South Park Creators Land $20M in Funding for Their Deepfake VFX Studio | Hacker News Reader

South Park Creators Land $20M in Funding for Their Deepfake VFX Studio

variety.com

63 pointsthm19 comments

Here's the music video they worked on, the AI face morphing starts at around 1:40.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAPUkgeiFVY&t=1m40s

Whaat, this was made by South Park creators?! I was amazed when this music video came out but I had no idea it was them.

I remember being a little kid and my parents telling me that the tabloids at the grocery store were fake. Elvis isn't alive and aliens aren't visiting earth. Similarly, I've been thinking that we need to educate people to be skeptical about deep fakes. The best way to do this would be to have a deep fake of someone famous saying or doing something ludicrous. So over the top that it is obviously fake. I'm pretty sure Matt Stone and Trey Parker would be the best to do this.

They did do this, kinda. They called it Sassy Justice. It’s on YouTube.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/@SassyJustice/videos

Already a lot of examples of this, my favorite is Justin Trudeau reading "How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVWK4oK93I

At the turn of the millennium "internet skepticism" came down to trying to tell people not to trust their own pattern recognition. We were told that scientific controls, formalized in peer review and institutional authority were more rigorous and that hard proof in the form of collected data and evidence was the only true standard for empirically based discovery and truth (to be judged in the open and free discourse of science).

Now the institutions' corruption lays bare. The incentives of peer review are just as clearly malformed. Institutional authority is spent in a void of trust, the methodologies and discourse are often no longer open to the public, and we are even less likely to be free to discuss them online. Now the very "hard" evidence of recordings will be less than reliable and prone to falsification. I think I'll go back to "trusting my gut." This new technocratic rational skepticism seems to me a house of cards.

They'll control your gut soon enough.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater there. Just because some assholes took advantage of a corrupt system to make money at the expense of public trust, does not mean you need to regress into anti-intellectualism.

> The best way to do this would be to have a deep fake of someone famous saying or doing something ludicrous.

Fortunately, someone’s made sure to get deepfake “Biden” and “Trump”’s opinion on the rapper Chief Keef, which does the job quite handily [1][2]

[1] https://twitter.com/DailyLoud/status/1597678029508968448?s=2...

[2] https://youtube.com/shorts/JeG0XRN-LF8?feature=share

I basically consider most of the internet to be the equivalent of checkout aisle media now.

You're basically telling them to be sceptical about literally everything. The only people who can reallh know anything happened are the ones who were physically present at the scene and saw it with their own two eyes, at that point. Everyone else just has to blindly pick a side to trust.

Right. It's good advice.

Probably so. I wonder how practical it really is though. I feel like qanon type cults will become far more common the more people realize how much ai and deep fake technogy are capable of on large scales. Throw away any sense of accountability for the elite when they can claim any evidence is deep fakes and can control the narrative about witnesses with thousands of bots arguing on their side that are indistinguishable from a human.

Similarly I remember telling my mom about chumboxes, clickbait and fake 5-minute hack videos.

I'm still waiting for the historical movie where the actual faces of the real people are deepfaked on actors. Imagine a WW2 movie with the real Hitler, Stalin and Churchill for example.

Can’t imagine that would change anything at all.

It would both enhance and degrade the perceived authenticity of the movie, which is kinda weird.

Well, I haven't seen it, so I can't tell. Would love to though.

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