Deepfake porn and the ethics of being able to watch whatever you desire
metro.co.uk
metro.co.uk
You know what I want to do, I want to actually create sci-fi films with my favourite actors. But sadly, I don't have the money, time or network of highly paid actors to do so.
Sucks doesn't it?
But what if I could get the time, a little bit of money and actors who are just starting out and relatively cheap?
Can you hear that? Just maybe the democratization of film, may just be happening?
Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXHsgucZuJk
Now imagine, building out very cheap scenes, overlaying them with something like Unreal3d engine and using deepfakes instead of having someone sit in a chair for 5 hours because they need makeup, as they are acting as some alien?
Or how about having permission from "Schwarzenegger as a service" (TM pending) to use his likeness as a deepfake in the film?
I know, I know. People will use this for porn first and if you look at technology like VHS, internet streaming, VR it's all being used for porn. But as the tech gets better, gets cheaper. It'll be put into the hands of the creatives and we'll be a lot better for it.
I'm really bullish about this tech.
But the reason these people are your favourite actors is that they're...good at acting, right? The deepfake won't improve the performance of your budget actor (actually it'll probably make it much worse). So your movie will be like seeing your favourite actors putting in absurdly terrible performances. Are you sure you want this?
In any case, somebody wants this.
Emphatically yes? There's a pretty big gulf between low-budget/amateur stuff and more professional acting.
> It's hard to say someone is good at acting if they are put into roles where they basically play themselves.
That's definitely true, but like, even if Keanu Reeves only plays one character, that character just happens to be someone who's fun to see in a particular sort of movie. You still can't achieve the same thing by getting a random person to be themselves, and face-swapping their performance with Keanu Reeves.
What if you wanted to shoot a scene where someone is hobnobbing with the rich and famous? You might need dialog, but do you need authentic dialog? What if you want to shoot a scene where somebody is stealing Keanu Reeves' boat, and he is just acting like a normal dude in a weird situation? You don't need his acting talent for that. What if you're shooting an alternative history film and want to present situations that conform to historical accuracy, yet defer from people's memories? Etc.
Yes. How about having permission first?
When people talk about the ethics of deepfakes, they are talking about consent. What else do you think they're talking about?
If your deepfake of that person leaks, that appears to be about them.
“The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.”
And everything should be a-ok
Just like regular intellectual property licensing, either they won't even talk to you or it'll cost far more than you can afford. If you do it without permission you'll get takedown notices or worse.
The fake porn problem really should not be underestimated in a society that still does incredibly vicious slut-shaming. Previously you could argue that one could avoid this by not taking any nude photos or allowing your partner to do so, but once these things start getting generated from just a face it's going to be practically impossible to control it and the demand for legal action will grow.
I've been thinking about this for a while. The "despecialized" versions of the Star Wars films prove that audiences can dictate the nature of a creative work in lieu of (or in spite of) its creator(s). It became apparent that eventually fan-edits of films, and fan-remakes of films, might eventually supplant the official material in certain cases.
But beyond the concept of "superior" or more popular versions of flawed films, there would be branching iterations that eventually are so distinct from their source material that they'd essentially be different things all together. Which is exciting to me.
Today Netflix produces shows by analyzing audience preferences. It's focus groups 2.0. In the future they might start generating shows based on individual preferences. Photo realistic content staring all your favorite actors in a plot you'll love in a setting you'll love. You might even be in it. Why not? Why not have every movie woven into your life? You could take this line of thought in some pretty crazy directions!
Hmmmm... Want to star in the greatest movie you've ever seen? No problem, just hand over every last detail about yourself!
Personally the media that has had the greatest impact on me was also some of the most unexpected or unfamiliar.
If it were to become common, society would quickly learn to take all video with a grain of salt. We already question suspicious images. If the exact line of how a photo got to you from the camera is unknown people quickly exclaim things to be Photoshopped.
I don’t think expanding our questioning to video is that far of a societal jump.
Deep Fakes or not, I think people are largely already comfortable with questioning the authenticity of videos.
In reality, the people who follow populist movements are both firmly in the grasp of illusory ideas and hold a very lucid understanding of their place in the world. They are riled up by fiery rhetoric but they are also well aware, whether consciously or not, that they have little to gain from a return to the neo-liberal order in which they have no useful economic role, no community (whether real or imaginary) to come back to, no access to the wonders of a globalization, and no real cause or culture to believe in other than competing against their neighbors for a slightly better place in the rat race.
In San Francisco you can see the end logic of this trajectory. An elite with highly paid and satisfying jobs served by a pauperized underclass of Uber drivers and mini-job holders who only have a crumbling public infrastructure to support them and no prospect of being a socially engaged citizenry.
My point is that its effects are more pronounced, more reliable, and significantly harder to correct in the presence deepfake style media. People who are trying harder to make honest evaluations of the world will be making more committed arguments for dishonest points if they fail to identify the inauthenticity of a deepfake message, a problem which is purposefully more likely due to the inherent design of a deepfake message.
We don't need to talk about people who are intending to be manipulated, we need to talk about the people who are not intending to be manipulated who will nevertheless be disarmed by new technology.
Images are not reality, and society has yet to grasp that distinction despite the pervasiveness of images and how long they've been around. No amount of effort will ever make images into reality, nor reality as harmless as images. People do wish for, and maybe not unreasonably so, the ability to trust their eyes and initial perceptions. They want the picture they see on a screen and perform significant acts of interpretation upon to reach some belief that it represents something that happened in reality to be proven correct. But it almost never is. The difficulty of communicating with images is just as large as communication with language, it's just not acknowledged when images are involved.
The Magritte painting that I refer to isn't photorealistic, so what he was getting at wasn't really a prompt to doubt the reality of images, but a maybe subtler point that images and reality, even undoctored photographs or videos of reality, are fundamentally and profoundly different things. The 'treachery' of images is that our intuition tells us the exact opposite. We have a long history of putting our intuition to the side when it's really necessary, so I do think there's a possibility that people could come to see images and reality as more distinct than they currently do. I didn't mean to suggest that we should totally dismiss every image, that really wouldn't be any kind of solution, but simply change how much inherent weight we believe they carry. The language people use when they talk about imagery, constantly conflating images with the things they represent, tricks an awful lot of people in an awful lot of circumstances.
> The solution was already known decades ago.
I understand what you're saying, I just don't think that that'll change - our brain wires itself to think in shorthand as much as possible, images are part of that shorthand for reality.
This just happened a few days ago and it was basic alterations and despite being authenticated as an altered video there are still those who:
-Deny it was altered
-Spread it for the sole purpose of misinformation
People will weaponize this technology like they do all others and gladly welcome it with open arms. We simply need to develop ways to identify and prevent abuse of powers.
I think he was crazy. But it gave me pause
Deepfakes can only put different faces on people, it can't create some of the more niche fetishes the illustrated porn market does. Call me back when it can generate a 800 foot tall bird-man stomping on a pixie.
There's already an algorithm for decensoring hentai pages [0, even reaches HN's front page last year], I'm not surprised if there are a few efforts trying to generate a whole comic from zero already lol.
The future will probably be automated scripts running in VR-MMD and bespoke engines, and it'd be probably a very good future for a while.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328213
Edit: nevermind, seems furries also have their own generators, though I suspect anime girls (and boys), being more... standardised, have better outcome already. And the second link is about a different regulatory regime, but eh.
*it being some similar type of GANN
But yeah I would be super fascinated if anyone was working toward that.
What will that mean for surveillance evidence? What will that mean for police brutality videos? What will it mean for rape/harassment/assault/stalking/etc videos?
By spreading this tech, which seems inevitable now, we roll back the protective aspects of video/film by decades, if not more.
But would a phone camera be considered “tamper proof”? What camera would, that a civilian could readily buy?
It is becoming difficult to discuss these kinds of issues at all with the way everyone seems to so easily move to the extremities..
I'd be a bit more concerned about people just deciding not to have children (because raising children is a pain), but right now there's too many people, so I'll worry when there are less than 100 million.
I remember reading about researchers constructing a fake monkey mother out of blankets, a heat lamp, and a milk bottle. The babies seemed to get what they needed in terms of intimacy.
Likewise Paro the Seal seems able to help elders cope with loneliness.
Much like the really facile conflict in the movie 2012, will all those 100 million be white and Asian winners of capitalism?
Lastly, human sexuality is super complicated and even with mass-produced customizable porn I’d expect a trend back to imperfect, flawed relationships like we have now eventually. I still see zero answers to what the female equivalent of porn is, so I don’t think every developed country will turn into a mirror of Japan (women may choose to emigrate to find love / purpose similar to how most single men tend to emigrate for economic reasons from developing countries). Most of the West is so culturally obsessed with sex and most Judeochristian religions dogmatically encouraging population growth I don’t see it being possible without a Dark Age of the world happening... which global war could indeed cause.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex....
Yep, that's a problem.
> these people no longer reproducing and passing down the genetics which may have played a role in the success
Nope, that's not it.
Having money has very very little to do with genetics. Sure, you might have some genetic predisposition to being more ambitious, but how many people are ambitious, smart, and driven... but are still incredibly poor because they grew up in the wrong neighborhood or with the "wrong" color skin?
Even if you don't take it that far, the best way to get money is to inherit it. Having money is very cyclical: if you have it, it's easy to get more of it, and if you don't have it, it's easy to get less of it.
Given the ample data demonstrating the link between genes and IQ and health (both of which affect 'success', however defined), I'd like to see you back up your implied claim.
Even if something better than sex came into being, people’s wish to have children would be unaffected, and I doubt they would have any problem engaging in old-school sex for that purpose.
That's not completely true even in the so-called developed parts of the world.
- Futurama, I Dated a Robot
This is really funny... the church has spent centuries trying to convince people to not fuck around, and now we are achieving this goal through porn.
IIUC, the idea is that people should fully enjoy sex for the purposes that God intended, but should limit themselves to that. (There are some secular arguments for/against adhering those those behaviors, but other reasons will depend on premises only meaningful to Christians.)
So Christian theology, in general, isn't to keep your pants on. It's to screw to your heart's desire with your spouse, but nobody else.
If the supposed problem is that what you watch may be unethical to some other person, that also does not compute. Why should I care what some religious zealot thinks about the ethics of me watching self-created deep fake porn in the privacy of my home?