291–300 of 313 posts
I understand the worries behind deep fakes, but i'm going to be a bit facetious here, hasn't getting the most realistic, lifelike images always been the goal of computer graphics? Wouldn't deepfakes be the ultimate culmination of lifelike CGI. So lifelike it's indistinguishable from the real thing? Like for most of my life, this is the goal I keep hearing about. Now it's here, suddenly it's too real. I dunno just see…
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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 infinite…
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.
Create short deepfakes that can go viral and be so ridiculous that they're both entertaining and obviously fake. Obama advocating for a border wall. Al Gore lobbying for the oil industry. Steve Jobs advising against staring at a screen all day.
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except (in my experience as a photographer), most/a significant chunk of the general public not only don't understand photoshop, but will actively disbelieve you about the extent, purpose and outcome of manipulations. Also, it's one thing to say the world hasn't ended, but that's to potentially downplay at a minimum the idea that commercial and widespread use of photoshop hasn't had widespread effects on body and sel…
It helps that a lot of the photoshops going around the internet are either super-sloppy or depict things that are obviously ridiculous. I actually can't think of any time somebody tried to alter a photo in a way that would change the meaning in a believable way and distributed it in such a way that they were trying to convince people it was real. Have I missed something?
https://boingboing.net/2008/07/10/iran-you-suck-at-pho.html
(and of course, you certainly have missed the fakes that didn't get noticed!)
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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 infinite…
That's such a sad outlook. We'll see the next Scorsese and Miyazaki using these tools and techniques.
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 ?
To show that a video was created after a particular time, a person can include a hash from any public server in the video. The easiest way is to have somebody hold a phone in view of the camera, running an app that shows a QR code of a recent hash, updating in realtime. They could also read the hash digits. And the phone app could play the hash as audio tones.
Afterward, anyone who has the video can use software to extract the hash, query public servers for the hash's position in the immutable historical hash mesh, and get the associated timestamp. The existence of the hash in the video proves that the video was created (or edited) after the timestamp.
To show that a video was created before a particular time, use software to send the file's hash to a public server for inclusion in the mesh. A good recording app can publish repeated hashes of the file as it is recorded and gets longer. When the user stops recording, the app adds an "end of recording" mark to the file and publishes a final hash.
Afterward, anyone with good enough software can determine the time interval between the hash embedded in the video and the published hash. This is the interval when the video was produced. A malicious actor would have that much time to edit the video. With a good enough network, this could be 2 seconds, insufficient time for a human to make any editing decisions.
Hashes apply only to the original file. Anyone distributing a file with hashes must provide the original file that was used to create the hashes. Low-res resampled files can't be verified. Shortened or spliced files can't be verified. Only the alleged original file from the camera can be verified.
To fake a video, malicious software would need to insert a hash QR code into the video, process the video so it looks like it was recorded from a camera, and publish the hashes, all with a few seconds of delay. Fakers could also use a physical camera to re-record a video on a monitor. Either technique should be detectable. Fakery software will get better and may produce undetectable fakes. I hope that people will invent new physical anti-fake techniques to thwart fakery software.
I'm thinking of calling the system "Livestamp". It would work for any type of file or recording, not just videos.
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except (in my experience as a photographer), most/a significant chunk of the general public not only don't understand photoshop, but will actively disbelieve you about the extent, purpose and outcome of manipulations. Also, it's one thing to say the world hasn't ended, but that's to potentially downplay at a minimum the idea that commercial and widespread use of photoshop hasn't had widespread effects on body and sel…
It helps that a lot of the photoshops going around the internet are either super-sloppy or depict things that are obviously ridiculous. I actually can't think of any time somebody tried to alter a photo in a way that would change the meaning in a believable way and distributed it in such a way that they were trying to convince people it was real. Have I missed something?
Focusing first on 'changing the meaning in a believable way'. Believability is a subtlety bordering on a truism. If it's believable, we would often deem it to have "not sufficiently changed the meaning". If it "sufficiently changes the meaning", does that make it no longer believable?
Second, it's arguable that the whole point of being a good photographer/photo-editor is to make an altered image look "believable" or "impactful" without triggering the brains uncanny valley or rejection response. That's fundamentally why we photo-edit.
For a start, there's actually lots of explicit examples from history:
- Lincoln/Calhoun composite
- Stalin editing opponents during purges
- John Kerry + Jane Fonda in US election
- George bush holding book upside down reading to school child
-etc etc etc.
Those examples are just the obvious things that a general man on the street would accept as photoshopped, and the ones that I know are 'shopped. There's a whole bunch of photography techniques involving telephoto lenses into crowds doing the rounds worldwide to make people look more numerous and close together (to spark social distancing outrage), framing and cropping like of trump's inauguration to make it look more crowded than it really was, and arguably "Hunter biden finger-lake tattoo child-molesting" stuff currently doing the rounds on the internet's seedier sites, but I don't know how/whether they're photoshopped, and you get the photographer's dilemma of discussing the lay person's belief that effects done "in camera" are "real" but effects done "out of camera" are "'shopped": a distinction which is often effectively meaningless.
Then we have the general "mass photoshopping" phenomenon, where practically every commercial image one sees has been explicitly edited to create some effect and giving the idea that the subverted-reality is just 'normal' and not in anyway actively subversive: be it skin that doesn't look like actual skin; eyes, hair and teeth standards and colours that are practically biologically impossible; general biological-hair removal; slimming, shaving and exaggerating the respective female body parts; slimming and expanding male body parts.
And practically everyone's doing it: take Kamela harris' officially supplied photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Kamala_H...
You can zoom in on the eyebrow and hairline to see such poor use of the blur tool that they barely even bother hiding it any more.
Now, as per my previous point you can argue "oh yeah, sure all our pictures and images are messed with and touched up, but it's not harmful and that's not really changing the photo!".
To that I repeat my initial observation: no, it does indeed seem to have a harmful affect in terms of body-loathing, a drive to self-hatred and consumption, and general reality distortion. It can be picked up upon and observed via the way it expresses itself differently in different societies and different ethnicities by observing the peculiar culture-bound mental illnesses and aesthetic phenomenon that appears as each is exposed to different photo-editing ideals and cultural mores.
And then there's the second point that these deep-fakes will actually be the next level. If we see, and know, that there are problems with our photoshopped media while the common man has folk-beliefs about the objectivity of the photographic media, imagine what's possible once we see that disconnect begins to apply to video + sound as well. It's probably going to get worse. Much much worse.
And remember, with doubtful photos, we have the belief in the authority of sound + video recordings to fall back on. Once we remove the authority of sound + video, we no longer have any effective authority to determine the factual nature of the media we're viewing. The deepfakes aren't generally quite there yet, but in 5 - 10 years, they'll be better. And they only have to get to a baseline where a significant number of people are fooled by them, or at least create enough of a reasonable doubt to allow them to dismiss or accept positions they disagree/agree with, before it becomes a real problem.
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The current media environment demonstrates that inaccurate reporting in favor of the audience biases is actually rewarded. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523045-cable-news-october... Tucker Carlson spent the month of October pushing Russian disinfo on Hunter Biden, all for it to culminate in "losing" his documents, re-finding them and then suddenly, inexplicably backing down. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-…
Can you post your source on this story being Russian disinformation please.
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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.
