Part of me thinks that it might be a good thing if everyone, right down to the Fox-viewing neckbeards, starts to wonder if anything they are seeing is real.
We have plenty of that in the post-60’s culture, and it filled the world with silly conspiracy theories obscuring the real ones. Thanks, I hate it.
What worries me the most is that this is a formidable weapon for character assassination and public humiliation.
I assume there’s a tech solution to detect that kind of tampering in a video?
Yes (you can currently tell with your senses if you’re looking), but next year or five there will be another algorithm who will need new analysis tools and so on, but that is nothing new for security people.
EDIT: I take back what I said about just looking at it, I hadn’t considered just slightly altering a sentence instead of generation and just saw a pretty convincing example.
Of all the people, Dean Koontz called this in his novel, then movie Demon Seed. A computer takes over a house to get the woman pregnant. Yeah, I know. When people come over to check on her, the computer uses a video display at the front door to appear as her saying nothing was wrong.
It also gives the Trumps of the world an out any time they are confronted with video of something they said. Deep fake news.
Good point, although they already do that, it seems to me.
With the 2020 US election looming, the US Congress has grown increasingly concerned that the quick and easy ability to forge media could make election campaigns vulnerable to targeting by foreign operatives and compromise voter trust.
There might be some furrowed brows! Oh, no!
The draft bill, a product of several months of discussion with computer scientists, disinformation experts, and human rights advocates, will include three provisions. The first would require companies and researchers who create tools that can be used to make deepfakes to automatically add watermarks to forged creations.
The second would require social-media companies to build better manipulation detection directly into their platforms. Finally, the third provision would create sanctions, like fines or even jail time, to punish offenders for creating malicious deepfakes that harm individuals or threaten national security. In particular, it would attempt to introduce a new mechanism for legal recourse if people’s reputations are damaged by synthetic media.
Here’s a larger report, released this week, on detecting deepfakes:
Isn’t this stuff basically open-source? I don’t know how you enforce that when anyone could basically cut out the watermark stuff. I mean, people disable features on compiled software pretty easily, let alone open-source.
Yeah, it’s almost as if Congress had no clue about how technology worked. /s
And since the image must be without the watermark at some stage to properly train and evaluate the model, it could just be extracted from another layer. And state agents would have the means to replicate the paper/software without the feature.
However, you can train another model to detect fake models in a way that lets a human understand why, so we’re not completely screwed.
I feel prescient because deepfakes seem to be hitting all of the news today…
I must only be finding older generation deepfakes, because they still look terrible and obviously fake to me. With time comes progress, of course, but I haven’t yet seen anything yet that blows my socks off.
But if it would be so good, you wouldn’t know it would you?
That’s because this SIGGRAPH paper hit the news about a week ago:
And ever since this stuff has been building. I think you must have just picked it up in all the places this was stirring the feeds.
Yes, I posted this (the first one I saw) on the 8th, and it refs the SIGGRAPH paper directly.
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/06/05/edit-video-editing-text/
Soon we will have to merge all of these topics.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gop-rep-trump-comments-fictitious
I remember last year Facebook patented a method for editing live video on the fly.
Obviously, the word the congressmen intended was “factitious”. I would assume he was misquoted, but I’d wager he doesn’t know what “factitious” means.