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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

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,"

Look it up from any source that pleases you, this is an unedited clip. I searched for "pete buttigieg ohio train" on youtube and that was the top result. I recall seeing it about a week ago and somewhat not being able to believe it myself at the time. Alas.

I hope calling "deep fake" on things that are a bummer won't become a thing.

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The only response I see there is hand waving the issue. Instead of talking about how this derailment is different from the other 999 that happen a year. A large percentage of derailments happen in train yards, in a controlled situation / enviroment.

Pete just hand waves the issue because the people affected didn't vote for the _right_ people.

> I hope calling "deep fake" on things that are a bummer won't become a thing.

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.

Yeah, but we know all that.

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.

For recent videos yes, it's easy-ish to verify their authenticity... but for material claimed to be older, particularly when combined with a SEO spam campaign?

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.

They aren't calling into question the clip's credibility; they're saying its potato-quality audio literally sounds like a deep fake.

Is that what he was saying? How do you know btw? I read it differently, my mistake.

- 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

Well technically only they know for sure what they meant, but I had the same reaction to the video that (I assume) they did, and they went out of their way to offer a plausible explanation for the audio distortions (packet loss).

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.

- This isn't a big deal

- 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.

I think we're just so used to higher-quality audio/video from the last decade in particular; I recently pulled some videos off of my old LG Env2 from high school [to archive the Fall Out Boy/All Time Low concert at The Rave (2010-ish)] that are hilariously poor quality - but it was the best we had at the time haha.

Exactly this. All I am saying is that the video has the feel of being a deep fake. Too late to edit and clarify.

Your comment has the feeling of a deep fake.

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