This is going to be one more dimension to misinformation on the net.
Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a fake.
Or if you see a quote claiming to be from Emmanuel Macron or Boris Johnson, you can see it was released with a digital signature from a Guardian journalist & they add whatever date/time/location details they want to validate the information.
If instead I release something (on Twitter or wherever) that I say is a screen-capture of my TV, _I_ add the metadata (originally seen on BBC on 27 Jul, 1:55pm) and sign and then you know that you only trust it as much as you trust _my_ reputation rather than the BBC.
Wouldn't solve the problem entirely but it might create a bit of an audit trail for stuff and encourage people not to trust unvetted material.
In that scenario, you'd want people to say "but wait, there's no signature on this, it could be fake" and then only trust the video as much as you trust the source (not the claimed source).
Any visual artifact can be mocked, so we end up with the same problem as clickbait titles, where the conclusion one arrives at from just a title can be disproved, but it doesn't prevent the false information from going viral.
What good is it to say "that video you saw was fake!" after the video has spread around and done the damage already?
It's hard to come up with a solution to this problem just because the solution has to preempt the problem. A cryptographic visual artifact _could_ work, but it's still likely that misinformation via deep-fakes will cause problems for society at large.
Websites like Twitter adopting a "blue tick" for a validated profile on their platform though is a model people seem to get. If we had some equivalent of a "blue tick" at a user-agent level, e.g. a for your browser to take a signature and display it in a standardised, human way to say "this video is signed by bbc.co.uk" it could work. (With a similar model for user-agents elsewhere e.g. you'd probably need adoption in apps like WhatsApp to get traction.)
The other side of it (like privacy discussions) is how much the average person will care — tabloid journalism often skirt the borders of what they can get away with at the moment & they nominally have a duty currently to only write factual information. If Fox News or the Daily Mail release videos and put their own signature to it, then you arguably lend them legitimacy ("it's on the news so it must be true. It's signed by them and all!").
That's the mood in the algorithm hole twitter put me in to.
So, make what you will of that.
But why store the signature in a blockchain? If you do not trust the certificates in the first place, the storage location won't make any difference. And if you trust the certificates, the storage location is completely irrelevant. Because the certificates alone provide the trust.
For the same reason as certificate transparency logs; you want to avoid trusting something that has a history of certifying false statements. You also need to handle throwaways, so it's definitely not sufficient (and might turn out to not be necessary once a complete solution is found), but it does seem useful.
Disclaimer: I am an armchair crypto fan. Not an authority.
Similar to how anonymous 'tip-off' stories with protected sources work in general at the moment — the media outlet put their own reputation on the line on the basis of the source & we trust (to a certain degree) reputable news outlets to validate & vet their sources correctly. This is true for stuff that's easily forgable at the moment, e.g. a whistle-blower releasing documents.
NFT for news!!
This changes when individual people with no resources at all can make convincing fakes and wield it as a weapon to sow disinformation, to have it then picked up by "major" media, all information on the net becomes pretty useless.
Sometimes a random video pops up and people believe it shows X and then it propagates but it's something completely different (e.g. people beating up immigrants on the streets in northern Italy -> traditional krampus celebrations; Junker drunk at some event -> Junker suffers from lombalgia; Berlusconi mimicing a sexual act on some woman -> it was a comedian skit; Britney Spears sex tape -> it's a random pornstar ...)
People will learn to be doubtful of random internet videos just as they have learned to be doubtful of random internet articles.
Or not, since they haven't yet, but it's not a qualitative change.
It's easy to lie to people so long as you're saying things that validate their shitty emotions. Conversely, it's extremely hard to tell people the truth when it goes against their shitty emotions.
Emotions can't be shitty.
You can miscalibrate your emotional responses to situations, much as you can sear your conscience.
But the emotions themselves - the full range are valid human feelings, from fury to transcendent joy.
Those feelings are valid, but the effect they have on other people is not. Dealing with valid emotions in a way that doesn't harm other people can be incredibly difficult, especially when those emotions put harm front and center.
Our emotions are valid, but our behaviors are not. It behooves us to mind our emotional states when they cause problems for other people. Often, that will coincidentally bring about an emotional state we prefer as well, but often with unpleasant transitions.
I didn't say anything about behaviors, because it was emotions that were labeled as shitty.
I didn't bother to go into the distinction between emotions and the bad behavior they often give rise to, so thanks for explaining that.
Emotions as such are good, from sorrow to rage to joy.
Each one is a good response to some situations, as far as I can tell.
Your emotional response can be misplaced, so that you experience an inappropriate emotional in some situations.
As noted elsewhere in the thread, you can also be inspired by your emotions to inappropriate (and just terrible) behavior.
The emotions themselves, though, are not shitty. Recognizing them and understanding where they're coming from can be tremendously helpful in aligning your actions with reality and your own values, and even in discovering what your own values are.
I share this perspective not out of a sense of superiority but in the hope that it helps someone else avoid my mistakes.
E.g. saying "I think people of type X are bad so I feel hatred towards them" is a good emotion but misplaced, vs is a bad emotion? I don't see the useful distinction.
It's called "repression" and it can really mess you up.
I don't mean that emotional responses are automatically good - I mean that emotions, as abstract entities, are inherently good.
I'm not so sure I'd call "hate" an emotion, so I'll try a different example.
If I'm angry at someone because they told me I wrote a buffer overflow (and I actually did), that's an unreasonable and unhealthy response. The fact that I feel anger over it should impel me to introspection and working out why I'm angry over useful technical feedback. From there, I can move on to personal change so that I'm no longer inclined to be angry about good, helpful input.
If I'm angry at someone because they sexually assaulted my wife, that's a healthy anger response. They've mistreated her horribly and my anger on her behalf should push me to protect her and seek justice.
How exactly I act on that anger matters, though - physically intervening so they cannot continue to hurt my wife then calling the police would be good.
Pulling out a pistol and shooting them would not.
Does that clarify my thoughts at all?
Calling all emotions axiomatically good, but also saying that they are "unhealthy" if they're "inappropriate responses" still seems unnecessary.
created by 12 people. spread by many thousands.
I think the opposite is true. This isn’t a historical perspective, you’re using logic to speculate. Historically speaking, there have been fakes that reached huge numbers of people, and they were more damaging then than they are today because they were more believable; the public had not yet conceived that photos could be faked, and it was not possible to see evidence of fakery. Today, everyone knows photos and videos can be faked.
I don’t know of any deep fake videos yet that have tricked a large number of people or been used for political purposes. Maybe it has happened, I don’t know, do you know? But there have been lots of influential faked photos. Just Google a little to find hundreds of historical examples of famous and misleading doctored photos. (Lots of overlap in these lists, because some of the photos are famous).
https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/history.pdf
https://delmarwatsonphotos.com/photographs/famous-photograph...
https://www.quora.com/What-historical-photos-are-highly-misl...
https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-photos-history-2011-8
https://www.ranker.com/list/historic-images-that-were-retouc...
https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=29607
https://www.pinterest.com/yosomono/faked-images-everyone-thi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard#Self_Portrait...
I don't buy these sky is falling arguments.
Deep fake video will have about as much impact as photoshop has had.
Back to text and the good'ol credibility of the messenger. Digital commodified journalists and now the need for credibility will let them get out of anonymity again.
A video needs to actually be watched, that takes more effort, and then it would be widely debunked as fake. The "fake news" memes are usually at least partially true which helps convince people that the misinformation is legit.
As far as you know. By definition, wouldn’t its successful use mean you didn’t know it was successfully used?
But totally agreed it needs to be common knowledge that everything digital can potentially be bogus. This stuff should be taught in schools from an early age honestly.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuH79E8rdKc&t=5s
Good, clean, and reliable information is expensive and needs a fair bit of work. I can see why most people have forgotten that but it might come back them and then this will be way less of a problem.
This is actually already the case with Biden and Trump video clips even without being deepfaked. Often they are presented out of context to the point of completely reversing reality. It's helpful to assume any clip is fake by default, especially if it's a viral one that makes one side look bad.
By the time deepfakes are common, it'll be best practice to assume fake by default.
Nothing new under the sun
People will be less likely to believe leaks or supposed hot mic recordings, but the majority of what politicians and other public figures say happens in public view which makes it difficult to fake.
You already don't really know if a video you see on Facebook has been carefully re-cut to change the meaning or tone of what the speaker was saying, so I think the fact that we can more easily wholesale create videos doesn't really change much. If you want to know if something is real the best option is still to cross reference multiple sources and if possible multiple recordings.
Yep. You don't need CGI if you can search a large population for someone who looks like insert-public-figure-here and make up the difference with makeup.
The problem is when everything you have ever learned is suspect.
When has this not been the case?
It's about to become pretty low-effort for a random person with an axe to grind to do that.
It's not that you can no longer believe anything published online - it's that video evidence without provenance was relatively reasonable to trust for a few years, and it's about to stop being so.