Fake Barack Obama delivers a PSA about “deep fakes” using a deep fake video

The problem lies in the motive. News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit. Breaking even is not enough. Doing well is not enough. Improving profit drastically quarter over quarter is the goal.

To do that, you cannot simply "provide news" anymore. You need conflict. You need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to increase it.

It's no longer a partisan issue. I'm 40 years old. I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It's almost surreal. They were still biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It's weird to watch now.

A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has caught up. Because they had to.

It's a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can't trust any of them anymore. Not 100%.

The voice sounds wrong, is the voice AI? I'm sure I've seen better AI voice demos than this --- though the video is impressive.

I'm a little disappointed that it took this long for people to get over the 'OMG celebrity porno' thing about deepfakes to actually start dealing with the real potential consequences. Deepfakes open up an amazingly large list of questions, from the mundane to the truly challenging. That someone will see imagery that fulfills a sexual fantasy is, by far, one of the most trite and harmless possible uses of this technology.

Realtime video synthesis has been around for awhile. I recall reading in 1999 that if you watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, the advertisements on the buildings you see won't be the advertisements that are actually present in real life. They were being replaced on the fly with different ads. Now, it's basically possible to replace people. Everywhere that people appear. And this isn't something we can deal with simply by going off of gut reaction and intuition, it really raises significant questions.

Who will be the first politician to use a younger version of themselves to promote themselves? Which celebrity will be first to replace not the face, but their body, in film to make themselves more attractive? Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? Or maybe they'll only bring in the actual celebrity for close shots?

This can be done on commodity hardware, and will only get easier. It will be used for schoolyard bullying, for amazingly uplifting and important artistic works, for debasement and aggrandizement. It's one of these things that we've got to do some thinking about as a society.

that doesn’t sound like Obama.. ppl would definitely comment wondering why he sounds different.

The magnitude of incorrectness/malicousness in reporting is irrelevant to this: No single source will leave you with a broadly-informed understanding, even if by simple way of time/space constraints in their output.

Even the simplest of biases affects editorial decisions as to which content to prefer over others. Omissions of viewpoints or of counterpoint example stories means you don't get the big picture, even without some massive media scandal. People scream distrust at media channels for leaving out information they view as critical, and go elsewhere to find those details (for better or worse).