by accident. People aren't as du…

In the past you had to pay a person to write that fake text. Wait a few more years and you'll see convincing text coming out of some algorithm at the cost of an EC2 instance.

That's fine and well, but again, I don't think the existence of it is new; if they generate 1 lie a day, or 1000, or a million, it doesn't change much. It gets resolved by the trust distribution network.

When that network breaks down, you only need a single good lie to do the damage.

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

#110

Post by cyorir »

darkcha0s wrote: post #7
thathndude wrote: post #3

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.

Yes. The cost alone could have been significantly reduced. As the article notes, using an owned GPU locally instead of renting one for a cloud instance would have reduced the cost. The author also overspent on virtual CPU resources - paying for unused RAM and CPU cores when most of the processing was done on GPUs. And once you have a good model trained, actually putting it to use in inference is much faster and cheaper.
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