Maybe it’s just packet loss from a live recording, but this video just reeks of deep fake.
The secretary of transportation really did initially respond to this incident, that was getting "a lot of attention" with, exact quote:
"Look, rail safety is something that has evolved a lot over the years, but there's clearly more that needs to be done because while this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing,"
I hope calling "deep fake" on things that are a bummer won't become a thing.
Pete just hand waves the issue because the people affected didn't vote for the _right_ people.
- This isn't happening
- It isn't a big deal it happens all the time
- He probably didn't say that it isn't a big deal that happens all the time, it reeks of a deep fake
- He didn't say it is a deep fake, just that it reeks like one, but isn't
There's also no apparent reason to doubt its authenticity, given that Yahoo Finance is a reasonably credible source and the content wasn't particularly outrageous.
- The only outrageous thing about that video are the audio distortions which were probably not caused by a deep fake, as we helpfully explained to you
Thanks for clearing it up! My bad.
It absolutely will. The technology is already powerful enough that Joe Random is able to deep-fake realistic porn, ChatGPT can write realistic sounding speeches (I personally tried "Barack Obama glorifying cannabis"), and iirc there's also an AI that can do speech synthesis for people where there is a good enough corpus of text and speech.
Given that this is the state of publicly available tooling, you can bet that at least Western secret services have had access to way more refined tech for years, not to mention the required training data.
In this case it was easily verifiable from multiple mainstream sources -- if instead of making that minor effort it becomes fashionable to just say "deep fake" about everything that we don't like (say a former and future presidential candidate for the democratic party looking like a complete political hack) facetiously we are doomed as a species I think.
Additionally, more and more people don't trust mass media in general which just makes the problem worse. There is nothing left any more that serves as a trustable institution for them.