Family fun with deepfakes
svencharleer.com
svencharleer.com
If we treat the normal rate of progression, we'll see a year 2023 version for 5 bucks off the App Store, your phone will live-convert the video you're recording at your drinking party with your friends into an all celebrity event. Probably with voice swap. Your drunken roommate's scratchy voice will be ML'd into Frank Sinatra, autotuned, face swapped, and uploaded for a few laughs to facebook.
It's here to stay whether you like it or not.
Got a picture of that co-worker you like? Congrats, now you have him/her in some porn. Interesting times for sure and I think we'll see a lot of flak and fallout in people's personal lives from their creations, far more than we see from "typical" porn use now.
Or, we end up creating a new digital addiction that partitions a class of society into preferentially existing digitally. Maybe this can just be a precursor to a VR caste that we never see in reality.
A minor detail, but the reasons these early products are compelling is that they are based of a large corpus of HD images taken from different perspective and angles and include various expressions and even stills while the subject is talking or laughing or expressing different emotions that a single picture of your co-worker won't.
iPhones and Google Pixel devices now include a special core for ML, and Snapchat already planned to move some of its filters onto it.
If Snapchat adds a deepfakes filter, it'd only take a few weeks before this is mainstream.
The truth is this technology is dangerous in the wrong hands. I don't know if that means there needs to be laws created regarding it, but I know that the difficulty in stopping it shouldn't be used as an excuse to not even debate that possibility.
I believe more than 5% are familar with the concept photorealistic computer graphics. Machine learning based face transfer is just a newer iteration that significatnly reduced cost.
Same goes for synthetic voice.
Banning this technology would be more like banning cameras, since they can also be used to create child porn. However, it would be even LESS effective than banning cameras, because we are talking about a software algorithm.
Also, you say this technology is 'dangerous in the wrong hands.' Why is that the case?
I think the only reason is because it has the possibility of decieving people into thinking it is real. The real way to reduce this risk is to either spread the idea that all video is suspect, and you can't assume who you see on video is who it appears to be, or to perfect technology that can instantly detect when this system has been used.
If you are able to easily distinguish between true and false video, isn't the entire danger mitigated?
We also ban computer generated child porn even though there is no victim involved in the production of that. If you use this deepfake technology and stick an 18 year old's face on a porn video it is legal but if you do the same thing with a 17 year old it isn't. The production of those two videos is the same. The only difference is the potential victim if the video became public.
>The real way to reduce this risk is to either spread the idea that all video is suspect, and you can't assume who you see on video is who it appears to be, or to perfect technology that can instantly detect when this system has been used.
That sounds great in theory, but people don't work like that. We are built to believe what we see. We all know that almost every magazine cover has been mercilessly Photoshopped and yet the images on those covers have still been shown to have a strong influence on people's own body image.
For reference, artificially created child porn (e.g. in mangas, or in other ways created) is in a legal grey zone in many areas, including Japan and Germany. It is absolutely illegal in other, e.g. Sweden.
No. The grayness only applies to non-photorealistic works.
Once you start making photorealistic deepfakes or diptychs, where the end result appears to be photographic, the color becomes much more black and white the world over.
But yes, it's a much more complex legal case.
Many places don't do that.
The swap is a "reconstruction" of the face at multiple different angles, taking on the characteristics of the original facial movements, tilt of the head, etc. In a video - way beyond what would be easily possible using PS or other "manual technology".
But today - it's just a face. However, nothing says that an entire person's body couldn't be swapped in the future. Nor that the system couldn't "dream" new scenarios for the background, etc.
Or that it could be done real-time, with full-on voicing in the other person's voice, etc - looking, doing, and saying things they never said - perhaps even in a place they've never been.
In the future, you could easily take someone else's entire person, and have them do jumping jacks in your living room while singing Jingle Bells - and it would likely look like an original video.
The only reason it's not being done now is the amount of processing power that would be needed to do it; gobs more than what most people can afford (along with the time and power needs - just note that for some of those facial swaps it takes hours of processing on a decent system for just a few seconds of video).
I'm not saying this tech is evil or should be banned, however; I think the tech is very neat and can open up some exciting possibilities for future products and uses. To that end, it's exactly like Adobe Photoshop, which is why it should be explored and played with, rather than banned.
Haven't got around to trying it yet, but I was thinking of editing myself into a bunch of movie trailers, and probably starwars.
I know we can create vaguely convincing synthesised voices, but I've not run across a program which can take my recorded voice, and convert it to a celebrity, or even shift apparent pitch or gender convincingly.
BTW, we can create extremely convincing synthesized voices: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind...
I think I've just gotten so used to that voice as the "google" voice that I automatically associate it with computers. It would be strange to meet the human that was providing the human voice in those samples.
I did have a fever at the time, which might not have helped.
Now imagine that with Tacotron quality, and you'll get that "strange" effect with anyone, meeting their vocal clone.
This is still text-to-speech, so it's not live-copying your intonation, but you could easily imagine a seq2seq network designed to do so.
Hence, if I could find a program which could reliably turn one actor's voice into another, I could use their acting ability, but with more characters and less requirement for them to "put on" voices. That's powerful because really good actors are thin on the ground, and also because trying to hold a different voice or accent can limit the quality of the main performance.
That's relatively mild compared to the really jarring possibility of your AR device doing it.
I think we're way past arguing about that.
It will be interesting to see all the consequences of mass produced special effects popping up everywhere.
It was shockingly easy to do. We're technical, but neither of us know a lick about machine learning. It took a couple hours to collect training data (we turned speeches/interviews from each of them into thousands of photos), and 20 hours to train the model.
In the future you could automate the data collection for a person even more, to the point where they just need to film a selfie of themselves for a couple of minutes in a couple of different lightnings, and boom, after you train their decoder, you could put them on any celebrity.
EDIT: This is what we used https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap Would be happy to walk anyone through how to do this
As you might expect, California leads the way in this area in the U.S., given their interest in protecting Hollywood / celebrities.
Without any precedents YMMV.
Law works similar with copies of physical objects. For example, you are free to make a 100% copy of an iPhone, the Mona Lisa or a pop song and enjoy them at home, but you can’t display them in public or sell copies, or even give them away (did I say I’m not a lawyer?)
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/back-future-ii-a-l...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-6IRuCaDw0
Nice work, it's a pretty amusing and somewhat worrying video of what's to come.
A thought experiment : I run a chat room site and will be adding support for user created chat rooms (something like discord for cryptocurrency communities with real time price widgets etc). Let's say I went ahead and got them to use my chat room, what would the consequences be? And what do you think about the moral and ethical questions behind hosting such a community? Am I now enabling the creation of deepfakes? By choosing to avoid hosting such a controversial community, am I imposing my moral and ethical reasoning on others (the free speech argument)? How do think about the deepfakes project, which is mostly being used for creating celebrity porn, but the tech itself is interesting and has applications(targeted ads or in stunt doubles etc)?
To be clear, I'm not trying to host a chat room for them, this is just a thought experiment. I don't like what it's being used for and don't want to support it in any way.
But the issue here isn't whether training on copyrighted face images is legal. You can totally take copyright-free photos of anybody as long as they appear in public.
The more interesting question I think is whether you own the copyright to the 3D capture of your face. For example disney won't let you get away with using models of their characters. Don't I have the right to not let anyone use the "model" that I spent my literal life growing?
The restrictions for using your likeness or publicizing deepfake videos with your face on them come from other laws, not copyright. For example, "disney won't let you get away with using models of their characters", but (depending on how you use them) it's just as likely to use trademark restrictions even in situations where copyright law would let them use them. In a similar manner, the fact that you can take copyright-free photos of anybody as long as they appear in public doesn't necessarily mean (for example) that you're allowed to publish those photos like you can your own; or that this has any impact whatsoever on your rights to use copyrighted face images - you could have taken the photo, but you did not, so standard restrictions apply.
"If some law prohibits others to do that it does not really equal to "the copyright to the 3D capture of your face" even if some restrictions are similar, it's an apples vs oranges thing, it shouldn't be called that - terminology matters, because it implies different rules.
For this discussion, the main question is about restrictions for publicizing fake videos of other people without their consent. There are some restrictions, they're not copyright-based and also are quite different for every jurisdiction, as they aren't harmonized with global treaties like copyright is. Also, these restrictions are different for public people (e.g. the examples with Trump or famous actresses), and the restrictions for distributing videos with your face would be different.
The idea that you can have morals and ethics without sometimes acting on them is also sort of incoherent. If you claim to believe it is immoral to do something and then do business in spite of that, it directly puts the lie to your claim. This is separate from whether you believe that there should be legal consequences or other government action attached to certain acts.
This depends on your ethical system and your reasons for believing it immoral. For example, if the circumstances change enough to move something from immoral to merely neutral, some ethical systems will then allow you to do it. A utilitarian example: you might generally find something immoral (because it causes harm) but in the presence of somebody who gets great pleasure from it, you find it allowable (actually, it becomes a moral duty to the utilitarian, but you get the gist).
This seems a bit extreme to me. In my view, the line is crossed when it’s used for fraud, i.e. misrepresenting the truth (for whatever purpose).
Face-swapping Daniel Craig’s face onto my body, and showing it to my friends, is neither immoral nor unethical — it’s actually kind of funny.
It can be fine in a news context, but there's not a lot of faked videos that would be appropriate in that context.
I even thought the faked Fred Astaire ad was in poor taste.
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/kellimarshall/clips/A...
Not necessarily, doing business with someone means purchasing their services or products, it doesn't mean I agree with everything they do (with that money). Business is not charity.
Otherwise I probably wouldn't be able to buy half my black metal collection :)
I think publishing the impersonation is unethical since it allows people to believe it's the actual person, so it's fraudulent from that perspective.
It’s your home, you can decide who you want to host.
Second, it's not actually a Discord server no matter how much they market it that way. Just like it's not a Facebook server. They just try to muddy the waters vs. real voice chat servers you can run yourself like mumble or teamspeak.
People should move away from centralized services where you are the product like Discord and use real voice chat servers. Now there's no ethical issue at all. Cut the gordian knot.
lol why because they banned people for creating fake revenge porn?
It’s illegal if you commit fraud with that forgery by signing a check.
I can't make my mind up if this will make the current fake news / filter bubble situation worse, or if it will make it so bad that people learn to distrust any kind of digital media entirely.
I'm still not sure, given that the use of these tools for political gain seems inevitable at this point how we will actually verify a video is real in the near future.
http://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-jesse-watters-bizarre-...
It's really two problems. One, making people say things they didn't say. And two, allowing people to deny things they really did say.
You mean the last election right? A lot of people believed it was faked.
There are already fake news sites out there that are "so bad" you'd think nobody would believe them, and yet...
Still, it's important we inform people this is possible, so that at least the more reasonable among them can view future videos through a skeptical lens. I'm sure by now many HN readers are not surprised by this technology, but many outside of HN would be blown away.
However, distrusting digital media isn't the solution either - there are plenty of trash magazines publishing conspiracy theories and other absurdities. Plus, digital media has revealed huge segments of America are becoming culturally isolated and undemocratic. A return to print media might shift funds back to deep professional investigative journalism that covers those issues... or just give owners better returns.
It takes a lot more to make it undetectable as fake though, and I guess the same applies to deepfakes. Once people get used to the fact such face swaps can be done, they'll be more sceptical and demand realness verification in case of published sensitive material.
You really think those same people will actually question if a video was real in the first place, particularly if it reinforces their world-view?
It's worrying to think of how this technology could be used in parts of the world where there is much less widespread understanding of this level of digital manipulation.
Even when scandals do break, it’s not a picture or video that’s proof, it’s a picture or video that produces witnesses.
or there was that time a german variety show 'false flagged' the germans by doctoring a video of yanis varoufakis to have him 'stick the middle finger to germany' during a talk he gave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-1LQu6mAE). There were witnesses; but they didn't stop the confusion and outrage that ensued due to the effects of viral media. Would this pass a sophisticated technical analysis of the video? No - is there time and public understanding for the results of said sophisticated technical analysis to prevent the damage before it is done? no.
The notion that witnesses or forensic analysis can combat the speed of information, especially across borders, is a bit quaint.
I edited the post you replied to with "in a video." in the first sentence to clearify
(And the GAN is the neural network model which does these transformations)
—Jonathan Swift
In your example they modified a very clean source video, image is perfectly stable, very little motion and they edited a very small portion of it for a very short duration. TFA is about replacing one person by an other while they're talking and moving on a potentially lengthy video clip. Doing this convincingly by hand would be hard work.
I think a good example of the difficulty is with the infamous "moustache removal" for reshoots of Superman in the Justice League. It cost a fortune and the results were not exactly seamless. Also the re-created Princess Leia in that Star Wars movie, not bad but definitely still in the uncanny valley.
Captain disillusion on youtube has a great channel covering all of this. Here's an example of a fake lightning video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPRtCW5sRk
Deepfakes has made it so the average user, with no knowledge of Aftereffects / composition, to basically run a python script so long as they have high res images + several angles / expressions of the target user. That same folder set of images can be replicated in multiple scenes with just the cost being GPU rendering time
Deepfake videos can also have a much higher resolution than "viral videos" with aftereffects to fake effects.
Deepfaking also leads to a lot of legality issues as well.
TL;DR deepfakes does make faking videos much cheaper, higher resolution, and easier now
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/mar/17/yanis-va...
https://youtu.be/Vx-1LQu6mAE?t=127
Youtube Video with subtitles with Böhmermann.
https://www.sapeople.com/2015/06/19/fake-images-claim-photos...
Someone finds very crude photoshop work that undermines the 'official' version of a news story.
https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
And perhaps it should... if average people have the technology now, how long has it been in the hands of police departments, newspapers, militaries, and intelligence agencies?
We tend to focus on fakes with high-profile people like politicians and celebrities, but it can clearly be done with everyday people as well. The author was able to produce a fake video segment of a well-lit, animated conversation involving his wife. She's directly in front of the camera, speaking and making hand motions for several seconds. How much easier would it be to insert a face into grainy security camera footage, or a shaky clip of a large crowd at a political rally?
With a few sources you can build an accurate single model of an event. You then edit that event as you see fit and then generate as many "independent" sources from different viewing locations as you want. Then upload them to different social media sites at different times.
And the real verification would come from ultra-high-res captures from drone cams, self-driving car cams, traffic cams, etc that are constantly running and recording everything, so that you can't realistically fake soemthing without simultaneously compromising uber, amazon, walmart, etc.
This only works in large events. What if you film a politician lying at a small event, but his image team makes 20 fake videos showing the event in a different light? I guess you're the liar then.
Secondly, your analogy is wrong. The new hypothetical you present is equivalent to the old model where you are all giving verbal accounts and his staffers lied. If you are going to compare to an old-tech scenario where you one-up them with a more detailed recording than they have, you need to do the same with new technology to keep the comparison accurate.
Thirdly, why aren't you the liar?
Fourthly, you can always go one level up. Show the footage of them constructing doctored footage.
Most of those people are average. Intelligence agencies can be assumed to have more advanced technologies in a number of areas but the gap between what they have and what's out in the more public world has narrowed.
We've already had image tampering technologies for a long time but there's not been a significant problem with fakes in the press or as evidence.
It is an important issue anyway and figuring out ways to being able to differentiate the genuine from the fake, with cryptographic signing in cameras for example, are worthwhile.
To be honest with you, when I was younger I bought into this.
Nowadays....it kinda seems like with the open source community, consumers are getting stuff first. Not always, of course, but often enough.
And police departments are one category that I can be quite certain are lagging behind, they are definitely not getting stuff before consumers have it.
Frankly, the suggestion that government agencies -- let alone local police departments -- have sophistication in AI/ML years ahead of publicly known work from academia, industry, or even side projects on reddit, will verge on comical to anyone who's actually worked with these folks.
Only a few cops will have the ability to edit videos, the problem is almost all cops in his department will lie for that officer on the stand.
It's all about which sources you trust. In fact, it has always been that way.
Deepfakes just makes it more obvious. Which is maybe a good thing.
Already nowadays the whole thing about fake news and alternative facts has segments of the population flat out not believing the truth. This may very well be greatly exacerbated in the future where, regardless of the amount of evidence you bring, people will just disregard it as fake.
Verifying the legitimacy and accuracy of 'news' claims and representations has always been very difficult for the lay person. We are now well into an era when 'the truth' is even harder to find.
'Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see' (Edgar Allen Poe) has now become 'believe nothing of what you see' too, at least until you have verified to your level of satisfaction...
Apple signing key -> your phone's key -> signature over hash of the media (edit: for video, embed signatures every so often to you can verify a shorter clip out of the whole). Embed Apple's signature and your pubkey in the metadata of the image, and TwitYouFace will verify on upload that it's authentic.
Of course, you can't fix stupid unless you talk about a complete overhaul of public education... And even then, people are people.
Philosophically though, I think it's a good thing that many are learning not to trust information from self-proclaimed authorities :-)
If there are no known exploits, a signed video, marked as having a network based timestamp, is at a minimum incrementally more reliable than a video without such metadata.
If you make your fake video after the event, the location and time will be obviously off.
It would be basically the macOS Developer ID software model applied to photos.
It boils down to trust, not whether the original video was real or not.
To put it another way, reputable news organizations already go to great lengths to ensure that their stories are well sourced. At the end of the day, they are putting their reputation on the line.
In other words, 2 main stereoscopic sensors, each recording their cryptostream to their storage. In addition to that, you have 2 UV sensors doing the same thing, and 2 IR sensors as well?
The idea being that it's much, much harder to fake something if you have to take IR and UV into account.
Isn't this also where something like a blockchain is useful? Where data is dumped into it realtime by this mythical secure camera, with all its associated metadata.
Then you can ask: "does the time the data was added agree with the time the camera says the data was recorded?" "Does the blockchain agree that the data hasn't been modified after it arrived?"
Add to that the possibility that there are multiple cameras all recording this incredibly detailed video from different angles, and the evil counterfeiters will (hopefully) have a dickens of a time faking all this.
Although with all this wonderful processing, networking and storage power to enable this secure camera, you can probably create a faking system too.
The otherwise is already covered by DSLRs. Canon has it, and I'm sure Nikon does. Law enforcement has been using this stuff for years.
http://www.canon.co.jp/imaging/osk/osk-e3/index.html
Apparently it was broken in 2010 (found while googling for this).
Of course, depending on how that's implemented it could just be another vulnerability in easy-to-use proofing.
But if there was some way to add an abstraction on top of the raw keys, keeping them still accessible if the user is keen, then that might be a step in the right direction.
Facebook / Twitter / etc verify the crypto signatures on media ingress. Then they can give proper attribution and show a checkmark or something that attests the media hasn't been altered.
So in your feed, there will be some media with checkmarks and some without and you can choose which to believe more.
Alternatively, a competitor could come along and reject all media that doesn't pass cryptographic verification.
What might be worth trying would be some sort of verified badge if this became common enough that players could meaningfully highlight its absence, similar to the way browsers are now showing non-HTTPS sites as insecure. If Facebook badged the video with a big “this iPhone video doesn’t have the usual signature” message that might slow people down.
For the deepfake porn or fake news problem I also wonder whether there’s a useful fuzzy ID service where a player could display a “this is substantially similar to <source video> and may be a copy” warning which wouldn’t be so inaccurate that nobody would heed it. That could be really important if we started seeing political fakes where someone is shown accurately but their words are faked.
On a bright side, young aspiring actors can make porn movies to get some cash early in their career without necessarily having to fear it will ruin their career many years later - those movies will exist anyway.
I think one answer can be found in device-level signing of images and A/V feeds. A recorder can integrate its cryptographic signing and keystore on the same chip as its CCD/audio controllers, like Apple’s T2 chip does, so that it has the ability to sign direct feeds from the hardware as being such. This might be more complicated for A/V than still images, since a large enough recording would have to be written to disk. Perhaps some rolling scheme could be devised.
For an added measure of verification, the SoC could upload them (optionally encrypted) to a distributed public store like a blockchain or IPFS, proving that they were created at/around a certain time.
This seems like it would be useful in concert with other tools for news agencies (who should be leading the way in providing as much documented research and evidence for things as they can, as a matter of course, while protecting their sources), law enforcement (who is losing the public’s trust when it comes to the chain of custody and testimony), etc.
We jumped very far ahead both in how much importance we place on digital documents and in how easily we can forge them, so we need to catch up fast on finding robust mechanisms for verification.
Ideally on the fly, with each box sold to the highest bidder, adsense-style.
I conceived it as video bloggers setting up a dynamic replacement volume in their scenes, and compositing a 3-D scene for the sponsored product into it as the stream goes out. One viewer might see an open Coke bottle. Another might see a half-eaten package of Oreos. Another might see framed photographs of adoptable rescue pets. All the vlogger does is avoid entering the ad-volume and the software does the rest.
Inserting into old movies would require a bit more sophistication, I think. You have to discern the geometry of the scene, model it, then discover the insertable volumes, match the camera movement in software, and finally use a shader to match the object textures to the film grain.
But let's not do this. Please.
Only if you're changing volume. We can start with swapping flat surfaces (say, cereal boxes).
I'm guessing this would dovetail nicely with up-converting 2-D movies to work with VR rigs. If you can reconstruct a scene well enough to fake some depth, it wouldn't be difficult to insert extra models into it.
The dystopic endgame would be to automatically generate the models from the 2-D video and randomly fill some of the volumes that don't interfere with the existing scene with advertising models.
It's a weird thing to watch an film turn out differently to how you rememebered it when you're not told it's a different cut. Feels like low-grade gaslighting.
(Another example is the translation of "天下" - Tianxia - in the film Hero, which is both critical to the film and translated differently in different versions)
These small clips can take several hours to render; my (unwarranted) assumption is that the machine being used likely has the equivalent (minimum) of a 1060 or 1070 (at least, that's what I'd use).
Now - if you have the resources to own or build a multi-GPU machine with scads of RAM and the very best CPU - it will still take hours, but you might be able to get it down to "less than a day's worth".
That's my best guess based on what I have seen so far and my own limited personal experience with deep learning and ML tech (nothing involving face swapping or such - more mundane things thru MOOCs I've taken in the past, using my 750ti SC as the GPU with tensorflow).
I think we are perhaps 1-2 years away from this becoming a practical consideration for the judicial system.
Also, using Meltdown and Specter as examples, can these companies actually build cryptographically secure devices. It's easy for a manufacture to say "Our device is secure", and it's easy for the judge to say "You go to jail for life", but it creates a big mess in the legal system when we realize 3 years later that someone extracted the private key from a device, framed somebody, and that person had been put in the electric chair between now and then.
Probably not. That sounds a little ridiculous. But probably so in the case of security cameras or bodycams or dashcams.
> but it creates a big mess in the legal system when we realize 3 years later that someone extracted the private key from a device, framed somebody,
Yeah, I covered that. Did you read my second sentence, or only the first one?
Evidence can already be faked. Eye-witness testimony has been faked for millenia. Photographic evidence started being faked shortly after the invention of the camera. What you do is, make sure the jury knows how hard it would be to fake, and let them make an informed decision.
Does that mean it's technically possible to frame someone? Yes! Just like it is today. Sucks to live in an imperfect world.
> and that person had been put in the electric chair between now and then
That's a valid argument against the death penalty. But that's a different subject entirely.
I felt the same way about all the Nicholas Cage ones that were viral recently. It's so obviously a very shallow 'effect' and can't compensate for very basic differences in bone structure, hair, etc.
One twist: don't adversarial generative networks already work by including a "fake detector" and beating it? This cat-mouse game might last, like, all of a week.
I'd give it two at least.
Fake: http://svencharleer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/anne...
Original: http://svencharleer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/elke...
I could see the fake being easy to detect at high resolution, but personally I have a 0% chance of catching this gif as fake.
elke-1.gif is the fake anne-1.gif is the original
You have to find a target actor/actress that looks similar to what you are deepfaking (e.g. family member)
But - that would also take a ton more processing; instead of a clip taking several hours to create, you might be looking at it taking a few days. That, or you'd have to throw a ton of money into better hardware to handle the extra load.
The technology works now, it's just at the stage where it's simple enough for a random person to build something but still tricky enough so that not everyone can build something good; it works, but not necessarily right out of the box.
But we've just entered the most dangerous period when most people still believe what they see in a video is what was originally videoed. It is when people will use this technology for deception and get away with it like they did with Photoshop before 'shopped!' came into the more general populations consciousness.
Of course, this would be exceedingly difficult in practice, since you'd need the signing to be opt-out instead of opt-in for it to be truly effective.
You'll be able to experience your own subjective reality, completely differently from anyone else.
Want to replace the grocery store with a Minecraft dungeon? Sure! Want to see dragons soaring in the sky above? Sure! Want to pretend your self-driving motorcycle is a speeder bike from Star Wars? Sure!
I think it's odd that we purposely ignore the joy created for the other side of (thousands and millions people). In a utilitarianism view we'd weight these sides in a 1000:1 ratio because of this.
I don't think a video that I know and everyone else knows is fake is very harmful. And it's clear that many people get joy out of it. I think it should stay (though it's here to stay regardless of the law).
I'm much less decided about the legality side of this, but I think the from the moral side, this is pretty hard to defend. Obviously this is taking things a bit to the extreme, but where exactly do you draw the line from a utilitarian perspective? Is a gang rape morally permissible if the perpetrators enjoy it enough to outweigh the victim's suffering? Why should people ever be (morally) allowed to derive their pleasure from another's suffering?
Or how about creating a company that sells profiles each of which would be a collection of high quality photos/videos. In turn if you have a video game or movie you can get a random actor with the body you want and swap the face with the face you want?
Or even better create a service where individuals can upload their own photos which they can get some of the profit if their profile is used.
(best to just spell out the obvious)
Buying groceries in your local supermarket ...
Films may come with default actors and the viewer will be able to choose alternate body types or faces.
Would be interesting to see how that affects Hollywood celebrity. Will the celebrities do the movies still or just use stand-ins and lens their visage to the final cut?
At what point will the star of live action movies be a computer generated skin?