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Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

arstechnica.com

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Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#111

Post by PavlovsCat »

simias wrote: post #4

A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…

I'd say a post-truth world wouldn't be a world at all so to speak, because if everybody lives in their own filter bubble, with no access to a common world, the public sphere, where humans can have experiences and communicate, ceases to exist.

> You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other.

-- Howard Rheingold, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s

> If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

-- Hannah Arendt, Interview with Roger Errera (1974) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-fr...

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#112

Post by PavlovsCat »

mrec wrote: post #41
jml7c5 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's so much that people will be fooled by fake video, as that people can no longer rely on video as evidence. Up until now, video has been the gold standard of "proof" that an event happened. Quotes, photos, and (to an extent) audio have been fakeable for a long time, and they are mistrusted accordingly. And while CGI has slowly made it harder to spot fake events , videos of speech remained mostly safe…

It'll certainly be weakened, but I don't think it'll necessarily have to be discarded altogether. The need now will be for processes and tools to guarantee the provenance of a video. The technology to fake paper ballots is trivial, but they still (mostly) work fine for elections, because we've developed strict rules for how they need to be handled in order to retain credibility.

> The need now will be for processes and tools to guarantee the provenance of a video.

Having a vague description of a need is not the same as having a workable solution, it doesn't even mean being on the way to it.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#113

Post by abathur »

tux1968 wrote: post #106
abathur wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really posting to refute. Just a few scattered thoughts, I guess. Anywhere you have trust, there's a potential for abuse. A seemingly natural response to abuse of trust is to find a lapse in the victim's vigilance and start strapping on your own armor. I listened to a podcast this fall (sorry, I don't recall for certain--my best guess is that it was peter pomerantsev on Ezra Klein's podcast) where the guest s…

I agree with everything you said, and I don't have any special insight about how things are going to play out. But i'm terrified of the current loud support toward censorship and authoritarian suppression of incorrect ideas. We have a lot of historical evidence of just how bloody that always turns out. So I choose to believe in the power of openness and competition of ideas. As others have posted above, we will never…

Aha. And so here we are, watching something we thought was steadfast float slowly out to sea. The ability to let people say shitty things without trying to shut them up is one more thing we need trust for.

(For example, we need to be able to trust that they have a sincere opinion and aren't paid shills for a corporate lobby on a PR mission to waste our time, emotional energy, column-inches, and attention.)

If you feel a growing sense of dread as it retreats, it's a good time to consider whether you know others who have expressed a similar sense of dread that other things in our world have come unmoored, and whether they could use some help keeping them tied down.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#115

Post by xedeon »

SmallDeadGuy wrote: post #21
xedeon wrote: post #9

That's a terrible Deepfake to be honest. This is a much better example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPhUhypV27w

More convincing for the face, sure, but last I checked Schwarzenegger had much, much more body mass than in that video. Does anyone know if the technology for faking body shape (and accessories too maybe) is anywhere near as good as for faces yet?

> More convincing for the face, sure

Uh.. That's what a DeepFake is? Look up the definition.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#116

Post by Jernik »

xedeon wrote: post #9

That's a terrible Deepfake to be honest. This is a much better example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPhUhypV27w

The article addresses this, the point is that someone new to the technology can make this one that's ok "The video isn't perfect. It doesn't quite capture the full details of Data's face, and if you look closely you can see some artifacts around the edges.

Still, what's remarkable is that a neophyte like me can create fairly convincing video so quickly and for so little money. And there's every reason to think deepfake technology will continue to get better, faster, and cheaper in the coming years."

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#117

Post by SmallDeadGuy »

xedeon wrote: post #115
SmallDeadGuy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More convincing for the face, sure, but last I checked Schwarzenegger had much, much more body mass than in that video. Does anyone know if the technology for faking body shape (and accessories too maybe) is anywhere near as good as for faces yet?

> More convincing for the face, sure Uh.. That's what a DeepFake is? Look up the definition.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake:

> Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake"[1]) are media that take a person in an existing image or video and replace them with someone else's likeness using artificial neural networks.

"Likeness" refers to appearance in general, not just the face.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#118

Post by AstralStorm »

abathur wrote: post #113
tux1968 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, and I don't have any special insight about how things are going to play out. But i'm terrified of the current loud support toward censorship and authoritarian suppression of incorrect ideas. We have a lot of historical evidence of just how bloody that always turns out. So I choose to believe in the power of openness and competition of ideas. As others have posted above, we will never…

Aha. And so here we are, watching something we thought was steadfast float slowly out to sea. The ability to let people say shitty things without trying to shut them up is one more thing we need trust for. (For example, we need to be able to trust that they have a sincere opinion and aren't paid shills for a corporate lobby on a PR mission to waste our time, emotional energy, column-inches, and attention.) If you fee…

Trust has a problem of root. You cannot exactly trust even your parents these days. They are more often wrong than not. Grandparents, even more so.

Even society is shown to be untrustworthy, and the social processes of science.

Thus some reactionaries want to replace trust with authority. Or markets, which is another name for social proof, but with much less transparency.

Ultimately the other parts of trust are verification and reputation, which are both not unassailable. (Sybil style attacks, bribery, institutional and social biases.)

But, our saving grace might be simpler: cooperation without trust is possible and might be as efficient if things get bad enough.

Re: Creating a deepfake took two weeks and cost $552

#119

Post by AstralStorm »

afpx wrote: post #99
tux1968 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world. Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in general. This very well might lead to a better understanding of truth, and our personal responsibility in understanding it. At the very least, it's not a foregone conclusion that this will lead to worse outcomes than what we have today. It might be what tips us…

The next step in authenticity will probably be devices that cryptographically sign media with the device id, author, time and place.

Do you mean as stenographic watermarks, so that these signatures are hard to remove yet do not degrade the perceptual information?

The thing is, people do not check information that matches their viewpoint for validity. Because being wrong feels bad.

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