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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does a journalist know about verifying video data?

And isn't a journalist going to bring their own side of the story to it? Hardly independent.

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

#262
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep fake is photoshop for video and audio. Alarmists are going to opine the many ways it will cause the sky to fall but life will continue.

Life will continue is a pretty low bar...

After the sky falls or how it has after the invention of photoshop? I'm referring to the latter.

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

#263
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.

Funny, I kind of got the opposite message. The Tom Cruise bits were poking fun at the fact that all of these deepfakes are every bit as obvious as the puppet. And they didn't even try deepfaking the voices because it doesn't work at all. Just listen to the latest state of the art voice mimicking samples. They're terrible! It says a lot that the only actually convincing fake in the entire video was a human impersonator's voice.

That said, this stuff will improve over time. But before you label it the end of the world you really have to think about how much has always been possible with impersonators and makeup/prosthetics.

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

#264
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.

At about 3:18 into the video you can see what appears to be Serafinowicz playing Sassy as the camera moves behind him. Makes sense that faking would be hard from strange oblique angles, so looks like they just skipped it.

https://youtu.be/9WfZuNceFDM?t=198

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

#265

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.

"Hey Google, make me a 90 minute movie about X where Y also happens but put in some plot twists"

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

#266

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.

Until very recently, I thought they wrote all the episodes without outside involvement, but then I recently came across this clip where Bill Hader talks about being part of a "South Park retreat" where they bring people to brainstorm episodes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdZnGz9CWpU

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

#267
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that is a bit of selection bias. Outside of what I've seen in papers Ctrl Click Face[0] has some of the best "in practice" deep fakes I've seen. The video in the main post is meant to be a joke. But these still aren't state of the art and really are just "some dude" that is doing this on their own. Not a production studio. What I think is different here is that we can think that: photoshop got so good that your average person can create convincingly fake content. At the end of the day deep fakes are part of photoshop (I mean they have neural filters now...). The question is more about ease of use. "Requires a team of highly trained special effects artists" vs "some dude in his basement and a shiny computer."

And a big part is that you have prior knowledge. I'll be honest, I didn't realize it was Trump at first. Nor did a friend that I sent the video to that didn't have the prior that all characters were fake. Took him a good minute. That's a meaningful difference.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3pV-_iyT4U

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

#268
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.

Funny, I kind of got the opposite message. The Tom Cruise bits were poking fun at the fact that all of these deepfakes are every bit as obvious as the puppet. And they didn't even try deepfaking the voices because it doesn't work at all. Just listen to the latest state of the art voice mimicking samples. They're terrible! It says a lot that the only actually convincing fake in the entire video was a human impersonato…

The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz did an episode on deepfake voices[1], which is my only real exposure to the audio side of this that I know about. Certainly wouldn't say it didn't work or was terrible.

[1]: https://www.20k.org/episodes/deepfakedallas

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

#269
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This works in a courtroom. Does it though? Suppose there is a theft at a company. The police go to the company's security team and get the surveillance footage. Presumably admissible. If it was an inside job, the surveillance footage could be a deepfake showing someone else committing the crime. Or maybe it's real surveillance footage. Without some way to distinguish the two, how do you know?

And a witness might lie. How will we manage?

Frequently by incarcerating innocent people.

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

#270
post #178
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also did Michael Cain in his show, it’s extremely spot on. https://youtu.be/HdBZ3Pg0-OM

Why does it best? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIQIpC5_wY

This is the first thing I thought about when I saw the Sassy Michael Cain. This is the only thing I remember from The Trip.
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