Tackling the misinformation epidemic with “In Event of Moon Disaster”
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
The irony is that all this "anti-disinformation" research will clearly be used to run better disinformation campaign if/when the primitive shit being used right now stops working.
Meanwhile, most of the population isn't even trained to recognize when videos are trimmed to start and stop at a conspicuously convenient moments, which is the most commonly used technique for creating fake narratives.
Actual media literacy is at near zero, especially among the people who arrogantly consider themselves "informed".
Consider, nearly a decade ago, the BBC (And that's an outfit that many believe to have journalistic integrity) airing video footage of a protest in India, with people waving Indian flags, and claiming it to be video footage of anti-Ghadaffi protests in Libya, in the run-up to the Libya bombing campaigns. Millions of people have seen it, a few of them noticed that they are being fed a line of horseshit, and then they shrug their shoulders and go on with their day, because Gell-Mann amnesia is probably a real effect, and they didn't actually care too deeply about this.
Worrying about deepfakes is a lot like worrying, around the invention of scissors that they could be used to stab people. Yes, they can be, but knives have been around for a lot longer, are easier to make, and work just as well.
Going through the trouble of deepfakes, to convince the subset of people that will not be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies, but will be convinced by deepfake-multimedia-lies seems like a poor ROI maneuver - especially given that we live in a world where the number of people that can be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies is sufficient to achieve whatever end you seek.
I’d say it’s something to be highly concerned about, but like an earthquake you don’t know where and when to actually be concerned about it.
This suggests you may not have done the research to support your viewpoint with such self assurance.
The increasing sophistication of Deepfakes as a technology concept applied over time is what people are rightly afraid of today.
But even now : (based on some search notes I have from 6 months ago)
[1] Video of Gabon’s long-unseen president Ali Bongo, who was believed in poor health or already dead, was decried as a deepfake by his political opponents and cited as the trigger, a week later, for an unsuccessful coup by the Gabonese military.
[2] Malaysia: Is the political aide viral sex video confession real or a Deepfake?
[3] ISIS 'preparing clip of al-Baghdadi ALIVE' using deepfake propaganda. "An important goal may be to try and rally the ISIS supporters and 'show' that the US is lying"
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/12/top-ai-... [2] https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2019/06/12/is-the-po...
[3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/al-baghdadi-stil...
The gap between scientific consensus and common belief has been driven by "regular" misinformation campaigns: promotions of conspiracy theories, manufactured doubt, cherry-picking of claims.
Why worry about the novel when the basics are still working?
Try: "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because regular misinformation campaigns are still wildly successful."
I might go as far as to say: "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because we live in a post-factual society, so evidence doesn't really matter."
> I might go as far as to say: "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because we live in a post-factual society, so evidence doesn't really matter."
Deepfakes are concerning because they point to a future where disinformation is so effective that it's impossible to pierce a disinformation bubble and unreasonably difficult for a sensible person to avoid getting pulled into one.
Take the idea that the moon landings are a hoax. It relies on accepting the idea of a rather unbelievable and expensive (for the 60s) amount of fakery. Sure, people believe it anyway, but they have to try pretty hard. They wouldn't have to try so hard if someone had faked a convincing body of evidence that the landings were faked. Or they'd have to throw up their hands and give up if they understood how easily things could be faked with modern technology.
I would guess that people who believe in government conspiracies has low or even very low trust of the government. Give them an story that display that the government can't be trusted and people will attach themselves to the narritive in order to confirm how they feelt. They don't need to try hard to actually rationalize it, because the actually details are unimportant. The only thing that matters is the feeling of confirmation.
It is really hard to convince people out of a feeling by using facts and proofs, and a common statement during online discussion is that it is impossible.
I agree with this. I think the problem with deepfakes is that they could make it impossible rather than "really hard" to "convince people out of a feeling by using facts and proofs." Not only will those people have "a feeling" to back up their false beliefs, but they'll also have convincing fake "facts and proofs."
Those fake "facts and proofs" will also make it easier to convince others of the false beliefs. With deepfakes, it could be possible to convince someone with moderate to high "trust of government" of false government conspiracies (e.g. a convincing high-resolution deepfake showing Hillary Clinton knowingly engaging in child sex trafficking or talking about adrenochrome).
Is it too late to claim I wasn't sure whether the original comment came from a human or a GPT-3 instance? ;)
This type of scenario seems like a very real concern to me. You can extend this example into practically any hot button issue.
We know this because that's exactly what ClimateGate was. A huge pile of hacked emails leaked, and they included climate scientists saying things like:
- The world had stopped warming and they couldn't explain that
- They were mixing and matching data to ensure graphs showed temperature's going up
- They were working to prevent papers that disagreed with them from being published
- They were deleting emails and other material to avoid having to release them
etc
Guess what - they denied everything, the emails were roundly denounced by a friendly media, and nothing happened to any of the people involved.
Really, you don't need deepfakes to create climatology skepticism. Climatologists are very good at creating it all by themselves.
In a highly polarized world people don't actually care about evaluating evidence. We pay attention to the voices that reinforce our beliefs and – at best – ignore those that don't.
Just telling everybody that you were told that this meeting happened through secret messages from a secret high-level traitor from the Soros Foundation would work just as well. It would work on hundreds of people even if you said that you were receiving these messages psychically or encoded through subtle changes in reruns of Law & Order.
You don't need a deepfake video of some scientists claiming masks are useless/evil/deadly. You just need to label masks as some kind of "liberal" hoax and half the country now hates mask-wearing.
If that's all it takes to influence the population why are deepfakes a large concern?
It doesn’t help that leading Health organizations have changed their point of view over time. It also doesn’t help that mask manufacturers place a disclaimer regarding effectiveness of the masks. That and very few people wear them right —which decreases their effectiveness such that they might as well be a good luck charm.
Hygiene, distancing, minimizing contact time as well as wearing a mask and goggles help. But a mask by itself is of limited effectiveness though not useless.
masks are a good backup to appropriate distancing, but not a good primary or always-on mitigation, because of their many failure modes, not the least of which is the enormous variety of human behavior.
More specifically, people who need to go out in public, because they need to:
1. Work for a living, and don't get sick days.
2. Can't get/afford <whatever it is they need delivered to them>.
3. Think COVID is a hoax.
4. Don't give a shit.
Are going to do that, regardless of whether or not they have masks.
The only people changing their behaviour because masks exist are employers, who think it is safe to sardine-can people in their workspaces, because everyone's wearing masks. (Never mind that so many people are wearing them incorrectly...)
at least we agree on one thing! i'm not nearly as cynical (or certain) about other people's motivations/behavior however.
Anyone who claims a position which doesn’t change at all as we learn more and more about a novel challenge should be viewed with less credibility, not more.
Anyone could be infected but asymptomatic, you never really know if you’re contagious, and wearing a mask helps with that.
Once this became known, the right thing to do was to change the advice on face coverings.
As with any expert group, the medical community defaulted to going with what they know. In the context of virology, in the overwhelming majority of real-world cases, diseases spread symptomatically. SARS-CoV-19 is genuinely a novel threat in the scale of its transmissivity while asymptomatic and while there was certainly evidence of this early on, it takes non-zero time for this component to be studied, verified, and understood.
You can't (or at least shouldn't) base public policy on reports that haven't yet been corroborated by data and experimental evidence. And being validated after-the-fact doesn't (or at least shouldn't) reflect poorly on decisions made before we had hard data of this virus spreading in a novel fashion.
(In the political sphere, the reason for this is pretty clear. If you're continuously shifting your view from day to day as mores change, then that's a clear indicator that you don't have any particular insight into what the true good views are. You're a follower, not a leader. Plus, it kinda sucks if I voted for you to uphold position A, only for you to change your mind and support B the next day.
Of course, when it comes to health, we want the exact opposite - we basically want a weak-willed spineless leader who immediately caves his opinion to whatever the most up-to-date scientific information is. :-) But who's ever going to respect someone like that..?)
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
In other interviews, Fauci clearly discusses how the community perspective changed as we saw greater asymptomatic spread:
> When it became clear that we could get the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks. > > And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores," Fauci added. "So in the context of when we were not strongly recommending it, it was the correct thing.
So yes, while some hesitancy was due to (extremely legitimate) worries about exacerbating shortages of PPE, the other half is that they legitimately didn't think that mask-wearing would help the average person when the expectation was that symptomatic people would stay home and prevent the spread.
As that turned out not to be reflective of how this virus spreads, the recommendations changed.
Policy choices like these are almost never made for single, simplistic reasons. Even just these two points (effectiveness, limited supply) are almost certainly less than what they were considering. But when it became clear that both effectiveness was higher than expected and supply issues were resolved by the widespread use of simple cloth masks, those factors combined strongly shifted the balance toward pushing their use.
The population starts out hating mask wearing - don't see many people volunteering for that in America before 2020. And then it was labelled as "caring" and "protecting others" and despite vast piles of evidence indicating it achieves nothing, half the country is immediately influenced into hating non-mask-wearing.
https://www.clickondetroit.com/health/2020/07/03/us-surgeon-...
3 months ago was ages given the recency of this catastrophe. And what we learned is that while masks don't help the wearer, they do help everyone around the wearer. Most of the medical profession wasn't operating from the current understanding we have about symptomless spread. As that became a dramatically more clear concern here, the scientific establishment quickly pivoted to pushing mask-wearking hard.
Isn't that exactly the kind of behavior you'd like to see?
Here's what the US CDC was saying about masks before COVID:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza
The idea that anything about this topic is clear or demonstrable is ridiculous. Masks are an ideological issue by the left, which is why my entirely reasonable post has been so aggressively downvoted.
That may or may not ever happen, but in any case it doesn't smell like a stable equilibrium.
Personally, I'm more concerned that the social gravity it exerts will be towards broad solipsism, which smells like a very stable equilibrium wrt to addressing much that doesn't affect an entire population somewhat simultaneously/equally.
We have had that already for millenia I am afraid. Deep fakes have nothing on the power of plain old bullshit. Like the pretext of Carthage's "Aggression" against Rome.
I think that is a false premise.
Book burners are with us today, and they're embedded within the "cancel culture" and every online upvote/downvote system.
The system worked, and still would work if I un-mothballed it. I even globally patented the system, with an ungodly expense doing so: https://patents.justia.com/patent/7460731
However, nobody believed what I was pitching 15 years ago was possible. After I'd demonstrate a scaled down implementation, I'd get interest and an investment pool would start to form. Then one of the investors would realize the tech could be used for porn, and then no matter how I explained the economics of failure such an application would cause, their stupid dicks would take over and I could not get them to realize "porn with anyone inserted" is a lawsuit engine and not a sell-able product.
While pursuing this, I became extremely jaded about what people think occurs in a film production, and the time and expense necessary to add visual effects to any media. The majority of angels and VC I pitched were flabbergasted at what current media and VFX productions are like, and their current level of expense and sophistication. My proposing a fully automated incarnation struck them as complete fantasy. Yet I had a working implementation. Slowly I'd convince them of the possibility... and then they'd get fixated on porn, ignoring the fact that there is no way to make money producing deep fake porn.
I eventually went bankrupt and left media production entirely. After creating my fully automated VFX pipeline, working in VFX without my automation tools drove me nuts. I work in facial recognition now.
This comment was generated by GPT-3
The actual faked Nixon speech is in the "Special Report" starting at 3.37 here (after a scene setting prelude):
The original contingency letter from which the speech is derived:
https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
Hell, play me Billy West reading Nixon as "Richard Nixon's head" from Futurama and I might buy it.
Not bad but the audio doesn’t sound quite right.
This is the same issue as RC va Drones, you could’ve strapped a pound of C4 to an RC flyer for decades but it was never as easy to do as with drones today, the skills, availability and reliability of consumer drones even the cheapest ones from Aliexpress allowed non-state actors to weaponize them with ease.
But, overall, "deep fake" isn't a critical waterfall aspect. It one piece of the overall trend toward fake archaeology. Fakeaelogy? Farkchaeology?
From Baudrillard (https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism...): "Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real."
> Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
> "The authentic fake." – Umberto Eco
Yeah pretty much. The lords are worried that the peasants can afford repeating firearms now and the well to do peasants are worried that the status quo might be upset.
How is a society governed when Western Englightenment ideals of logic and reason have failed due to the inability to have any axiomatic truths? The way that societies were governed before the Englightenment -- religious fundamentalism and "might makes right."
At Risk? Where have these people been for the last 40 years? I don't want to say the authenticity of information doesn't matter. But what clearly matters much more is collective trust in information institutions and from that standpoint the ecosystem has already utterly failed.
In context of India, where news channels have reneged from due diligence on evidently doctored videos, this is something which can have huge consequences.