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We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

vox.com

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Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#51
post #17

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?

No, but we're already watching two seperate movies unfold in realtime.

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/02/12/good-example-of-our-two-m...

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#52
post #17

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

If only we had some kind of decentralized consensus system that could help us formulate truth on a societal scale...

I sense you're being tongue-in-cheek, but how would something like blockchain help this situation? (I genuinely don't understand -- can you walk me through how that tech would validate a video's authenticity?)

Second, it would only help to validate that a video was taken (and possibly that it was not modified? But I suspect a great deal of video footage gets modified after capture, for light balancing and whatnot.)

Beyond that, however, the problem is larger: videos can be started after a person incites another. They can selectively film parts of an incident, so you miss details off-camera. They miss context, can push an agenda -- all of which are (IMO) the bigger problems than validating a video provenance. (Also, the latter would require skepticism of all non-blockchain'd videos -- something that would take a major cultural shift.)

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#53
Another potential use of blockchain technology. When an image is first captured, the time and a fingerprint generated from it will be recorded in a public blockchain that can't be tampered with. Then we can disregard images that don't have valid dates that match when the image was supposed to have been recorded.

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#54
post #39
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Vox article is also making a nuanced point -- that memory is constructed subconsciously. So the insidious thing? Creating 100 videos with only slight political position adjustments, and thereby (even if the videos are later revealed as fakes!) shifting a voter's "gut" impression of a candidate. I'd be amazed if we don't start seeing audio & video cryptographic authentication in the next 10 years. The subject of a…

This is probably already happening with good old fashioned Photoshop (or not even that sometimes). For instance, when a Telegraph journalist mistook a photoshopped photo of Trump with a white supremacist for the real deal and tweeted it with the comment that "this isn't complicated"[1], I doubt many people who saw the original tweet even saw the correction[2]. Over 28,000 retweets for the original claim, under a thou…

As if "Photo OPs" haven't been essentially exploiting this principle for 100+ yrs.

This is nothing more than legacy media bemoaning that media production (and propaganda production) has now moved mainstream and is out of their control.

In the end its a good thing, having a "trusted news sources" is not a normative expectation to any critical thinking based society. Everything should be viewed critically and viewed somewhat suspiciously. The entire concept of "trusted news" only has real appeal to the intellectually lazy. There is no objective truth in matters of politics, economics, society. Having some class of companies designated as "Trusted" has 1000x scarier potential than "view everything as a potential political statement".

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#55
post #17

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?

Not every fucking terrible thing is the Great Filter.

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#56
post #25
post #17

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

The Vox article is also making a nuanced point -- that memory is constructed subconsciously. So the insidious thing? Creating 100 videos with only slight political position adjustments, and thereby (even if the videos are later revealed as fakes!) shifting a voter's "gut" impression of a candidate. I'd be amazed if we don't start seeing audio & video cryptographic authentication in the next 10 years. The subject of a…

I've been thinking about this and I think a tricky part is editing, since naturally people are going to want to edit the video for normal reasons but I think that will mess with the signature?

I guess you could always have the unedited version posted and verified, but that has its own difficulties too.

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#57
post #54
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably already happening with good old fashioned Photoshop (or not even that sometimes). For instance, when a Telegraph journalist mistook a photoshopped photo of Trump with a white supremacist for the real deal and tweeted it with the comment that "this isn't complicated"[1], I doubt many people who saw the original tweet even saw the correction[2]. Over 28,000 retweets for the original claim, under a thou…

As if "Photo OPs" haven't been essentially exploiting this principle for 100+ yrs. This is nothing more than legacy media bemoaning that media production (and propaganda production) has now moved mainstream and is out of their control. In the end its a good thing, having a "trusted news sources" is not a normative expectation to any critical thinking based society. Everything should be viewed critically and viewed so…

[deleted]

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#58
post #17

I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility. Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?

"So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?"

It's a possibility I've considered before. To put some math meat on the idea, consider that as education increases, the number of thoughts you can conceivably think goes up exponentially, but your ability to discriminate probably goes up only polynomially, and possibly as badly as somewhere around linearly. So the smarter you get, the more bad and wrong idea come within your reach, and the less resources you have proportionally to disprove each one. And this is assuming a very idealized situation in which you are a perfectly rational observer attempting to dispassionately filter truth from untruth; any deviations from purely rational make it even worse. Note there's no reference to "humanity" in there; it's a problem everyone in this universe will have. (It's basically a restatement of the impossibility of Solomonoff induction.)

As an example of what I mean, consider the claim "the quadratic equation is x = (-b +/- Sqrt(b^2 - 4bc)) / 2a". My children are still too young to have any clue what that means. It requires substantial education to even begin to think this wrong thought, or any of the many related surrounding wrong thoughts; there's who knows how many ways I can mutate the right answer to be just slightly wrong, to say nothing of simply making something up. All of these wrong possibilities are available to you, once you are educated.

On the one hand, I use math here because it allows me to give you a clear example of an unambiguously wrong thought, on the other hand, it also betrays me for the very reason that it is unambiguously wrong. Math gives us tools to raise our confidence in the true quadratic equation even above the exponential noise of possible wrong answers. But the real world has much bigger problems than that where we lack such tools; how shall we structure our society to obtain a given goal? How shall we even determine what those goals are? How can we be sure that we are not actually putting ourselves on the path to inevitable destruction, even with possibly every participant trying to avoid that in all earnestness?

You probably just had some sort of thing leap into your head, perhaps about the environment or war or social inequality or something... how can you prove that you are not in fact 100% wrong? What if the only way we can still be alive in 10,000 years is precisely that we must unambiguously destroy our environment in order to be forced to learn to deal with it, because it's going to happen anyhow later (supervolcano, asteroid, etc.), so better to learn to deal with it in slow motion? What if space is empty because all the other species did learn to live in "harmony" with their environment, until it blew up and they couldn't deal with it? What if war is a necessary component of survival because without such evolutionary pressures, intelligent species inevitably just fade out of existence as intelligence is selected away, Idiocracy-style? What if the only way for anyone to survive the next 10,000 years is to create a rich upper class that at some point will be the only ones to survive some inflection point crisis? (What if the only way through the Singularity is for some rich person or set of people to be the one powerful enough to hold back the first rampaging AI, so all the egalitarian species keeled over dead because the AI trivially economically overpowered any given individual before extinguishing its own spark?) I'm not "seriously" proposing these ideas, but when it really gets down to it... you don't know. Neither do I.

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#59
My personal belief is that we should be generating vast amounts of deep fake videos and audio clips now that the technology is available. We should intentionally and hastily move to pollute the information streams around us as rapidly as possible in order to force an evolution in how we process information.

To attempt to slow down this arms race, or to ignore its implications just puts us at a further disadvantage to those that want to capitalize on the potential it brings them to arbitrage our "default accept" mindset against their fake agenda.

For example, China's Great Wall will not protect them from deepfakes and indeed it actually makes the delivery of deepfakes into China more effective.

The advantage afforded by weaponizing deepfakes only lasts as long as the audience defaults to trust without verification.

Re: We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

#60

We’re also underestimating the mind-warping potential of detecting fake video via carefully trained algorithms.

Why not both?

Generative Adversarial Networks http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative-adversarial-n...

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