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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

#271

Post by ryan-allen »

01100011 wrote: post #252
ryan-allen wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The older episodes are my favourite as well. Ding dong m'kay!

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

#272

Post by lolcatv »

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.

This funniest thing is this is 100% Trump and probably the best thing he's put out yet.

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

#273

Post by watwut »

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.

We as a culture are not able to verify content of deceptively cut videos.

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

#274

Post by lreeves »

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.

I mean presumably you could just have the subject or subjects of the video sign the content. A full unedited interview for example could be signed by the interviewer and interviewee.

Edit: This would of course be predicated on PKI being safe and easy for most people to use which decades has proven otherwise though.

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

#275

Post by nobody9999 »

strogonoff wrote: post #255
njharman wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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

This was treated (along with the ubiquity of CCTV in London) by the 2019 BBC show The Capture[0].

They glossed over a bunch of technical issues, but got the idea across pretty well.

Of course, they made the Americans look like the worse bad guys (no one comes out looking good, even the nominal "victim.") but that's to be expected, given the darkness the show attempts to purvey.

It's not great, but it absolutely provides context for the eventual advent of reasonable quality deep-fakes and the potential for abuse of the technology.

I'd expect that we'll see lots more of this sort of story telling, especially since any sort of video production (not including raw video footage) is never seen the way things actually are. As such, the "faking" (minus the deep-fakes with faces, etc.) is the key to the exercise.

Go watch the taping/filming of any television or movie and that will become immediately clear.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_(TV_series)

Edit: Added the missing link.

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

#276

Post by modeless »

nucleardog wrote: post #268
modeless wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess it's a matter of opinion, but it's obvious to me that the quality in that episode and in the state-of-the-art models is very, very far from the quality of that Michael Caine impersonation. If they had deepfaked Michael Caine's voice, nobody would have been fooled.

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

#278

Post by prox »

thenickdude wrote: post #250
prox wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 camer…

Ack...not so good then :/

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

#279

Post by breakfastduck »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #258
patcon wrote: 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.

Easy to get around this by shooting the deepfakes in high quality, then crushing the final footage into lower quality before sharing it.

Would make those kind of artifacts much harder to identify

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

#280

Post by greggh »

bobbyi_settv wrote: post #266
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.

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

Bill Hader was on the writing team, he worked in the office during the seasons. There is a documentary that shows what its like there, 6 Days To Air. The writers room is hilarious.
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