Earlier quoted context omitted.
Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be. It’s simpler and more insidious than that. I’ll use the old Eleanor Roosevelt quote: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Most people are not that intellectual and probably spent most of their life gossiping. They wouldn’t know how to even discuss certain topics if the low hanging fruit of…
> I’ll use the old Eleanor Roosevelt quote The quote seems appropriate for a person that doesn’t want to be talked about. I get what it’s going for but “only small minds talk about people” feels like it serves political elites very well. Don’t talk about me and my conduct. Talk about the generalised idea of conduct by people who are somewhat like me! I studied politics at university and learned enough about political…
Zelensky video deepfake
201–210 of 308 posts
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in rural America, where it is safe, and folks are polite and friendly and happy to leave you alone (if you're white), I have to say that doesn't mean people don't believe batsht crazy things. Because lots of them do. Or at least say they do, 'cause there is a big step between saying you believe something and actually acting like you do.
Believing batshit crazy things isn't unique to rural areas. In fact, I'd say it's more common in cities simply because there are more people there. I know a woman who lives in Chicago who doesn't believe in dinosaurs. It's not a religious thing, it's just that dinosaurs don't fit into her mindset somehow. I dated a woman in New York (native New Yorker) whose entire family believed that the moon landings were fake. I…
However, organized, coordinated crazy is a problem, even more so when it is sufficiently organized and coordinated to become an effective player in our political system.
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#203The quality on this is really awful. Lighting mismatch on the neck, no atmospheric effects, voice sounds robotic, very little movement and it’s unnatural. It’s not even a useful PoC. It’s more like a meme. I think if it actually got some traction in mainstream media - like Marina Ovsyannikova’s fake Twitter account which was quoted by journos, then you could call it a legitimate first.
I don’t know, honestly I felt the opposite way, maybe because I’m not Ukrainian and it’s not my native language. But I found the level of deep fake we can achieve nowadays truly scary. Even if it was a shoddy job, I feel like that’s enough to convince a lot of people, or at least stir confusion
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true for now, but eventually, as the technology progresses, it will take very little training data to create deepfakes of anyone unfortunately. Probably just a minute or two of video.
Is this true? I don't see much evidence that the technology is progressing in a direction where models will require less training data, if anything the trend seems to be towards models with higher and higher parameter counts.
Better models are coming out which are already pretrained on a significant amount of data, so the model already learned a lot about what is common to all example of video generation (keeping the edges aligned coherently at every frame, keeping texture and lighting coherent etc.) and will not need to re-learn that for every target.
Since initially, deepfake models were trained from scratch for every single target, you had to provide a lot of data from the person you want to target so that the model can learn what is common as well as what is specific.
Now you can get descent performance with much less data, since you only need to learn the specifities.
However, this only helps if you need a limited deepfake: The model cannot infer the exact facial expression of the target when they are, for example, laughing unless you provided an example of that in the training data (assuming there is no way to infer the laughing expression from someone by looking at other provided expressions). It will instead generate a generic laugh. All missing informations are substituted by what was seen, on average, in the pre-training phase.
That wouldn't work for a long complex deepfake meant to be sent to someone reasonably close with the target.
But for the types of deepfake where it's targeting a personality that we all know, but not very well at all, much less data is neeeded than before for a similar result.
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#205The idea could also be to first post something obviously fake, in order to make everyone think, that their deep fake video tech is not addvanced enough to create really good fakes. Later they post something, where they put in maximum effort to make it seem real, having people think back to the previous fake and think: "Oh but this looks real and they are not able to produce better deep fakes than that other video."
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#206In Swedish telephone directories there used to be a section entitled "Om kriget kommer" (If there's war). Prominent among it was the phrase: > Varje meddelande att motsåndet ska uppges är falskt. (Every message stating that resistance has ceased is false). No doubt something similar is stated in Ukraine. https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/siteassets/5-information-och-f...
Is this a usage of ska I haven't learned?
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#207It’s always a bit of a shock to remember that “photographs lie!” goes back to the very beginning of photography. See this (probably) staged war photograph from 1855 — in Crimea, of all ironic places: https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow...
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
How come in Romania (from where I'm from) it is illegal to have a street named after Antonescu (our Bandera counter-part from WW2) while in neighbouring Ukraine it is not? Why aren't they 100% for eliminating their Nazi past from, well, the present?
That law does indeed exist, but nonetheless you still have numerous streets in Romania named after Antonescu. They can be trivially found on Google Maps. For example, Strada Mareșal Ion Antonescu in Constanța [0] — and it was given that name in 2000! Of course, nobody should judge all Romanians, nor even the political leaders who were not directly involved in the naming decision, for that. Countries are not a homogen…
> Countries are not a homogenous unit.
I expect things that stand in your face (like a boulevard in a capital city, a bust sculpture of a genocide perpetrator in a downtown place in another capital city) to not be left to the local authorities. Even Bandera's wiki page mentions the EU and Israeli administrations not being at all happy with Ukraine naming things after Bandera back in ~2011, apparently that has all been forgotten now that Putin has attacked and everyone acts surprised how come Putin calls the Ukrainians as being nazis. And I didn't mention anything about the infamous "Freikorps" now battling the Russians close to Sumy, most definitely their name was not taken from a Heine poem or anything like that.
[1] https://foto.agerpres.ro/foto/detaliu/158701 (if you're Romanian you might recognise one of the characters in that photo)
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried living in any liberal part of the country? People there don’t just think they should dictate what you do , but also what you think!
I think that is generally true everywhere. People are against censorship, except when they're for it. They're for religious freedom, except for "those people". They're for free speech, except when you say things they don't like. I've not seen one group that values their own speech, their own beliefs, their own values, actions and communities, that doesn't undervalue the speech, beliefs, values and communities of othe…
Re: Zelensky video deepfake
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
The right wing political machine made Hillary Clinton out to be the devil. They, correctly, anticipated her run for president after Obama, and spent years making her out to be the worst person in America before she even began campaigning. The result is many conservative circles are still obsessed with her even though she is relatively unimportant.
That demonizing started way before the 2016 lead-up; until Obama came into the foreground she was also a clear front-runner for the 2008 election, so the machine was targeting her even then. I've noted this before, but being in the public eye for too long tends to be really bad news for presidential hopefuls in the US (Biden being the exception that proves the rule in that he eked out a win against a wildly unpopular…