Welp, Christmas came early. I couldn’t have hoped for a better satiric voice to exploit this particular tech.
South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
121–130 of 313 posts
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#122This 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.
Sadly we are well aware of how inaccurate and untrustworthy eye-witness accounts can be.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: Audio and video evidence isn't admissible because it's audio or video (and may be inadmissible nonetheless). It's admissible because someone testifies under oath that they have personal knowledge of its provenance. The burden is on the party introducing the evidence to show that it's reliable, and the question of whether or not it is indeed reliable is a factual one for…
This works in a courtroom. This won't work for a politician who retweets a faked video that then incites real violence. And that , at least for now, is where we truly need to be concerned.
We already have plenty of politicians who misquote or lie to sow division and therefore violence. What's new here?
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. You cannot underestimate the global political ramifications of this. If you think the amount of video manipulation was bad enough this c…
The other way round. Any shocking video trending on twitter will start with a -100 credibility as people will think "just another deepfake". You are assuming people will have never heard of these deepfakes. Sure there are still a few grannies today who have never heard of photoshop. But your average twitter user?
I think that's overoptimistic. A shocking video trending on Twitter that reinforces some population's existing beliefs and biases about the subject will find a ready audience of believers.
Every piece of controversial video content will have a group loudly screaming "TRUTH!" at the same time as another group screaming "FAKE!", and it will just amplify the social polarization we're already experiencing.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Deepfakes have the potential to exacerbate existing issues in civil society. If your husband has just been murdered because of a riot instigated by a deepfake, it's not a great comfort to know that it's not really the "fault" of the deepfake but instead the "fault" of a broken civil society.
Plus, deepfakes have the potential to create much more noxious videos than real life. Real life videos depict real life people, flaws and complexities all included; deepfakes will be constructed to depict representations of the target that're most likely to generate inchoate rage of the mob. It's rare that the former happens to be exactly the latter.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Trust. If the root signatory is CNN, you decide whether you trust CNN not to do that.
Not really any different from other encryption. Your bank could be defrauding you on the back end despite the verified https session. But you trust they aren't.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#127This 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?
Digital signatures do exist.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#128This 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.
I would say it didn't work for thousands of years. It just was the best we had.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
This works in a courtroom. This won't work for a politician who retweets a faked video that then incites real violence. And that , at least for now, is where we truly need to be concerned.
We already have plenty of politicians who misquote or lie to sow division and therefore violence. What's new here?
The argument would be that we have social antibodies to typical politician lies, but we've not developed the same antibodies to deepfakes. Since political deepfakes are inevitable IMO, the question is how can we accelerate the development of these needed social antibodies.
Re: South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The governments will get it right this time. They just need absolutely authority to ensure it goes smoothly for everyone.
The problem has always been accountability. If we can devise a system that includes accountability in the authority we could be on to something. Democracy has accountability by virtue of everyone having a vote. It’s a small power that everyone can use to hold their leaders to account. But it still allows people to hold arbitrary power over each other. If you can convince enough people, you can apply your morals and b…
I think it's all fucked until we can get humans out of the loop entirely. The sooner we can develop benevolent AI overlords the better.