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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

#241

Post by seg_lol »

rossjudson wrote: post #154
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 couldn't agree with you more. It probably is the best way to popularize what deep fakes can really do. I also agree on video provenance/signing. Perhaps signed video will be something devices do by default in the future. If there are multiple devices recording, we can probably find a way to cross-check. Actually, that probably also exists. ;)

Multicamera deep fakes are already a thing. I just saw some patches for injecting the same hardware codec fingerprints into the synthesized video so that one appears to come from a samsung and the other an iphone 11.

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

#242

Post by jonhohle »

mattnewton wrote: post #238
fredley wrote: post #7

I _think_ that the Michael Cain section is Peter Serafinowicz doing a Michael Cain impression (which has then been deepfaked), but it could be Lyre Bird or similar! The fact that I really can't make my mind up which it could be and the weird sense of doubt, to me, means that this has hit the mark perfectly. I've been thinking about this video a lot since I first saw it. It's genuinely very unsettling.

I thought the punchline was going to be a wavenet-style audio deepfake for that segment haha, I had no idea it was a person doing it haha. It explains why they repeatedly said it was impossible for a _human_ to do a perfect impersonation.

That's where my mind went as well. There are some audio artifacts right around the time he says that that almost hint at the audio being generated. I really enjoyed the ambiguity.

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

#243

Post by seg_lol »

echelon wrote: post #240
LinuxBender wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Just my two cents, but acting is not as simple as wearing someone's face. If deepfakes make me look like an A-list actor, that alone will not get me a lead role in a big bud…

Do you know how many skilled, under-appreciated actors there are in the world? The economics of production create limited head room at the top. You'd be shocked how many talented actors, directors, and writers there are that go undiscovered and under-utilized.

Screenwriters will be able to make entire movies using literally only their voice. I tell a story to a computer, it will "imagine" the entire thing.

And after that, the computer will make the stories and we will watch, at which point the Drake Equation takes over.

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

#244

Post by Schiphol »

ryan-allen wrote: post #237
01100011 wrote: post #201

This is the funniest thing Matt and Trey have done in years. I don't know if they still write the show, but it hasn't been funny to me in a couple years. This clip had me rolling. This feels inspired and I hope it creates more awareness in the general public.

Trey Parker is credited as the writer for the vast majority of episodes of South Park, especially since Season 4. Most of their episodes are topical these days, I recommend checking out the recent Pandemic Special. Matt, Trey and a guy named Robert Lopez wrote the theatre production Book of Mormon, which was well received and won Tony awards (Trey studied Musical Theatre in College, which explains why the South Park…

That Robert Lopez also wrote the awesome Avenue Q musical, and co-wrote the Frozen songs with his wife. He is also the youngest person to achieve an EGOT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_won_Ac...).

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

#245

Post by oehpr »

Accujack wrote: post #189
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 ?

You can sign the data, but it won't help. Basically, the ability to fake any video means that other data is needed to prove that the person/events in the video was in fact the person/events that that video is claimed to depict. Other proof, other measurements of the same events, etc. Deep fakes mean people will know they can't trust their eyes, they need to think critically. That's been true for a while, but now they…

As a side note regarding the money: My understanding is they had formed a studio to make a deep faked movie some time ~2019? I think? But covid rolled around and the studio dissolved. They took advantage of the contacts and assets they had initially made to produce this youtube video. They think it might be the most expensive youtube video ever made.

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

#246

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

readams wrote: post #194

People are going crazy over deepfakes but we've had Photoshop for a long time and the world hasn't ended. We find ways to verify the content of photos through other means, such as their provenance.

Verifiable content is definitely not the norm through history. I’d love to see an academic analysis of whether misinformation really went down by much (if at all) when photography became a thing. Or when camera phones and social media came along.

Yesterday there was a fake Trump tweet with a zillion upvotes on Reddit, and that’s just text. Text is trivial to fake, so maybe the chain of trust we see in text is what we’ll see with everything else moving forward. “An anonymous source within the White House provided this footage,” being countered with, “you can’t trust anonymous sources!” It will come down to who you trust, just like it always has.

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

#247

Post by echelon »

seg_lol wrote: post #243
echelon wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how many skilled, under-appreciated actors there are in the world? The economics of production create limited head room at the top. You'd be shocked how many talented actors, directors, and writers there are that go undiscovered and under-utilized.

Screenwriters will be able to make entire movies using literally only their voice. I tell a story to a computer, it will "imagine" the entire thing. And after that, the computer will make the stories and we will watch, at which point the Drake Equation takes over.

More or less bingo. It might be a few decades, but this is where we're headed. And I'd rank this as more certain and profitable than self-driving cars.

I don't think Disney will keep pace. This trend will cannibalize their IP and this level of tech competence isn't in their DNA.

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

#248

Post by DerDangDerDang »

filoleg wrote: post #228
DerDangDerDang wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure there’s any deepfakery on the Michael Caine audio. Peter Serafinowicz (the other collaborator and originator of ‘sassy Trump’) is well known for his Michael Caine impersonation.

>Not sure there’s any deepfakery on the Michael Caine audio Most likely not, and the parent comment seems to agree with you on that. I think they were just trying to point out, in general, that the arrival of commonplace audio deepfakes might be way more disruptive than video deepfakes, despite a lot of people (including myself) who used to counter-intuitively think that video deepfakes would be more disruptive.

Fair point, and I agree audio is potentially more disruptive - especially if it can get to good real-time performance.

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

#249

Post by echelon »

talentedcoin wrote: post #234
echelon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, but if the "new media renaissance" is SpongeBob singing WAP, count me out. I don't think it's exciting, I think it's lame. But you're right, there's always money to be made in making the Internet an even dumber place than it is already. Have fun!

That's such a narrow-minded, salt vinegar take.

How many leaps away are we from 10 year olds making their own Star Wars movies? Not many, I posit. And I think that many of them can and will do better than George Lucas.

This technology is going to give so many more people the ability to create. As we begin to automate the tedious jobs and industries, it's important we have something fulfilling and engaging for people to move to. The creative field is rewarding and leads to self-growth and entrepreneurism.

The future is going to be a Cambrian explosion of creativity and expression. Look at YouTube, TikTok, and Patreon. Imagine what more tooling will do for these folks. Brains are teeming with ideas and imagination, but they often don't have the resources to breathe life into things imagined - with this next round of tech, we're going to change that.

Conversely, the concentration of wealth and production value at the top (entities like SpongeBob and Cardi B) will erode once everyone has the ability to generate character designs, animation, music, lyrics. More money will pump into the system, and it'll spread more evenly.

This is the Internet / Smart Phone revolution all over again.

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

#250

Post by thenickdude »

prox wrote: post #207
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 believe Canon has special cameras that the police uses. It’s been a while but they use some encoding scheme I think.

Canon's image signing scheme was half-assed and was comprehensively broken, they didn't even store their signing keys on a secure element:

https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-lifestyle/...

>In Canon's second version of its ODD system, the HMAC code is 256 bits. The code is the same for all cameras of the same model. Knowing the HMAC code for one particular model allows the ODD to be forged for any camera within that model range, Sklyarov wrote

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