The strange new world of being a deepfake actor
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The fact that this framing is so normalized to just be thrown out in a mostly technical article with no other explanation is insidious and insane. There's video of the guy right above. It's very clear what his skin color and gender are. And it's totally off topic.
At a minimum if you are going to do this, it should be done for every single person mentioned consistently. Why don't we get Nixon's gender and race or Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund genders and races? And of course when you have the choice between doing this consistently for everyone or not for anyone it becomes clear that it would be way over the top if done consistently and in reality is inappropriate in all cases.
It gets into Noam Chomsky's manufacturing consent arguments in my mind. Everything is a meaningful editorial decision. This IS a political statement. By including this you are implying it would have been undescriptive and impproper not to include whereas the opposite is the case.
And yes, I know it's off topic but I think it is important to call out nonsense when you see it lest it be normalized. If you want your article to be discussed instead of prompting a culture war, then don't bait a culture war.
2. Much of the article talks about what factors are important and what aren't for a "deep fake actor." Skin color and gender seem absolutely relevant. (I don't necessarily disagree it could have been mentioned in other places as well.)
>For the visuals, Canny AI specializes in video dialogue replacement, which uses an actor’s mouth movements to manipulate someone else’s mouth in existing footage. The actor, in other words, serves as a puppeteer, never to be seen in the final product. The person’s appearance, gender, age, and ethnicity don’t really matter.
So I could argue it either way. If the gender and ethnicity didn't matter in the Nixon case, the writer/editor should probably have indicated that on the first mention. (On the other hand, they also wanted someone who sounded a bit like Nixon which would tend to lead you to a white male.)
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4. some ad that overtook half of the screen
Do they want people actually read this website?
Reading the website often can be considered harmful as you may not share it if the article is not as interesting as title that took you there.
I had to open up an incognito browser to see what you were talking about. In my normal browsing experience I only got the thing on the bottom half. And perhaps there is a possibility that I already had managed the cookies in the past.
I don't really think you could rely 100% on AI for creative things like novels. A fundamental problem with AI (in my humble opinion) is that it simply doesn't have a grasp on reality. Unless if you constantly take care to guide it, it will go off the rails very fast.
Here is a random agency where you can book real-life doppelgangers:
It's certainly arguable that doppelgangers made "deepfakes" easier in the past, but only easier to those who could hire the actor. And that this technology makes it so that hiring the doppelganger is unnecessary, but it's by no means easier like the printing press made copying books easier.
The same way, yes it was possible to hire a lookalike, but a) the deepfake will look more similar to the target person than any lookalike can and b) you don't need to find a needle-in-a-haystack lookalike to generate a fake video of anyone you want.
Or, "the post has been carring messages to people for centuries, why is the Internet such a big deal?"
because, as the article points out, the actor in the deepfake isn't going to actually act out what the deefake is later going to produce. So this makes creating nefarious content possible by letting the actor read something harmless and then replacing voice and appearance with say, a scam or whatever else. You could hire an actor to read something random and then use deepfakes to make it look like a kidnapping to extort someone or whatever.
If you hire an actual human for the entire thing you'd have to clue them in, and pretty much every commercial business is probably going to not participate in something criminal. Deepfakes probably could scale one innocent performance up to thousands of potential malicious ones.
You know these scams where old people are being called and told that their grandson had an accident and you need to wire them money? Imagine that with video footage and 100% fidelity.
(Sentiment du fer may seem like a strange idea to us, but in disciplines where 40 ms is important, it may help to base reactions on senses which are more time sensitive than the eyes.)
This is also true of visual facial expressions, but deep fakes know to avoid close ups on the face otherwise the deceit would be apparent, and we are accustomed to seeing faces from afar. Audio on the other hand, we just dont accept perceiving it badly: We'll ask the person to speak louder and clearer, turn up the volume, come closer etc.
It would be nice to hear what the actor was able to produce directly, before it was "mapped" to be Nixon. With the amount of effort that was spent, I'd presume that there are actors good enough to create a convincing fakes even without the post-processing. Are there any before-and-after samples available?
The other probably more appealing use is to have a credible figure (say maybe Greta Thunberg) say she was just kidding about climate change and global warming. Fake news is going to have a party. It's going to get ever more difficult to tell what's true and what isn't.
I wonder if in the future it's not about being able to afford better lawyers, but better fakes.
This could be a better pivot for Stadia than cloud gaming. Cloud deep fakes for everyone.
Do society and human behavior adopts to new reality?
https://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/national-geographic/
Granted that's a case of a reputable media outlet fooling their readers by Photoshop, but it's arguably part of the problem.
You also have the photo illustration that Time did of OJ Simpson which was about photo manipulation to fit with a narrative tone. Of course, photo selection could have the same effect.
"The manipulation damaged the magazine’s credibility. Tom Kennedy, who became National Geographic’s Director of Photography after the incident, stated: “We no longer use that technology to manipulate elements in a photo simply to achieve a more compelling graphic effect. We regarded that afterwards as a mistake, and we wouldn’t repeat that mistake today.”
[https://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/national-geographic/]
In any case, I was certain it had happened but this isn't exactly compelling evidence that it's a widespread problem. A much more recent example would help your case. Also, (as you mentioned) this is a case of an outlet fooling people with their own fakes, not an outlet getting fooled by a fake which is more what I was referring to.
Nothing in that scheme requires "rights management".
Ultimately still it comes down to trust: do you trust the org who put out the video, do those people trust their subcontractors and (freelance) videographers, the hardware and software that was used, etc
In some cases this might help a little. But in the end misinformation and outright lies will still spread, be it deepfakes or be it just the written word. QAnon is relatively successful without the need to deepfake (they will just do a few meme pictures), so is the Flat Earth movement, and Alex Jones (US not UK) has still a following too, for example.
Authentic for pay content would have contained unique signatures that acted as a watermark.
If someone ilegally shared the signed version it could be traced back and action could be targeted. The goal was not to make it impossible to pirate content (I find it foolish to try to prevent this) but to make unsigned content undesirable due to uncertain authenticity. The same way authentic colectables are desirable due to their authenticity. A forgery of a famous painting is worth a lot less than the original if you know it is fake even if it is a perfect copy. A reissue of a first edition comic book is worth less even if the content is the same.
In some markets 3C marketing works better than 4P marketing and this results in a circular symbiotic relationship between creator and consumer rather than a hierarchical antagonic relationship.
This also included a way of remixing content that allowed distribution of the original along with the alterations. A sort of open source for media. Think of distributing your Blender/Premiere/ After Effects/etc. project file instead of the rendered result. It would have also been possible to share the alterations without the original and let the user provide their own copy if the original. This was based on a very wrong understanding of what is a derivative from a legal pov.
Alas, this was a foolish dream in my youth, but it was a vision of what media formats would have been like in a parallel world where authenticity was worth more than monopoly over distribution. A world where plagiarism would have been a bigger crime instead of copyright infringement.