Pinscreen Deepfake Live Prototype [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
This isn't a new phenomenon that now means that we cannot trust anything anymore - it's only that the fakes are finally catching up with live video.
You can even digitalize this part already. All you need are 5 seconds of recording and a pre-trained model in the desired language/accent.
Point is: I totally agree! The entry level to fake something is really low. No matter the technical value or skills you bring to the table.
Zeitgeist: panic, "the concept of truth is being destroyed by advancements in computers!!!"
OP: sigh, "no... you have always been able to trick people, such as with audio, using a trained voice actor"
You: "but, even with audio, you can also trick people with fancy new computers!"
Me: ?!?
In other words, almost no one would have bothered seeking out and then paying a talented individual with a somewhat uncommon skill in the vast majority of cases. Once this kind of software is available for free and packaged in such a package that almost zero effort is needed in order to achieve the same effect, a significantly higher number of people will do it.
So something important has changed. I agree that the alarmist stance is still unwarranted, though.
I see the "base reality" debate in a similar situation. Base reality could be the same thing as a religion, where the "god" is the system operator [1]. That way, you are "only" as scared of multiple levels of reality as you are of religion. But perhaps more importantly, that way you have 2000+ years of debate and reflection on the topic.
[1] Not my idea.
"In late December 1942 Grimson and Allan Morris walked out of the camp with a group of German servicemen but were recaptured 2 days later, when they showed more courtesy than was expected from a German Officer. The prisoner forgery department had produced the documents necessary for the escape and the German uniforms to go over their civilian clothing. Both Grimson and Morris had again noticed that they had near doubles serving as officers in the German guard company who they impersonated and both had lain in wait for 3 nights fully disguised in their German uniforms waiting for the right moment when the two clones attended the show. Outside the wire they changed into civilian clothes disguised as foreign workers, walking to Sagan station and catching a train to the outskirts of Leipzig before being caught."
Deepfakes are deeply troubling, because anyone with a computer (a requirement that's getting optional as well quite fast) can fake any video almost instantly.
Consider just one sinister motive that's already making women in many countries cower in fear: if you reject a dude he can just make a deepfake porn video with you and release it as revenge. What's the equivalent of this in the distant past? All a guy could have done is "allege" the woman is so-and-so, which to be sure, probably did ruin some women's lives, but it's almost as if our society has devolved back to that same Stone age at best then.
And we live in a time when "facts" already don't matter much anymore and people are just looking to find evidence that supports their claim alone rather than the truth. To not take this technology seriously, to brush it off because "sensible" people will still pursue to seek the truth, is the kind of smug arrogance about questionable tech that has led us to the current overall shit:sandwich state of affairs to begin with. Let's hope we learn some lessons at least.
> If you reject a dude he can just make a deepfake porn video with you and release it as revenge.
This will be troubling at first, but again in the long run it will likely just lead to people not taking these sort of videos seriously and interpreting them as a joke / weird stuff on the Internet. This already essentially happens with Photoshop and celebrities.
> And we live in a time when "facts" already don't matter much anymore and people are just looking to find evidence that supports their claim alone rather than the truth
This is how human beings have been since the beginning of time. There is no "Golden Age of Rationality" that we are exiting.
This is doubtful. People still believe in pictures despite it's so easy to forge. People believe obvious oral lies. Hell, people believe tweets.
The video medium is incredibly powerful, and the damage it can do is huge.
We are going to suffer for this, and most people won't even understand why.
I don't think anything about that is "deliberate propaganda".
It's just nutjobs gathering and gatherings of nutjobs creating more nutjobs. It's much easier these days with "social" media.
Even Alex Jones, a figure so obviously deranged with claims that sound like satire, has been selling supplements and merch. All because these days anybody has a platform and monetizing lies is easier than ever. People will believe anything, especially if it's 'published in a scientific magazine', nevermind that the publication has no credibility, reliable sources, or academic integrity. This is how anti-vaxxers got their start, after all.
This is obviously less ideal than someone actually understanding an idea they profess to hold, but it's far better to have support around beneficial ideas. It's not hard to imagine a lot of important issues fitting into this: support for liberalism and demoracy, support for global warming, support for coherent ideas about vaccines, etc. These all require broad public support, and the truth of the matter is that many people generally don't spend much time evaluating why they believe what they do.
I understand this is not a perfect point of view: eg, who gets to decide what the "best" ideas are.
It's an illness that demands rejection of overwhelming proof, it leads down dark paths, much like how arsonists become murderers these things need to be cutoff at the stem. There's nothing wrong with that
I fully agree. Even if rationally, one rejects a video is fake, it does have the potential to influence the subconscious.
Will courts interpret it seriously? It is quite different from funny GIFs if you can completely fake appearance of a politician in an appropriate place doing bad things. We did have different scandals in recent years ('grab'em by pussy', austrian leader of right party, etc.) and it is certainly more to come in upcoming years. How much of that content will be not fake with 100% certainty?
I doubt it. All it takes is a defense attorney showing the jury their own faces merged into a deep fake porn.
We developed as a world because the most important nations did not peddle obvious distortions of facts in matters of fundamental importance (that all people are equal, that no one deserves to die, that the world needs preservation, and recently, that man has indeed harmed this planet irreversibly). Of course, every nation in history has been hypocritical and done grave acts that go against these beliefs, but at the least they'll not try to reason it as right, but often just hide them from public.
Now, we have the major leader of most of the important countries misrepresenting fundamental facts for their political gain, and close to a majority of their population is ready to believe them for myriad reasons. Facts have always been misrepresented by politicians but never this brazenly so, and never at this scale.
"Fake news" is not a phrase that involves any technology in and of itself, and if you were right, then this phrase should have been in lexicon for ages. But it hasnt, has it? People a decade or two back would contest facts, but never had I heard anyone say "facts don't matter" till 2015 or so. Things have changed, and not to be iterative, ignorance of this change again shows the inabilities of even the "enlightened" or whatever it is the people around here would like to call themselves to cope with change. Only time will tell where this will lead us.
We don’t even need to back that far: the beginning of the Iraq war, not even twenty years ago, was rife with “fake news.” The fact that the buzzword didn’t exist doesn’t mean that the phenomenon didn’t exist.
https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-a...
Next is legislation that outlines the rights on individuals and provides a process for reporting and removal of content, a la DMCA. We have existing laws for non-consensual pornography, but it might be interesting to allow the option to treat them like copyrighted content. If a video is profitable, pornographic or not, why not allow people to collect on that?
The next catch-up phase is to release client-side tools to allow people to seamlessly render template content on their home equipment, circumventing any public distribution / "make available" clauses.
I also think long term this'll be a boon for sex worker acceptance and reintroduce some skepticism into the public evaluation of media.
My grandfather was a retired military officer, and late in his life they shot a battle scene for a movie down the street from where he lived. He saw the set and effects in action and was deeply affected by it, saying it was indistinguishable from reality to him, and if that was the level of control they had over video these days, how could he ever trust anything he saw on the news again?
Interesting times.
But the woman in this example could take the same video and put the faces of a thousand other people on the person in the video.
There are so many versions depending what time and what place. If its an elder in ancient times then what they say is the truth. If its in a caste society then the truth is determined by your blood. In chivalry, truth is based on reputation. 19th century truth is written in a book. 20th century it was written in the paper. World war 2 is a period where truth was what was said by leaders, both political and scientists. Post world war 2 until 21th century and truth was anything said on the TV (in many places a single channel).
With the exception of the caste system, I would say that there is a need for a healthy balance between trust and distrust. It also seems that balance generally will occur after a while, but not before a lot of damage happens. Deep fake in that sense is not ushering in a new dark age, but it will likely take a bit of time before people find a balance in how to perceive video evidence.
How is that different from anything else nowadays? That's what computers do for us.
Making calculations, decrypting text, generating art, developing a software.
All of these used to be harder and more manual and time-consuming. Now, anyone with a computer or a phone and an app can do these things way easier, and I'm sure there are better examples I failed to think of.
It only makes sense that even the "bad" uses of a computer will be benefitted by computer progress.
Are you truly suggesting here that the government would never make a fake video about a moon landing because it would cost too much to make this video?? So instead they sent humans to the moon and brought them back safely to earth because that's all their budget would allow?
Just because we scaled a lot of services in a digital network means our trust services need to adapt as well.
While deepfake are high quality, I think most people can notice that it's not entirely authentic. A deepfake cannot really account for the shape of the skull, face mimics, face muscles, how the head and jaw move, etc, there are many things that the human brain works on to identify a face. I'm not really sure that deepfakes measure and render all those things reliably.
So I'm not really convinced by deepfakes in general. It's mostly a glorified silicon mask, nothing more: it will trick people if they're far away enough. Those might be able to fool face recognition softwares, but not humans, even those who are aware of deepfakes.
I generally agree though that with time we will learn to see red flags like this and treat video as probably fake.
This particular article is not that impressive, looks like animation to me.
It is also possible that hair was disabled to get real-time performance for this (quite impressive) demo.
So I'd expect it to only work on the 1 person in the demo, with the 4 famous people depicted.
https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab ("More than 95% of deepfake videos are created with DeepFaceLab. DeepFaceLab is used by such popular youtube channels as Ctrl Shift Face, Sham00k, Collider videos, VFXChris Ume")