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South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

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Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#111

Post by DenisM »

stanrivers wrote: post #11

This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not. It’s going to get to the point where you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true. At the same time it will add additional fake situations to the conversation. Worst part is that e…

It’s been exactly like that with newspapers and eyewitness accounts for hundreds of years. We survived.

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#112

Post by keiferski »

scarmig wrote: post #107
keiferski wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The onus of responsibility is still on the person doing the violence. Contrary to the fearmongering, I'd say deepfakes will just make people not believe things they read on the Internet (again), especially as the technology becomes more widespread.

Where the ultimate onus of responsibility falls doesn't matter much when you've got a bunch of Rohingya hanging from trees because some politician retweeted a fake video.

If you follow it through, that line of argument makes no sense. If the video weren't fake, would that somehow make the murder of Rohingya acceptable? Of course not.

Ultimately you end up back at the beginning: holding people, and not pieces of information, accountable for their actions. That's an issue with civil society, not social media.

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#113

Post by echelon »

hospadar wrote: post #57

This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

I agree 100%. Deepfake hysteria is absurd.

I'm the author of https://vo.codes, and my goal has been to make deep fakes as accessible as possible so people become familiar with them.

You know what people use vo.codes for? Memes. That's it.

A number of journalists have decided the technology is entirely confusing and deceitful. While there are new risks posed by deep fakes, I believe the potential for good far outweighs the bad. Today I see it being used mostly for artistic purposes and for humor. The real threat is social media and the soapbox amplification and attention algorithm, not deep fakes.

Deep fakes enable creatives to make this kind of stuff (most of these are made with vocodes) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSgd4PoQofQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpqJF5LXX4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs

https://twitter.com/RodanSpeedwagon/status/13172304947156213...

https://twitter.com/twpl_logan/status/1306542488694460416

https://youtu.be/mS0v2zbjtTg

vtubers are using it to give themselves new voices, which is amazing:

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

As the technology improves, it will become disruptive and enable average people to join the ranks of Hollywood actors, directors, music producers, and vocalists. The future isn't A-list celebrities and grammy winners, it's people like you and me.

The people stoking the anti-deepfake fire are the media. They claim that this is the end of trust and authenticity, despite the fact that classical methods of trickery and deceit are already way more common. Where are their doomsday articles about catfishing, phishing, and social engineering? There aren't any, because it isn't exciting.

This technology doesn't really move the needle for deception if you can slow a video of Nancy Pelosi to half speed and claim that she's drunk.

Deepfakes are just the next wave of photoshop. People don't use photoshop to steal elections and win court cases. They use it to make memes. It's the same deal with deepfakes.

The technology is going to improve. And I'm sure the hysteria will increase in volume too.

Real time voice conversion and video generation is going to be cited as "scary", but it'll mostly be a hit with gamers and vtubers. It's not going to be a "Mission Impossible"-style espionage tool. It's going to be used in good humor and to good effect.

These tools are going to bring about a new media renaissance. They'll let the small players compete with the giants. That's not scary - it's exciting.

That's also what I'm working on for my startup: memes today, hollywood / old media disruption tomorrow.

I've already got insane growth (millions of requests a week, and our videos have hundreds of thousands of YouTube views). I'm wondering when to pull the trigger and start hiring people. (My users are already working with me to build more!)

I'm super excited by this field, and you should be too. The media is screaming fire, but I'm running at it with full speed. I see the magic and the amazing opportunity.

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#114

Post by phailhaus »

hospadar wrote: post #57

This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

> What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

There is a sizable group of people who do not know that The Colbert Report was satire. The problem with satire is that there will always be a group of people who think it's real, it's like a corollary to Poe's Law.

Source: Research: Conservatives believe Colbert isn't joking https://www.cnet.com/news/research-conservatives-believe-col...

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#115

Post by [deleted] »

0xffff2 wrote: post #93
hospadar wrote: post #57

This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

>years from now or never? I really don't think this is true. I hear stories about deepfakes on NPR pretty regularly. It would be very strange if a subject that has managed to gain some mainstream media traction was never internalized by a large percentage of the general public.

[deleted]

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#116

Post by chrisseaton »

hospadar wrote: post #57

This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

> I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?).

Maybe we'll have to go back to sworn witness statements. Worked for thousands of years.

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#117

Post by tines »

phailhaus wrote: post #114
hospadar wrote: post #57

This is SO GREAT! I often feel deep existential dread about deepfakes and the lag between when they are viable (now) and when everyone stops trusting video that doesn't have some kind of rock-solid signed/encrypted/testified provenance (years from now or never?). What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire?

> What better way to educate the public about deepfake technology than with over-the top satire? There is a sizable group of people who do not know that The Colbert Report was satire. The problem with satire is that there will always be a group of people who think it's real, it's like a corollary to Poe's Law. Source: Research: Conservatives believe Colbert isn't joking https://www.cnet.com/news/research-conservative…

Not a compelling problem imo. You could say the same thing about irony, sarcasm, etc. but nobody calls it a problem.

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#118

Post by filleokus »

ip26 wrote: post #89
sega_sai wrote: post #82

Is there some kind of private/public key signing technique for videos, when the camera creating a video signs it with some key providing a signature that can be verified for authenticity ? so you would be able to at least verify that the video was created at certain date on a certain camera ?

It's a good question, crytpo can be used for this sort of thing. It does preclude editing, unless you also establish a cryptographic trust chain where each successive editor also has a trusted key. Probably never going to work with cameraphone journalism, but if we're talking about newsroom & press conference footage you could make it happen.

Expect from editing, which, as you say should be able to be solved somehow (encrypt every frame?), I think the biggest problem is the equivalent of the "analog hole".

How do you know if a signed recording is from the actual event, or from a camera being pointed at a screen in a pitch black room recording the playback of some malicious video trying to show said event?

Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes

#119

Post by mistermann »

m_ke wrote: post #53
stanrivers wrote: post #11

This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not. It’s going to get to the point where you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true. At the same time it will add additional fake situations to the conversation. Worst part is that e…

I recommend watching Adam Curtis' documentary called Hypernormalisation to get a sense of how badly this can get abused by political operatives. Especially this clip: https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM

There are a lot of valid and important ideas in Adam Curtis (and many, many others) documentaries people could benefit from exposing themselves to (Century of Self is another one that I believe is a must watch for citizens of a democracy).

A weird thing about this thread, and others like it, is that there seems to be this broadly shared implicit premise within the thread context that the feared ill effects of new technologies like this have not already been prevalent in our societies and information ecosystems for decades. In a thread about bias, fake news, propaganda, etc, people seem to have no problem realizing and acknowledging that we already have a very serious problem (often only visible in one's personal outgroup, but that's better than nothing) - but when the specific topic of conversation is a new technology, the majority of the comments seem to be written as if we don't really have any significant issues currently. It seems as if there's some sort of a phenomenon whereby the logical methodology for evaluation of the situation changes according to the topic, as opposed to there being a consistent methodology that at all times has an explicit awareness of the ever-present bigger picture.

Here's [1] an 8 minute video on Presidential debates. This fairly well demonstrates how this aspect of our political system is largely pure theatre...and yet, intelligent people often speak (again, depending on the specific(!) topic of discussion) as if this charade is highly legitimate process, within a larger political (and journalistic) process that is also highly legitimate.

The way I view the ecosystem is that the vast majority of things are to a very large extent ~fake (in whole or in part). Cranking up the absurdity to 11 in classic South Park style, making a complete mockery of both the politicians as well as those who can't consistently(!) conceptualize the true nature of our system, seems like an excellent response to a situation that has been sorely in need of some good old fashioned satirical mocking for decades. Western society & politics lost the right to be taken seriously ages ago - admitting to ourselves that there's a problem seems to me like a prerequisite first step in fixing it.

[1] Winning the Presidency: Debating

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayz7zLn6uFU

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