AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Deep fakes automate what deep pockets and state actors could already do with Photoshop and other professional tools. The world isn't going to become a scary place because the barrier to entry got lower and the technology has been democratized. People are smart. Fakes will be detectable through entropy measures, corroboration, common sense, etc.
FWIW, I've been working on real time voice to voice style transfer.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKB...
There are already a few other (non-real time) players in this field.
I'm hoping to spin this up as a small social app or filter and sell it so I can fund my capital-intensive film making startup.
I think this tech should be widely available. Not only will it make people think and question more, but it'll be fun too.
It's also amusing (and terrifying) to see all the anti-1st Amendment legislation aimed at combating deep fakes. The truth is that there is nothing to fear except our freedoms being taken away.
Yes, in the same way that people can detect and filter email spam. Either by a time-consuming manual effort, or complicated systems very few people understand. And we have corporations to swoop in and save us by offering a centralized service! Search wasn't hard enough to enter. It will be fun in the same way that searching for something useful in a landfill is fun.
Even if 5% people click on mail spam, it's still profitable and there will be more of it. If 5% is deceived by a fake video, it can have a big impact on election results. Fake news and outright lies are already damaging enough if you do get a court order to print an apology. By that time it's already damage control, you can't revert it because people move on and believe what they want to believe. On social media people upvote what gut feeling tells them is right.
"For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family.
The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations — lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or bad-ass tunes about "ugly."
Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you."
If through software a non-technical person can generate hundreds of websites of "content" that either pollutes a topic with noise or misinformation, you can bet that will be used at great scale for everything. Pick an element of human life, and I can describe a way someone will have financial or political (which often boils down to financial) motivation to do it.
And besides, the end game isn’t to fool everyone into believing a fake. No, the more insidious goal is to flood the zone with enough dis- and misinformation to overload our ability to filter it. It’s like gaslighting at scale- at some point you just stop being able to process information because it’s so voluminous and of dubious quality that you stop believing any of it.
Grandma’s still falling for the phone and mail scams. No amount of legislation is going to fix the reality of technological illiteracy among the oldest adults.
Deepfakes might fool some of today’s adults who don’t quite understand, but we are raising a generation that has turned into a meme: “Everything you read on the internet is true” -Abraham Lincoln
I think the real silver lining here is that the internet is an alternate reality. Many of us refuse to believe that, but social media has created manufactured people. The only solution is to bring people back to the real world. The people are real here. Their opinion, no matter how controversial, comes from a real mouth, and the face you see is the one they were born with.
If anyone forms their worldview based entirely on things they read on the internet, they probably would be just as susceptible to our real world forms of propaganda/gaslighting/ whatever you want to call it.
Previous examples: Gmail had a better spam filter. Apple and Google did a better (though not perfect) job of protecting users from arbitrary code execution, as did the web itself, way back when.
This doesn't happen all that often, but if it succeeds, power users will scoff at how nerfed the new thing is.
I'm reminded of an old story [1] about an early game for children:
> I found myself unable to reconcile the idea of a virtual world, where kids would run around, play with objects, and chat with each other without someone saying or doing something that might upset another. Even in 1996, we knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I asked for a clarification: "I’m confused. What standard should we use to decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?"
> The response was one I will never forget: "Disney’s standard is quite clear: No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed."
But maybe text filters will be better if you throw enough machine learning at the problem?
[1] http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
I think you are on the right track, but not going all the way. The bigger issue here is that media literacy is incredibly hard. You need a wide body of knowledge, essentially an educated[ß] mind, and an almost unhealthy skepticism against absolutely everything you read, see or hear.
As a short cut, a good first approximation is to be a cynic. Assume everyone is pushing their own agenda, and that even at best you can only see half of it.
(If you are asking yourself what agenda I am pushing with this post, well done. You're off to a good start.)
ß: The ability to question information, conduct research, cross-check the results of research, and have the mental agility to identify your own biases - these are not natural tendencies, but learned traits. We can lump them all under the "educated" label, even if that's not the optimal term.
Highly educated people in the grip of an ideology can dream up conclusions far beyond the limited and unreliable evidence we get from media consumption. They are often rewarded for this.
And one of these ideologies is the myth of rugged individualism (or competent adulthood), the idea that each person can and should figure out what's going on by themselves. It's obviously not true of children and the elderly, but most of us outsource a lot of our thinking. Living in modern civilization inherently means having a lot of trust and dependency on others.
The ideals of media literacy are simply unrealistic for most people. It's not clear what the alternative is, though.
Have you seen it creating major social issues? I haven't observed much of anything.
For the lies most people want to tell, there isn't any need to make a fake. Want to paint a protest in a bad light? Just use a real photo of a riot and falsely label it as the current protest.
Even for someone with decent media literacy, proving 'this is faked' is a lot harder than 'this is some old content falsely labeled as new content', because you can't just look for the original source. You have to try to identify what the original source was pre-fake, and that's a LOT harder with deepfakes.
If the tabloids were unable to make fake photos, would it affect anything at all? They can just write up a fake article without a photo. The actual act of making fake media just isn't necessary for any of this behavior.
So yeah, I imagine the fabrication, proliferation and automated spreading of conspiracy theories to have potential major societal impact
This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. It might as well outright be the job of the Fourth Estate ever since the Fourth Estate has existed (funded, as always, by ads).
And when you look at the people complaining about this, which is for the most part people part of said political group (Facebook/Twitter/non-tech journalists), it makes sense that anything that could diminish their ability to control the narrative should be presented to the public as a new and novel threat.
So this isn't going to result in widespread social chaos, because it's already happening. If anything, this technology will democratize what the old media is currently doing; which will likely result in driving political power towards crowdsourced content aggregation instead of the individual content creators themselves.
What then? An unlimited amount of glut that is indistinguishable from human writing, but can be produced with any kind of bias, by any number of fake identities and there is no reasoning with hem.
It’s making it hard for me to engage with others online. I want to talk to others about my political beliefs but I’ve seen infiltrators like the ones on twitter destroy conversations and spread FUD. I experienced this with Venezuela before.
In my opinion it is a real problem. Yes we will eventually adapt but I think actors taking advantage of this tech early will succeed in influencing the public.
It is the bad actors getting of the hook more than the bad actors framing the innocent.
The real problem we face with elections is much less exciting to talk about. It's a few people going around making reasonable and factually correct comments, and manipulating upvote/downvote counts with bots to drive-home the belief that one view is popular, and another is extremely unpopular.
Would you mind sharing your argument about why this notion is a waste of time? Machine learning experts are concerned about it [1], but maybe you know something they don't?
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602776/yes-we-are-worried...
Maybe someone will create an amish version of the internet whereby every user must be verified as human by another human who was verified by another human etc. before they can log on, and everything on it was user generated, and user programmed, etc.
Even without the advent of deepfakes it was bound to happen as the internet keeps growing in content. Fake news is just the tip of a big iceberg
but now that the tools are getting into the hand of everyone, everyone is starting to questioning everything they see, and it was about time that people start to realize the chain of trust required in reporting and accepting news.
here's hoping that in half generation we'll be back at thinking critically about every piece of information we see.
It is already the case that for many everyday searches I do, I am forced to be very creative in my search phrase in hopes of filtering out the garbage sites that manage to dominate the first results page.
Watching less tech-saavy people use computers (such as elder family) is enlightening and frightening. They either cannot tell real content from fake content, or worse they are satisfied with what they get from obviously suspicious sites.
Maybe my concerns of polluted websites are less relevant considering the general population is getting more of their "information" from within Facebook rather than even going to search engines (of which they use the default for their browser!).
These all came with real tradeoffs and we've just accepted them. The printing press and the internet, in their own ways, sped up the world and shortened attention spans. Cars changed cities. The benefits have been there, but we've engaged with or ignored the harms posed by changes in different ways, and the same unconscious trade is going to happen again.
Right now Estonia allows any non-citizens to get an Estonian-approved crypto-token to prove their identity online. They'll deliver it after a thoroughly check of your passport.
Now, you can get fake passports from corrupt governments, but I would argue that the effort, cost and risk to do that is a magnitude higher than what it takes to farm karma on reddit from a troll farm.
EDIT:
> Now, you can get fake passports from corrupt governments,
But these are known for being corrupt, so your score would already be lowered considerable with a passport from there...
For a reputation system to actually work, you end up having to limit it to hand-picked "experts", and now it's a question of how you pick them and how you stop regulatory capture from ruining the system (spoiler alert: it will)
There is an urgent need gap[1] on detection of deep fakes.
[1]:https://needgap.com/problems/21-deep-fake-video-detection-fa...
Me? I welcome the future where audio and video evidence are just another piece of evidence.
Now news spreads horizontally through social media and group chats. It's common to see, say, a clip purportedly of police brutality right now in country X, which is actually 7 years old and from country Y. Someone will correct it, someone will dispute the correction, whatever - the damage is done. So I don't think deepfakes will move the needle much. The real damage is the end of gatekeeping, and that's already happened.
However, I would still only find it's text convincing for producing ... a marketing blog since such things just seem like a contentless stream of buzzwords to begin with. If anything, it gives a certain idea of how marketing speech require something, a stream of words with certain feeling, but not real logic.
I did notice that some types of articles tended to be easier to fake. A sports article asking a coach about his team's performance would end up spouting the same handful of platitudes, and some random sports statistics that sound realistic unless you look into them. Some articles that were more on the wonk side of things (lots of statistics and not a lot of context) also seemed to produce decent results, although I'm sure they're ridiculous if you're in expert in the subject matter of unemployment figures or auditing a city for overtime charges.
One example: Pentagon's slide decks. https://archive.org/details/MilitaryIndustrialPowerpointComp...
Real news not believed, fake news believed has been an unsolved problem for a long time. For example, the history of medical advances show doctors not believing exceptionally solid science in many cases.
There are a number of quotes about progress along the lines of "First they say it's impossible, they they fight it, then they say they believed it all along".
This is a people problem and a media velocity problem going back to the famous quote "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."
You can't stop people from believing a lie after it has been released. Removing the lie doesn't help. "Reputable" sources not repeating the lie doesn't help.
We have to top-up education and teach media-awareness in school, while giving badly researched and generally toxic content the cold shoulder.
Do you realize that current conversational NNs are better at making comments than you?