Two recent studies on judging authentic vs. deepfake images
nautil.us
nautil.us
Here's his video comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
[1] https://www.engadget.com/lucasfilm-hires-shamook-054904077.h...
People with a 25% score are basically as good as recognizing fakes as people with an 80% score. The former group just prefer the fakes to the real..
Everyday misinformation techniques are far more pernicious - out-of-context sound bites, selective coverage, framing in an uncharitable way, interviewing non-experts, etc etc.
Everyday misinformation techniques were already really bad, but things could stand to get a lot worse.
and yet are willing to put it out there that means actually they see this technology as important, it's the future for them, and what do you do when you think a technology is the future, that's right you invest time and money in using it so that you can improve it. It's not that they have the budget of the Mandalorian to do this scene, it's that they have the budge of Disney to improve the technology.
I would say in 10 years Disney in a show with a budget the size of the Mandalorian (adjusted for inflation natch) will probably have something really worrisome.
A6000 is only $50/day rental.
I'm thinking specifically of 2002's S1M0NE[0].
I can't wait for this future.
This is just an iteration of the same overreaction that has been occurring since the days of splicing audio tape together.
If anything, I would argue malicious editing of REAL footage, which already occurs in media outlets today, is far more frightening than the possibility of having a deepfake video, though it might be another tool in that slimy toolbox.
We already do this with photos. We don't necessarily worry so much about what's in the photo as who claims the photo is real and what the chain of custody was.
The same will be true for video evidence, even if or especially if we start stamping videos with tamper-proof signatures.
Convincing enough deep fake + the 24/7 news industry + Twitter rage machine combined will at some point overreact way too fast and too hard and someone will get actually hurt, maybe even killed.
Actors have had clauses for not using their likeness for a long time now, if their face is 3D scanned, the use cases are carefully limited. They can't just put Brad Pitt in a random commercial even though they have the scans of his face and body and can find a voice actor.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
Bruce Willis got paid an insane amount of money for his deepfaked face to appear in a Russian commercial. He literally got paid a couple million dollars to do NOTHING except agree to his likeness being used.
https://www.ign.com/articles/bruce-willis-russian-commercial...
For example, let’s say you want to make someone seem like a jerk… in 168 hours, everyone is going to have at least 30 minutes of actions that, in a vacuum, make you look like a jerk. By choosing only to show actions that contribute to a certain narrative, you can completely change how someone appears to behave.
What we need is better inoculation to psycho misinformation politics
And then there's doubles: when you just find somebody who looks exactly like the real person, and get them to do some acting.
A deepfaked video or photoshop can be debunked because we're all aware that the technology exists to fake it; all we have to do is show evidence that it's not true. And at the same time, there will always be people who simply want to believe something and so will refuse any evidence to the contrary. You don't need a Deepfake for someone to believe that Hillary Clinton is running a gang of pedophiles out the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor in the DC suburbs.
Is this too simplistic an outlook? Are there different options? I'm not sure but I know that third party unverified content is always suspect. First party content less suspect. Verified content is ... verified. Still could be deepfake but then the risk is on a loss of trust.
Especially when you have companies silencing people that criticize approved sources, and are determining what "truth" is allowed in public discourse
It's always been true that rumor (or disinformation) spreads faster than truth. It always will be true, because rumor is easier to generate than truth.
We will lose the battle against deepfakes, but we can create a subcategory of video proven as non-fake and win the war.
Same with deepfake videos, which could always be faked with good FX and one of the reasons why videos with no chain of custody don’t become evidence in court already!
Or any still image for that. But on the other hand - we are already theoretically and practically able to generate very convincing fake images, if we would want to. We could generate fake stills from a surveillance video (or a smartphone video) of a fake politician doing cocaine. Or interacting in a compromising way with a prostitute. Why do we not see much more of things like that?
Probably because it just might be more difficult to create a believable story around such a fake that does not break down when looking at the story more than 10 seconds.
So maybe the problem will not be as big? I don't know. I have no idea how easy it will become to create truly believable fakes.
Not sure how people will adapt and if trust in anything might break down in the process. But what I do not believe is that tech industry creating rules for itself will be a deterrent against abuse of any technology.
If it hasn't happened yet, it will soon - people will be submitting modified doorbell camera and home security footage to police. Or someone's compromised home network will record a deep fake overlay of otherwise legitimate footage, and the owner won't be complicit. In a situation with, say, a $5,000 or more item, or a schedule 1 or 2 substance stolen, a person could be subjected to damning evidence of them committing a serious felony, for potentially less difficulty and risk than swatting.
A century ago, you could trust photos. Then, Photoshop came out, and the world didn't end, we just learned that we can no longer trust photos. Now we just won't trust anything, and it'll be one party's word against the other's.
Sure, this isn't as good as living in a world with objective proof, but I think we'll grow out of the short-term issues and find different ways of verifying truth.
10y from now, we will be able to simulate any human action or sound or gesture on screen with commodity hardware. I can have a 75m USD cast for my film, for the price of a couple GPUs spun for a few days. Crazy.
Only if you want the people you've copied to sue you for breaching their personality rights (image rights in other countries). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...
Star Wars certainly didn't use deepfakes because they though it was cheaper or easier.
Saying deepfakes makes actors superfluous is like saying synthesizers makes musicians superfluous.
I guess such an AI would also be able to write and direct the movie.
But yes, everything you mention up to and including writing and directing can and will be automated to the fullest degree possible in time.
You can look at voice acting as an example. Before Robin Williams' performance in Aladdin started the trend of recognizable celebrities as voice actors, there was a thriving community of voice-only actors in big-budget movies, hired for their craft instead of their brand. And yet, you probably can't name a single one, despite being able to name plenty of actors from non-animated films of the era. They were also inherently replaceable, as memorably parodied by the simpsons: https://youtu.be/g5ffaTv4ajg
It's notable that the studios switched to celebrity actors precisely for the brand that they brought from their non-voice roles.
Deepfakes are pretty much identical to this animated case, allowing it to be extended to physical movies. The recognizable portion of a performance becomes a few model files instead of an actor's face, and the job of a (replaceable) human actor is to play the role of the performer, not just the character.
But more to the point, there is no need for constant deepfakes. You can just get regular people to act in your movie. Some movies might need deepfakes for the same reason that animes are really popular. But there's plenty of movies that would not benefit from deepfakes at all.
I can't help but think this effects the demand for models more than actors. Why spend money on hiring a model who has spent enormous amounts of time looking good shirtless or in a bikini when an average looking person can have a filter applied?
I agree that there is no need for any of this, but that's never stopped technological / artistic progress.
Also, a weird-ass set of conclusions here:
> People are also excellent at incorporating context and background knowledge into their judgments in ways that computers mostly aren’t, and in ways that the sorts of tasks in these studies mostly don’t assess. One exception is a pair of deepfake videos of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un included in the video study. People were much better than the model at classifying these videos. Whereas a majority of participants correctly spotted these fakes, the model was way off, highly confident that they were real.
> Here, people may have taken into account factors like their memories of previous statements made by these leaders, or knowledge of what their voices sound like, or the likelihood that they would say the sorts of things shown in the video: all things not included in the model at all.
Couldn't it just be because they were bad imitations of people they recognized? Isn't the entire ominous point of "deepfakes" to deceive people by presenting them with people the recognize doing things they didn't do? Looks like people still don't have a problem recognizing those as false.
The only good "deepfakes" I've seen are ones that have been extensively touched up manually, using the automatic part as raw material. New techniques have certainly made that a lot cheaper.
If every video out there is suddenly a potential forgery, people will grow to become more skeptical of things they see unless they see those things in person in the meatspace.
It's almost as if we're going to go back to the time before cameras and audio recordings. What makes things like deepfakes so scary right now is that people overwhelming trust images and videos by default. Once we shift from automatically trusting images and videos to automatically distrusting them, things like revenge porn and viral videos of people saying or doing embarrassing things will lose most of their power.