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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

#251

Post by tomtomtom777 »

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…

Maybe if we start the habit of signing one's own appearances, this at some day will make unsigned video considered unreliable.

But I guess this is wishful thinking given that we don't even generally sign written comments yet.

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

#252

Post by 01100011 »

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…

I saw the pandemic special and, I don't know, it just didn't seem funny to me. I still watch Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics every year when I decorate the tree, and I still love what they did up until around season 12. After that it gets hit-or-miss and after a few more seasons just didn't seem worth watching anymore. I'd chalk it up to getting older and not smoking pot anymore, but I still love their old stuff.

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

#253

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#254

Post by spurgu »

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.

Others have probably mentioned this, but my first thought is how this will bring deep fakes to people's attention, and make them realize that nothing they see on the internet is necessarily real.

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

#255

Post by strogonoff »

njharman wrote: post #197
b0rsuk wrote: post #177

I think the biggest casualty of deepfakes are going to be citizens. Record a video of police brutality or crime footage and it can all be shrugged off as a deep fake. TV stations and journalists can afford 'signed videos'.

Deep fakes typically are putting a face onto an actor (or other footage). Not faking an entire scene with multiple people, that's just called CGI/Animation. So you could easily take existing footage and change who it appears to be. But, 1) doing that to frame or unframe someone will be pretty niche 2) the original correct footage might still be findable 3) with access to the video files(which is going to be required…

Deepfaking doesn’t have to be used on its own. A dedicated entity can shoot entirely new original scenes (unique footage), deepfake actors’ faces to look like the people they’re targeting, edit it all together, and possibly add CG VFX as a final layer to make the resulting video look very real[0].

Of course, knowing all that is not really necessary for someone to shrug off truthful incriminating footage as “fake news”.

[0] One caveat is that deepfaking works better with higher quality footage. To produce a complicated scene with altered actor faces while maintaining realistic “phone video” look, it would make sense to film with good lighting and high-quality gear into log or raw format, and then imitate the look in post-production after deepfaking is applied.

Thus, one method of detecting such fakes could be by checking for traces of VFX, artificial noise, signature lens properties, signature behavior of phone video recording “magic” (such as noise reduction and stabilization), etc. Enough of producer’s dedication could make that tricky, but IMO it could be easier than applying automated deepfake detection straight up—it’d be buried early enough in post-production workflow, with a lot of noise introduced by subsequent “phone look” VFX.

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

#256

Post by talentedcoin »

echelon wrote: post #249
talentedcoin wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't have the same idea of the meaning behind the words "create" or "creativity".

TikTok is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about -- you just want to create another vector for even more soulless, time-wasting popularity contests.

What you're describing to me sounds like a technological way for adult children to play brand-promoting dress-up inside the already-worn-out shell of pop culture, a way to infinitely recombine the old without actually creating anything new or interesting.

Call it a narrow-minded take if you like. I'm sure you'll be laughing all the way to the bank, so who cares what I think? It'll be a hit on 4chan.

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

#257

Post by chillwaves »

chrisseaton wrote: post #132
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly we are well aware of how inaccurate and untrustworthy eye-witness accounts can be.

But at least there is a human being behind each statement. You can question, you can examine their motives, you can challenge. A video is just a video. An anonymous accuser. You can't ask a video any questions.

A video is data that exists with forensic context.

What we need are institutions that are trusted to verify this data, like journalism. Except it is being allowed to be perverted for profit or ideology.

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

#258

Post by paulryanrogers »

patcon wrote: post #214
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.

i dunno, seems pretty significant to me. used to be that we only had to be skeptical of blurry newspapers photos, then detailed photos, then videos without people as giveaway, now highly detailed videos and audio aren't trustable. You don't think it seems significant that it's getting to a point where only "seeing with your eyes" is believing? All our systems of spreading information beyond our senses start to fail w…

Blurring around the face edges and mismatched lighting still give them away. Time will tell if the machines can overcome a trained eye.

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

#259

Post by lillesvin »

fullshark wrote: post #221
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.

Looking at the video here, the two best by far are the Michael Caine and Julie Andrews deep fakes, and in both cases the voice is doing most of the heavy lifting. Deepfake audio is somewhat scarier to me in terms of political / legal chaos than video, much easier to possibly trick someone with a "secret" audio recording than video recording if we some day get to the point of near identical audio mimicry.

Audio deepfakes are getting better but they have a surprisingly long way to go still.

Here's an exploration of a deepfaked Jay-Z reading/rapping the Navy Seal copypasta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZzYoOdIXoQ

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

#260

Post by spurgu »

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.

Are you blind at how stupid people are verifying even the basic things?
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