We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video
vox.com
vox.com
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.
In my eyes, greed, hierarchy, and limited compassion / an inability to share are the filter, and all society's diseases are the symptoms.
It's almost like a pernicious, psychological cancer, except it can also spread virulently to other susceptible hosts.
Humanity's rise is due to lots of factors, especially the countless individuals who have worked to improve the health, well-being, safety, and wealth of the people around them. Greed is but one aspect of humanity, and unbounded greed destroys societies.
Yeah, there are problems in 2018, but to sit here today, in the relative comfort of modern society, and say "we only have all this because we're terrible animals" is hugely disrespectful to the work of a lot of people.
Yes, you can look back at our animal past and at Chimpanzees and say we're a brutal, greedy, what-ever. But that is only a tiny sliver of conscious existence. What makes us human is the constant progression towards humanity - compassion, love, and society-wide safety and abundance.
See Hans Rosling for some promising trends rooted in global facts over the past 100 years. Yes, there are still bad things "left over" from being animals, but these are declining over the decades ::across the board::
However, I don't know how you can deny that we are greedy and have limited ability for compassion. Do you deny Dunbar's number? If not the specific selection, the concept?
Do you deny that some men have 10 figures of wealth while others have nothing to their name?
Do you deny that we have, as a society, enacted a plague upon the planet, and are causing extinction of other species at a rate only witnessed within other extinction events?
Just because one has virtue does not mean one doesn't have vice, and certainly the same applies to the "one" that is human society. While we certainly have accomplished great feats and have seen great individuals, as a collective, we do not know how to relinquish the individual pleasures in order to facilitate comfort and health for all.
As the article I saw here recently that said something along the lines of "people are not stupid; life is just hard", your energies are limited, and there are those who take advantage of the splintered and uncoordinated thoughts of society to gain great wealth and power, and those who use their great wealth and power to splinter and confuse the thoughts of society.
That is the cancer, not my thought that these people exist; do not ignore that their existence is all but guaranteed by the very nature of the creature we must have been to find ourselves the dominant force of this planet.
We're a relatively weak, slow animal. We don't see well at night. Our teeth and nails are fairly useless from a hunting or even defensive perspective. We don't procreate quickly and our young mature slowly. Our survival advantage is working in coordinated teams and having flexible minds with respect to the world around us. Cats are closer to what you described.
> The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents "dead matter" from giving rise, in time, to "expanding lasting life". The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human). This probability threshold, which could lie behind us (in our past) or in front of us (in our future), might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction. The main counter-intuitive conclusion of this observation is that the easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.
So ZeroBugBounce is wondering if "not agreeing on facts/truth" is the thing (or one of the things) that technologically advanced civilizations experience that filters them out of the running for expanding out into space. E.g. people can't agree on facts, which causes unrest, riots, etc; civilization eventually collapses from it all, and people never make it into space.
The last major diversion happened with the creation of the US, where a part that had different ideals split from its european core. the same thing happened throughout our history, starting in Africa from where people spread into the middle east and then beyond.
The options to handle this drive for diversion are either diversion into space, and/or inwards, reformation to gain time until we can spread into space.
Tech shouldn't be used to enforce conversion, but to enable peaceful diversion. Diversion, and diversion of opinion makes sense if there's a free flow of information. Political systems just haven't cought up.
As a civilization, we still have the fatal problem that people want what's best for themselves, and we don't have great ways of making them work towards a common good. Worse still, as issues become more complex there are more ways to twist policy towards self-interest while maintaining a facade of group-interest. Evolution has beautifully primed us to do this subconsciously.
In this model, peoples' differing self interests leads to them constructing plausible but different arguments over "facts/truth". The conflict resolution mechanisms (argument) that used to work start breaking down. Society polarizes, stops agreeing on things, and eventually reverts to violence.
I don't think this is The Great Filter though. More likely our civilization disintegrates until it reaches a level of complexity we can handle again, but it's not going to be totally wiped out.
I think people assume it often, but I don't think the Great Filter actually requires destruction of the species/civilization. Maybe it _is_ nukes, or bioweapons; or maybe, the Great Filter (or _a_ Great Filter) is #7 on Hanson's list[0], "Tool-using animals with big brains". So there could be plenty of species out there that use tools and even have civilization, but not enough or the right kind of brainpower for developing space travel. So the Great Filter could be a rigid wall that prevents further progress towards space travel, or an elastic trampoline that keeps pushing civilizations back whenever they get too close to it (what you said). Or it could be a wood chipper. We can only speculate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter
[note] I say "space travel", but this also includes remotely-detectable signs of intelligence (e.g. signals, or Dyson spheres), and if our remote sensing gets good enough, of life.
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.
Our ancestors have solved this problem for millions of years through context, trust and reputation systems and a bunch of other heuristics. We're in a historically unusual time where we've developed a medium of communication that's cheap to use and very expensive to fake. It's only the transition period back that's ripe for exploitation.
Deepfakes aren't that easy to make and they only do one specific thing and do it quiet poorly if your job is to actually fool people. The handful that I've seen in the news are obviously fake. This is not the general purpose video faking tool I think we're really talking about.
"The Great Filter" and the probability of alien "civilizations" or life in general are massively overstated because of a bias for imagining cool stuff. Existential threats are real, no need to bring extraterrestrials into the discussion.
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 an interview gives me a box containing their private key, and video is looped through it and signed as we record.
For press briefing, chaining to something like a White House press root is feasible.
But what about "married congressperson caught in local hotel with fling"? Or in one-party consent states, secret recordings? Self-sign? Sign with news organization (those that still exist) after sharing additional documentation?
[1] http://archive.is/paG5C [2] https://twitter.com/rafsanchez/status/896654656348323841
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".
I guess you could always have the unedited version posted and verified, but that has its own difficulties too.
It's probably safe to assume that most people susceptible to fake news are computer-illiterate. Or at least, not as technical as the HN crowd. Why would normal people suddenly start listening to some nerd mumbo-jumbo they don't understand?
In the same way that signing keys are used by infrastructure & many who don't understand the nuances.
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.)
Before, only those inclined to believe a false narrative would allow themselves to be convinced by a selectively edited interview or whathaveyou.
From here out even the more discriminating of us are likely going to find ourselves being duped.
Who are still safe? The skeptics of course. Are we to be left as a society of skeptics though that doubt everything?
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.
A whole society where all non-physical interaction is treated with total suspicion can't be a pleasant one to live in. Maybe that's the end result either way though.
Small groups and towns, places where people live and have a regular continuous presence, are more likely to be places of higher trust.
Your typical broadcast media sources or your typical corporate social media sources, places where anyone with any agenda can buy their way onto your screen are not places that deserve high trust without verification.
Given what we know now, screens of all kinds should be (and IMO, will become) known as low trust environments. Hastening that is paramount because in the intervening time you have a population that's susceptible to all sorts of manipulation.
I'm suggesting nothing new. Be nice to people, and don't believe everything you read.
- Henry Ford, believing that since “sight” was the universal language, movies (along with airplanes) would unite all people and places - Many people who believed television was so captivating when it first started to be introduced in the late 20s and early 30s, that it would replace nearly all books and teachers in schools
I think people adapt really well to technologies more than we give them credit for. Of course the first few years lots of scams and dangers can arise, but they are figured out somewhat quickly by the powers that be.
People adapted to it, sure- but that's the problem.
Sure, a TV station can't annoint a President of whatever. The power to destroy is a weaker power than the power to create, but is still an immense power.
Rupert Murdoch's lifelong business philosophy is that all information gatekeepers should be destroyed, so that no one's opinion (or facts) are elevated over any other's. It's pure libertarian-democracy of ideas that throws the baby (education and critical thinking) out with the bathwater (suppression of outsider voices). The modern "Internet of Trolls" is the culmination of his philosophy.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/reb...
0: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/86-man-of-the-people
We'll remember the late 20th and early 21st century as the exception to the rule because during that time period if there was an audio/video recording of something you could be reasonably assured that it was legit. That won't be the case going forward. Audio and video will become a free for all like every other medium.
It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" where points out that people more likely to read a paper critically if it uses a bad fonts, poor layout and some typos. It's not a ground-breaking conclusion, but the studies also implied that people tended to read papers less critically when they looked good. The idea is the mind has the tendency to substitute out critical thinking with heuristic thinking whenever it can. If a paper superficially resembles serious paper from a well-respected journal, there's a real temptation to ease up on the scrutiny because many other signals are suggesting your enhanced scrutiny is a waste of time and energy.
I can't say for sure if our reliance on video and photographs over the last 100 years or so had helped or hurt our critical thinking. It's very easy to argue the hard work of photographers have been critical to bringing important issues and events to our attention. On the other hand, you can argue an over-reliance on images have stripped us from engaging our imagination.
I know in a world of fake news, it would seem like the last thing we need is to engage people's imagination. When we hear the word imagination, most of us think about the skill the lets one fabricate novel stories or alternate realities. We don't think about imagination as a tool that people use to try to figure out our reality. A vivid imagination not only knows how to fabricate alternate realities, but it also knows how to incorporate information from the senses, books, articles and information to test and consider different world views. We need people who can absorb information about how the world works, and can project possible realities as well as many possible futures.
I know I'm going long on this comment, and I don't want to come off as an optimist, but maybe we can use the advent of fake video to cultivate a culture that stops trusting passive sources of information (video) and begins to engage healthy critical thinking instead.
I could be way off the mark and would love to hear someone tell me what I'm missing.
The issue here is that there is no trusted authority on the video, the people distributing the video are the content originators so we can use a signature to verify the video wasn't corrupted in transmission but not that it wasn't edited before it was signed.
(this technique would work well if the concern was that videos from some primary source were being edited by a CDN entity helping to stream that video to viewers, which is entirely separate from the article)
Assuming you got it to work sanely, how would you ensure that all manufacturers properly locked down their devices?
Assuming there's a reasonable trust framework and you're able to enforce it... How would you allow legitimate video editing without allowing people to edit video to create misleading images? How would a movie cut between characters and an exploding model in a legitimate and signed manner without allowing someone to splice a politician's speech in with terrorist training videos?
There is a lot wrong with this "Tech can fix it" approach.
There will be lots of good reasons for a video not to match bit-for-bit from CSPAN- if I add commentary on top of it, or intercut it with other clips Daily Show style, or just re-encode it, the hashes won't match. False positives are the death of an indicator, and there will be far too many of those for this sort of scheme to work.
I’d be more concerned to see manufactured outrage having some random supporter saying/acting bad to someone on the other team, inciting the Twitter swarms to descend- by the time they dox the individual it’s too late for that person to go back to their normal life.
If it's technically indistinguishable, I can't see a valid line of attack against it.
The ones least equipped to defend against misinformation are people who have suddenly broken into the public sphere but lack the support systems to help their case. Typical sorts of people in this situation are fresh politicians (often local), viral 15-minutes-of-fame celebrities, and internet randoms who are called out online.
Think about it, we haven't had video or photo evidence for all that long relatively speaking, and it's only over time that our ability to 'prove' things became more absolute. First it was just speech and choosing who to believe, then writing came into the picture (along with paintings and drawn art), then over time voice/sound/radio recordings, photography, videos, etc. For most of human history, we haven't had great evidence, and in many ways were in the exact same situation we may end up in after these fake videos hit the mainstream.
History is a long line of people attempting to 'prove' things, and fakers gradually getting better at lying in a near endless arms race. We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and we'll survive in that situation again in future.
Surviving isn't the issue, quality of life is. You made the point that "fakers [have] gradually [gotten] better at lying in a near endless arms race."
While I understand that things have a tendency to stay the same, history has also shown trends that have lasted thousands of years can also be punctuated in relatively short periods. Sure, people have lied and faked for thousands of years, but fake videos just might be the critical inflection point that in our timeline that creates a huge asymmetry of power and influence.
What sets this apart isn't the technical quality of the lie, it's the agents that are performing the lie: Machines.
Not only are machines capable of fabricating evidence, they are incredibly effective at measuring the efficacy. Lies can be cheaply produced, tailored for very specific micro-demographics, and directly sent to their intended recipients.
The early 20th century showed us how broadcast radio could be exploited for propaganda warfare. The early 21st century could show us how history rhymes when well financed organizations or nation states can finance disinformation campaigns that leverage machine learning.
There is an opportunity for some type of chain of custody app that guarantees the integrity of footage from camera to screen...
A small percentage will, but just like text-based fake news, most people will fall for it, every single time.
Remember, fake video news that reinforces your world view will be so much easier to believe, just like with text-based news, than the truth.
You're only half-right here. People will quickly wise up to fake video, but that will just make everything worse: every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, every video contradicting it will be "fake", just like what has already happened with text news. Your hypothetical chain of integrity between camera and screen won't put a dent in that conviction.
Yes, this has been true for quite some time already since even innocuous footage can be made to lie with creative editing.
The chain of custody thing is already a problem and has been since courts started admitting photographic evidence.
The solution has to be that individual citizens become educated, I don't see any silver bullet here.
What are the solutions we will use to verify authenticity?
Will live speaking events become more valuable as a result?
Many different angles of video will probably not be of much use alone, but useful for public events. I can imagine events in which the audience is surrounding the speaker, creating difficult-to-replicate-from-multiple-angles background noise. But this is just delaying the inevitable.
If a video is circulating the web and people don't know if it's real, but it looks real, and experts can't affirm its fakeness, then what are people supposed to do?
Generative Adversarial Networks http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative-adversarial-n...
If it's built with state-of-art GANs, then you don't be able to reliably detect it with discriminators from these state-of-art GANs. If you manage to build a better automatic discriminator than the authors did, then they could directly use it in the adversarial approach to build a better generator, and your detection approach would again cease functioning.
Remember that in the end there's a fundamental asymmetry - in theory, there could be a perfect generator (not that we're close to perfect yet) that generates undistinguishable samples, and thus there can not be a perfect discriminator.
This will induce peaks of paranoia into the minds of conspiratorial people.
The bad side effect is that now, you can call any video a deep fake, and attack the authenticity of any video used against you.
One of the most vivid examples I recall was back in high school, seeing a video that was debunking the myth of "back masking" (having hidden messages when an "evil" metal song was played backwards). They played the same sound clip, with a transcription of the supposed hidden message on the screen, and I could clearly hear that message. Then they played the same clip but with a completely different message on the screen, and I could also distinctly hear that alternate message, in the same sound clip.
For example, in one episode [https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory-ill...]: "Julia Shaw’s research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that’s a potentially dangerous belief.
Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime.
In this episode, you’ll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth."
TL/DR: What is reality? How can I even trust my senses?
This would be great for enforcing copyright on sites like youtube.
frighteningly, these glitches can be hard enough to detect even when the fakes are made with an amateur's level of attention to detail. this implies that there is already a very widespread use of the technology by people with the capability to edit out these glitches.
with the technology of today, i think that state actors or potentially corporate actors could very easily generate nearly undetectable deepfakes if they cared to do so. i expect that they already have, in fact. but probably not where there would be a massive public eye to scrutinize an improbable or a ridiculous forgery. that would be too risky.
instead, the state of the art of deepfakes is likely invested in making the realm of the plausible "into reality" in a targeted way for the sake of shifting opinion of small populations rather than 100% forming new opinions or causing an about face of prior opinions.
consider, for instance, two allied militant groups in some warzone that the US has an interest in.
the default condition for these populations is the fog of war, wherein information is often hard to come by and rumor runs rampant, especially among the combatants themselves. the US doesn't want the alliance of the groups to persist for whatever reason. now, introduce a very convincing deepfake video of the commander from one militant group plotting to do something that the other group -- and perhaps some of the original group's members -- would disagree with.
there might be immediate chaos between the groups, but probably not. the most likely result will be that some people from each group see the deepfake and get convinced, then perpetuate the false information to others who haven't seen it. over time, the relations between these two groups will become strained, and their alliance may fray or fall apart altogether.
the incentive to be able to cause these kinds of changes is undeniable. especially when populations are compromised in their ability to fact-check information by hard problems like insufficient internet access, deepfakes will be especially effective.
the article worries about the total capitulation of reality at home to that of the fabricated image. no, that is not the risk at present. we have too many alternative channels to validate information. in fact, we are likely to evaluate information without even intending to by discussing information learned via one channel -- perhaps a deepfake -- with other people who may have learned about it via a different and contradictory channel. skepticism is becoming built-in. for people who aren't in the deep-information environment, however, deepfakes are already powerful enough to tilt reality to its preference...