Deep fakes are going to rock your world.
> Oh, it was camera footage, so we can automatically trust it despite the fact that the project doing it is inherently untrustworthy.
Agree.
I was interested in fringe politics as a social phenomenon and I've been following it for a year or two.
I now see CNN as a media outlet largely serving their interest groups. But see RT, Project Veritas, etc., as "second-order propaganda" serving their respective interest groups by selectively "exposing" targets for their political utility, not because they care about truth, it's half-truth, half-falsehoold. Meanwhile, the accusations of the mainstream media are made against them, not because they care about truth, but because their existence damaged the mainstream's own interest. It's all biases vs. biases all the way down.
If someone spends enough time and effort while maintaining rationality, it's possible to extract a great deal of useful information from the sum of all these propaganda. I think it's what open-source intelligence is largely about.
But I don't want to waste time doing this. Nowadays, I view many things in politics as mere talking points without make judgements, and get most of my news from Hacker News (which is, of course, heavily biased towards the Silicon Valley).
> Deep fakes are going to rock your world.
Definitely.
I think most (internet-savvy) people will eventually learn it and ignore things like that.
In Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG (second season of the TV animation), one group of politicians for their personal interests within the government, has launched a conspiracy to intensify a military conflict (against the refugee uprising) that involves nuclear weapon. The protagonists from Section 9, a national security agency that operates independent from the executive, saw the truth from the satellite footage, had the following dialogue.
> "How do we stop it? Can we post the video footage online?"
> "No. Video footage nowadays is seen as completely unreliable to this day."
Since most video footage "exposure" themselves are propaganda or hoaxes.
Released in 2000s, it portrayed and predicted our world remarkably well, and it'll give you a lot of inspirations of what would the future society look like.
>Since most video footage "exposure" themselves are propaganda or hoaxes.
>Released in 2000s, it portrayed and predicted our world remarkably well, and it'll give you a lot of inspirations of what would the future society look like.
I think the current situation is a bit more severe than what was portrayed there. It's not that video footage is unreliable, but that it is unconvincing. All evidence is interpreted through the eyes of tribalism first and foremost, while truth is relegated to the back, because how information is disseminated now exploits our natural behavioural patterns in a negative way. That is the core of the rot in our great age of "(dis)information".
When news outlets consider themselves entertainment but present themselves as journalists how can the people trust reporting from any side? The press has been given a significant amount of power in an attempt to inform citizens who have the ultimate power, but that is being abused to reflect the views of a few unelected corporations that control media distribution.
And on the flip side, if you are a witness with a factual account of events and want to inform others, any attempt will be met with skepticism and, as you mention, “the eyes of tribalism”.
It’s unclear to me how we, as a society, move on from here. Should freedom of the press require explicit disclaimers about bias and require purely factual accounts under penalty of law? At least then, even with selective editing, accounts from multiple sources could be combined to reflect an accurate story, maybe.
0 - https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/15/media/abc-news-error-video/in...
I also have an observation.
The perceived problem of the mainstream media outlet is "a few unelected corporations that control media distribution", or that the state uses the media to feed propaganda. But it's not like that the problem didn't exist before. In fact, yellow journalism played an important role during the Spanish-American War of 1889 [0], People claimed that William Hearst said in a telegram, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." There is no evidence for the quote, but it showed the massive influence of the media. Later, world War II and the Cold War saw the height of government propaganda.
During the rise of the Internet and the social media, many people thought the more decentralized distribution of information can free people from the tyranny of big media and state propaganda. It seemed be to the case during Occupy Movement or Arab Spring, but as soon as the current trend of populism dominates, suddenly, the social media became another evil.
Well, I know that major players in politics and media often have much greater leverage on the web and they can do large manipulations, and I agree the conflicts of interest of web giants as public forums, and web as places for viral advertising is also a problem - However, the most popular attack on social media and the web is that "everyone, including many people with malicious intention (including big media and state propaganda) have a chance to control information distribution and push Fake News, outside the reliable mainstream media". And that we need to have a system to restrict and remove Fake News online.
So mainstream media is bad because unelected corporations, and the state propaganda controls it, but social media is bad because everyone has control. How do we reconcile this contradiction?
My conclusion is, this is pretty bad. But the age before the web is equally bad. letting the mainstream media to monopolize the media outlet is worse, having a system to restrict and remove Fake News online is dangerous if abused, because any system that restricts Fake News is also a system that restricts civil movement.
The future society just needs to learn living with it. Everyone needs to be skeptical about the information on the web, the battle against mis/disinformation should be fought with more useful and true information that informs people, not by banning them. And perhaps the society needs learning to cooperate without consensus (the "national consensus" has partially died). And perhaps that the mainstream media outlet should act according to a higher standard.
> And on the flip side, if you are a witness with a factual account of events and want to inform others, any attempt will be met with skepticism and, as you mention, “the eyes of tribalism”.
I don't know any solution, perhaps we just have to acknowledge the truth is intractable (web is bad, but the media before the web is hardly the truth, anyway), and simply live in doubt forever.
I'd rather to live in the world that has a few flat Earthers, anti-vax activists, or conspiracy theorists, that I can learn to ignore, than a world that has The Inquisition.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8...
> It's not that video footage is unreliable, but that it is unconvincing.
Why not both? It's a mixed bag.
Unreliability can be one problem. For example, "quoting one's words" is a common type of political videos on YouTube, they're mainly a few-second or few-minute of video segments that quote someone's words, and makes a point about it. Some of these videos are mostly reliable, but some other videos intentionally remove the relevant context and mislead the viewers to draw another conclusion. Because of the existence of misleading videos, my first response to any of them is distrust until it's proven reliable. The same principle applies to expressing a statement of something by a politician - is it true or is it misleading rhetoric?
This is why fact-checking becomes more and more popular. But the issue of reliability is greater than objective facts, you can fact-check data but you cannot fact-check the framing or context. As technology marches on, the issue of unreliability will become greater, e.g. DeepFake.
Unconvincing can be another issue. For example, some activists have been warned us about mass surveillance for a decade based on reliable evidence.
Both work together.
Maybe I should have phrased it differently. The main issue we have the people who are not convinced of a source regardless of reliability. And even further, questioning reliability has become a strategy for dismissing an unfavourable source and has been weaponised. This is evident when people take the example of a single error made by a source that they believe are biased against them while dismissing all of the errors and falsehoods from source that they believe favour them.
This win-at-all-cost attitude in politics is killing any real discourse and along with it goes decency in public life. Politics is no longer about good governance, but instead another activity that people participate in to satisfy their tribal urges.
Perhaps a potential solution would be: full freedom of speech, but less freedom of the press, e.g. you can post whatever you want online until someone sues you, just like today, but media outlets should not be allowed to do the same without facing consequences.
Wait. "Second-order" propaganda? What's "second order" about it? This is directly how these machines work. The only remotely novel thing about Project Veritas is that it has absolutely no news credibility at all, whereas CNN, Fox and RT can and do occasionally support real journalism as well.
> Since most video footage "exposure" themselves are propaganda or hoaxes.
I've yet to see a deep fake that holds up under scrutiny at high definition. It may be a matter of time, but I'm not sure we are "there" yet.
Its also worth noting that there is actually a cool use of blockchain-like technologies here. Until such time as deep fakes can be done perfectly in real time, a certification of video being taken close to the time of an event is still a very good indicator, and pubic blockchains are one of the best ways to do this. We don't even need proof of work to make this service! Outside of a specific time horizon (which you can tune), the trust is in the historical consensus which can't realistically be altered!
I used "second-order propaganda" as a catch-all term for propagandists that say "Everything you know is wrong, [exposing some cases of propaganda, can be real], see, these are propaganda and manipulations! But don't worry, just listen to my propaganda." I don't imply that there is anything new here.
> I've yet to see a deep fake that holds up under scrutiny at high definition. It may be a matter of time, but I'm not sure we are "there" yet.
I was describing a hypothetical scenario in the future.
> Its also worth noting that there is actually a cool use of blockchain-like technologies here. Until such time as deep fakes can be done perfectly in real time, a certification of video being taken close to the time of an event is still a very good indicator, and pubic blockchains are one of the best ways to do this.
Upvote. You proposed an interesting question: "how do we certify that a video is real in the future?", with a solution. If you have time, please write a blog post.
Claims it'll be used and transform politics have been largely overstated.