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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

#161

Post by m_ke »

mistermann wrote: post #119
m_ke wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tec…

I'm much more concerned about the inverse, not people getting fooled by fake content, but believing that anything that doesn't align with their views is fake. We can end up in a post truth society where someone like Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro or Orban can claim that any footage that is not politically advantageous to them is fake and created by an evil opposition to hurt their cause.

ex:

  Trump access hollywood tape -> fake Soros conspiracy to save the pedophiles
We'll have a lot more people believing conspiracies like the moon landing being fake and end up with a lot of 9/11, JFK, holocaust, etc deniers.

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

#162

Post by Bluestein »

cm2187 wrote: post #106
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?

Agree, video has always been a deeply manipulative media. Between editing, angles of shooting, music. The simple fact that you have a voice over that tells you something and that somehow because you are watching the video (what you watch is real) the voice over is also the truth. It will introduce a healthy dose of skepticism to that media.

We might as well ask Kuleshov about this, father of the Kuleshov effect with his experiments between 1910 and 1920 ...

In the - now famous - film below, Kuleshov edited a shot of the expressionless face of an actor, which was alternated with various other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan).

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc

When the clip was shown to an audience, they believed that the expression on the protagonist's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the bowl of soup, a girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief, or desire, respectively.

Of course, the footage of actor Ivan Mosjoukine was actually the same shot each time.-

The audience even went on to rave about the actors "performance" ... "the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, [they] were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman".-

The point is that, given the audiovisual medium, a certain degree of manipulation, or "intent" on the part of those creating the work is always to be expected ...

... and, also, that audiences bring their own bagage when they view something.-

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

#163

Post by marwatk »

utexaspunk wrote: post #131
skocznymroczny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would make their living by licensing the likeness of actors. Because you might have a great rendered movie, but most people will want a great rendered movie with Tom Cruise and Samuel L Jackson, not with nonane actors.

Until you make a completely artificial persona that gets famous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)

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

#164

Post by djsumdog »

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 ?

I think this solves the wrong problem. Most of these deepfakes have obvious places where you can tell they are renders. I think it's more important to have tooling that can tell when a video has been altered.

I'm more concerned with the manipulation of grainy low-res video. Police body cameras are an incredibly tool for police departments to fight misinformation (well, only when people watch the whole thing). Is editing these types of videos as obvious has high resolution video, or is it more easy manipulable?

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

#165

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

prutschman wrote: post #151
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 ?

So I can cryptographically prove that at a particular date at a particular time with a particular camera that I authentically pointed my camera at a screen projecting faked content? I think this only works if you're signing something currently much harder to fake, like a full light-field or something, and even then it won't stay hard to fake forever.

You could have the camera record the lidar also and crypto sign that too. Assuming it is all done in camera and the lidar is high resolution enough it should be possible to completely tamper proof a video recording at least at the “talking head” level.

I think Apple could possibly start providing this for iPhone videos if they decided to as the hardware is all there already both the lidar sensor as well as the Secure Enclave etc

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

#166

Post by aiyodev »

yalogin wrote: post #4

Deepfakes have the potential to turn the word upside down and cause utter chaos in the world. I don’t know how we are going to deal with it as a society, I think we are not equipped for it. In fact I fully expected trump to use it for the October surprise, but I guess he didn’t go there for whatever reason.

I think you're right. It sounds like their plans fell through:

https://outline.com/FuBxnT

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

#167

Post by kube-system »

echelon wrote: post #113
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 outweig…

> People don't use photoshop to steal elections and win court cases.

People definitely attempt to do both of these things.

While we definitely can't (and certainly shouldn't) stop this tech from existing, there is still an important civic and academic need to address deep-fakes in conversations about media literacy. People should understand how to analyze the reputability of media regardless of the type. It doesn't matter if they're watching a video or reading a book.

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

#168

Post by mistermann »

m_ke wrote: post #161
mistermann wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tec…

I'm much more concerned about the inverse, not people getting fooled by fake content, but believing that anything that doesn't align with their views is fake. We can end up in a post truth society where someone like Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro or Orban can claim that any footage that is not politically advantageous to them is fake and created by an evil opposition to hurt their cause. ex: Trump access hollywood tape ->…

> I'm much more concerned about the inverse, not people getting fooled by fake content, but believing that anything that doesn't align with their views is fake. We can end up in a post truth society where someone like Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro or Orban can claim that any footage that is not politically advantageous to them is fake and created by an evil opposition to hurt their cause.

I believe the optimum approach is to be concerned with all risks, and weigh the magnitude of each in a state of careful self-monitoring of one's potential biases (and ideally, have your conclusions reviewed by others, preferably from a diversity of ideologies and perspectives in an attempt to minimize the well known affects of groupthink). Noteworthy to me is that a significant number of people (if not the majority, depending on which community you are in) are easily able to see the epistemic errors in their outgroups thinking, but has more difficulty in doing the same within their ingroup.

For example, in your comment it seems that you have noticed shortcomings when it comes to politicians of one general ideology, but I wonder if you are of the belief that this phenomenon does not occur across all ideologies?

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

#169

Post by evan_ »

optymizer wrote: post #27
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 think it'll be similar to the situation with pictures. We've had the ability to 'photoshop' people's faces in and out of images for a long time now. I think the first question asked of a video is going to be "is this a deep fake?" just like we currently ask "is this picture photoshopped?". It doesn't mean that we no longer use pictures, or that we don't alter pictures, just that we are more critical of them. That s…

In just the last couple hours someone has tweeted a picture of Biden from June 2019 not wearing a facemask, and claiming it's from more recently and he's being irresponsible by not wearing a facemask. It has tens of thousands of retweets, no deep fake necessary.

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

#170

Post by 0xffff2 »

cacois wrote: post #148
0xffff2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

NPR listeners != large percentage of the general public. Also, people believe what they see, on an instinctual level. Hell, people believe what they hear, mostly. It will take a lot of education and time to untrain that.

I try to avoid consuming too much news, so I don't have much exposure to other news sources (and I only probably get an hour or two of NPR programming per week). Given the level of coverage I've heard on NPR, I would be pretty shocked if the subject hasn't received some coverage by most major media outlets.
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