Despite some comments here, I don't thing society will adjust to this for a long time, if ever. We already live in a world where you can create bias with words on a page or a website, moreso if they come via someone with influence.
Imagine an AI generated 5 second clip of Weinstein saying something scandalous about raping women, or imagine Trump retweeting _anything_. People choose to believe something that fits with or reinforces how they think - emotion and reaction is easier than checking if something is true. Even if it's reported to be a fake after, people would rather question the reporting ("well that's what he'd want you to believe" / "of course they'll report it as a fake") than acknowledge the fake.
I hate to be a harbinger of trouble, but I can see a lot of people having their lives destroyed with this.
You could have said the same thing about Photoshop. Journalism is as good as the integrity of the source. In places, you could argue that's systematically eroding. I don't think you can argue that fake videos are what will bring it down.
Journalism is as good as ever. It's easier than ever before to gather facts and verify sources. The problems faced are external to journalism: a losing business model, and government saying that journalists aren't trustworthy. But the integrity of the press is fine. There are less yellow outfits than there were a century ago, even.
You can say that but the press (whether because they have no money or they can't afford to be second with the hot news) is complicit in the perceived decline and real decline.
It used to be you had to have two independent sources before you took an individual source's word. Now rumor becomes newsworthy --it's like the Enquirer won.
They are also owned by big cos (Amazon, Conde Nast, Carlos Slim, Murdock, etc.) and have very clear biases. NOt that biases didn't exist before (Hearst papers) but on day to day stuff they played it pretty level. Now, they go for the incendiary whereas before they were focused on big issues --the issues that mattered to society at large rather than smaller divisive issues. But divisiveness gets you clicks.
You say the integrity of the press is fine, so lets look at two examples: Huffington post and fox news during the 2016 election and any international or global news related to political subjects. Terms like hyperpartisan comes in mind, as does recollections that number of articles and time on front pages was something like 1:20 depending on which side the news site leaned towards. Integrity of the press would not be the words I would use.
Remember that image? I would bet good money that the amount of green has gone down steadily the last 50 years, and Journalism is at the lowest point it has ever been. I would also predict that the amount of politician donations and lobbying has never been as high in the Journalism industry, nor the amount of quid pro quo between journalists and politicians.
Contrary to the article's stance that this would be used to create fake revenge porn or celebrity sex tapes that are taken as real, I'd expect this to devalue the real thing and give space for people to claim anything with their face in it is fake.
We've already seen this with images and Photoshop. Society and their heuristics of belief will adjust as these new capabilities become widespread.
What's more troubling is that as media becomes falsifiable, solid evidence of...well, anything, becomes hard to have. The ultimate loser there is the truth, sadly.
Indeed. The worst use of this will be forged political speeches. What happens when you can fake any video of anyone saying anything and then feed it to the social media outrage machine?
As the parent noted, society will adjust expectations about how to determine facts. When radio first came along, some people were fooled that Orson Welles's War of the Worlds [1] was actually happening, because it was in the style of a news broadcast. We learn and adjust how to process data as systems change around us.
You can already fake a political speech if you've got the resources. A look-alike and a good make-up artist can do a lot. The danger isn't a really good fake that can be discussed, but a high volume of OK fakes.
Its really not so different than it was prior to the advent of radio. By the time news reached you about what some politician said it had gone through multiple people and could be altered in any number of ways. Sometimes intentionally and sometimes through misunderstanding.
This is a basic assumption historians take. They assume sources have biases and agendas, and try to figure out what is true. It isn't a perfect system, but no historian takes a source at face value.
The question that concerns me more than Terminator- and Matrix-like scenarios is why we allow "the social media outrage machine" to exist in the first place. It is nothing more than a bunch of mostly uneducated opinions that create erratic views around the world of their M-sized subscriber sets.
Maybe this new tech will force people to bet their credibility on what they say and spread.
The truth can benefit greatly if the standard for fact checking changes. Media is not a great friend to truth, especially not when it conflict with either revenue or political direction.
Just take the massive global interest in fact checking sites after the 2016 US election. It seems as a strong trend in competing with media for carrying the banner for truth, and the best part is that many such sites seems to have a non-partisan policy in stark contrast to most media out there. The loser don't seem to be the truth, but rather those who wish to use a few seconds of video with no context to push a point.
Trolls seem to be doing just fine. It's also cool to be a fact checker but if you think the fakers have lost then you're naive, they're stronger than ever.
It's horrible, people will have to have reputations, be careful about what they say, and consider who they trust again.
It wasn't the good old days or anything, but that was how it worked for a while. There will be value in being a trustworthy source of information again.
No, it will force the development of AI to detect whether things are fake or not.
We'll soon be in an arms race as better-and-better AIs alternately try to fool or not be fooled.
The people who are able to understand and wield these technologies will have incredible amounts of power over those who are not.
This is one route to the singularity - to deal with the consequences of ML and AI advancements, you need to invest even more. This ever-increasing arms race sucks vast amounts of human and financial capital into the 'tech sphere'.
That ignores the role of actual social networks and social proof in the construction of consensus reality. "Our" AI says it's real, and "your" AI says it's fake, and one can debate the margins - just as one debated whether it was metaphysically true that Clinton didn't have "sexual relations" with Lewinsky, or that Bush "lied" about Iraq.
a lot of this stuff is already generated using generative adversairal networks, so i think the AI to fool is just as good as the one thats trying not to be fooled by design.
i often wonder if there is a way for people to put information on the blockchain so it -is- verifiable (you can post a public key to demonstrate that the information is from you). so that all public information is only official if its on the blockchain. soon enough people learn that they can't trust anything that is not on blockchain.
of course, talk is cheap. i dont have the chops to actually spec this out.
"Oh that porn video of me isn't signed. My signed porn videos are over there"
How are you not seeing the obvious issues with your idea? People are not going to put compromising photos and videos on this blockchain because they are compromising. And yet some compromising photos and videos taken by other people are real. The fact that it's "on the blockchain" means basically nothing in this case.
Other users who were discussing "hardware signing" are closer to a working system. This is not a problem for a blockchain to solve.
I'd like to believe that, but I suspect that more likely would be that people believe the videos of their friends are fake and believe the videos of their enemies are real, pushing us further down the easy slope of polarization by giving it even more fodder to work with.
This reminds me of a crypto application I've been waiting for someone to build / explain why it would suck:
Secure enclave based verifiable recording devices.
So, a camera that uploads a signed hash of every image it takes using mobile connectivity as soon as it takes it. Or the same for video and audio recordings.
It's loosely inspired by Town Crier[0]. The notion is that instead of regarding arbitrary blocks of data as "recordings" we demote those to arbitrary blocks of data, and anything you want to claim as verified truth needs a time-stamped hash proving what device took it, where it was taken, when, and that it hasn't since been modified.
Disclaimer: I'm the furthest thing from a crypto person, this just seems like a nice use case to me.
The Secure Enclave helps a lot but the Nikon hsck illustrates a hazard of needing devices to be updated, especially since there’s an obvious opening for someone to use a plausible old vulnerable device – and it seems like, say, a compromising photo of a politician would spread a lot further and faster than the observation that the older phone has been compromised.
One other challenge is that you might be able to prove that a device took the photo but not that, say, it was a real scene rather than a high quality print or that the time stamp wasn’t subject to a manually set clock. Again, I’d expect countermeasures but worry that nobody would see them in time for the most damaging cases.
The time stamp is handled on receipt of the hash by third parties in my mind, not by the originating device. Ideally the position component of the data would also be verified by 3rd parties, eg cell towers receiving the data add their own signatures so you know it was at least in the region it claims.
The high quality prints problem is more interesting. I’d hope that sort of trick would be detectable by inspection, but then we’re back to cat/mouse games with AI.
If we all switched to crypto verified light field photography, we could at least force hoaxsters to build dioramas :)
One risk: all of that could make a forgery more persuasive. Imagine some James O’Keefe style operative preparing a fake but not uploading it until they drive by the victim’s house, rent a room in the same hotel or near their office, etc. How many people would see the extra metadata and decide it proved accuracy?
The normal risk is the service simply replaces an old hash for video with a new hash secretly. However, if you put data + old hash you can create a long verifiable chain and someone can record a specific block and know the chain is unchanged from the point they saved a specific hash.
Well, it wouldn't help much with the topic of this article.
Maybe cryptographically verifying that a porn video happened is someone's fetish, but I don't think most people involved in the production or consumption of porn would care.
Sounds like a good idea, if you also receive a freshly made hash: to ensure the picture was taken _after_ the received hash and _before_ it was sent out.
I would make a merkle-tree-like hash to be able to obscure parts of the picture and still be able to prove the date.
I heard that piece, but I read is less as "unwilling to grapple" and more "resigned to the fact that it is inevitable the technology will be built, so might as well enjoy myself building it".
It would feel a little grating to me as the interviewee to have the interviewer keep pressing me on these questions that, while totally relevant, are obviously designed to make me have to "answer for what I'm doing" in some Frankenstein-esque sense. Yeah, I get it, it's scary, but this train left the station a long, long time ago and probably I'm not (even as someone working on the tech) gonna have a lot to say about the downsides that haven't already been said.
With great power comes great responsibility. If you want to make money or social capital out of providing some innovation, you have some obligation to think about the negative externalities that will result and come up with a way to minimize them.
The negative externality of fire isn't arson, it's uncontrolled burning. Once you know water extinguishes fires, that's something to think about the next time you start one.
The thing is, we know what externalities are and how they play out in regards to technology, even if we can't fully predict them. It's trivial to infer that this technology could be abused for deception, and that some sort of authentication technology might help to prevent that. So the responsible thing to do would be to provide both the editing and authentication technologies at the same time, even if neither is perfect.
I just don't understand how they can be expected to provide this, though. This "authentication technology" might not even exist, and in any case is very likely to be wildly different from the editing tech.
The editing tech in the OP is also off-the-shelf components, i.e. nothing was invented, just assembled in to the correct form. What exactly are they supposed to have done, just not posted anything about it until they found a way to thwart the technique they just discovered? Most likely this bottoms out in an arms race, so they'd be waiting forever.
Your request seems really absurd and I've never seen technological innovation work like this.
Not exactly a new concept but it’s likely extremely cheap now and would even get cheaper and better.
With VR porn, the new sex toys for men and women and now this I’m somewhat happy that this wasn’t around when I was a teenager as I’m really not confident I would have left the room if that was available.
More like the rick and morty episode with the sexbot...
"I Dated a Robot" actually has dating in it.... if we had a human or near human AI datebot that would be quite different since whilst you won't be participating in the continuation of the human species at least at that time you would also not be losing any social interaction skills.
This could be nothing and this could be the same thing as the rage against hustler in the 70's and internet porn in the mid 90's but for someone who grewup with every nasty available when I tried one of the higher end recent VR porn productions on my Oculus the feeling that you get from it is quite different.
I've tried VR porn as a joke like 1-2 years ago when the Google VR stuff started and back then it was pretty garbage it was mostly just barrel projection of a standard porn scene that wasn't shot with the intention of VR.
The new stuff is shot with proper cameras, uses 3D audio and it's just creepy how convincing it has gotten so far despite the major drawbacks of the current VR headsets.
In a similar vein, this video[1] by a visual artist explores the impact that modern CG is having on cinema and art. It's 14 minutes, but if you're into movies or modern art you'll dig it.
An issue that the same algorithms that can be used to differentiate between real and fake can be used to train AIs to make better fakes. But here, the fake detector has the advantage in the arms race.
Another approach is to use cryptographic signatures. Some cameras sign can sign pictures to ensure they are original.
I don't think it would work. A 4k screen has 8Mp, that's less than a cell phone camera. The artefacts will likely be obvious to those who know where to looks.
Printing may be a better option with regard to resolution but because the print color gamut is different, simple analysis can probably give away the trick really easily.
Furthermore, assuming EXIF informations are signed along with the rest of the picture, you also make all the metadata match the picture. A sharp picture and bright daylight is not consistant with a slow shutter speed for instance.
I'm imagining the value for making actual theatre movies will be a bigger issue. You can have Humphrey Bogart in a science fiction thriller! We'll have to come up with new rules.
Hey, this could actually be awesome. Everybody could make their own preferred version of the movie.
Movie studios could get away with legal problems just by releasing videos without the faces, and letting the audience download faces through gray market channels.
>”It kind of shows how some men basically only see women as objects that they can manipulate and be forced to do anything they want... It just shows a complete lack of respect for the porn performers in the movie, and also the female actresses”
This statement is confusing me in many ways. Can anyone explain the exact logic behind it? Specifically, for “forced to do” and “lack of respect”.
How does it, and implications of it, seem for you?
I've been thinking a lot about trust, reality, and sourcing. I wonder if we'll move towards cryptographically signing content and facts so we have a verification of legitimacy.
Maybe a blockchain single source of truth, using tiered identity verification where one can accumulate identifiers and use this ID to sign content (biometrics, other verified IDs can vouch for your verification etc higher score = less risk of fake). Seems like these things all already exist the big problems would be putting it together, scale, and easy clarity. For instance making it so my mom's browser or email automatically verifies signed content (and maybe more important denotes unverified or verified false) and clearly presents this like the green lock key in internet browsers.
I wonder if something like this could be extended to verify beyond like an MD5 checksum saying this email or photo is real - i.e. solving problems like 'fake news.'
Can't wait to tell my (future, 10-15 years from now or so) kids stories about the Internet from when I was a kid and have them ask, "daddy, is it really true that you could post on the internet without giving a blood sample, retinal scan, and fingerprints to your ISP and didn't have to tie your real name and address to all of your comments?".
Lol. I refuse to use the face scanner on my new iPhone for similar ideological reasons. But we also already do this across platforms: TW verified, banks/Coinbase verification using IDs etc.
There's a difference between having some platforms requiring personal information and having Internet access predicated on everyone knowing your identity.
For example, I want my bank to know my email address, phone number, and physical address because I want to receive fraud notifications, to make telephone banking transactions, and to receive paper statements.
I do not want forums that I shitpost on to have any of that information, nor do I want it to be written into law that any service I access over the Internet is required to ask for and log that information.
Yeah I think this source of truth/verification would have to be an economy where trust and truth is the capital. For instance the WaPo can sign an article or post and PolitiFact could sign the work as factual (allow for non-binary labels). Using the ID system mentioned above, anyone could vouch for something. NyTimes would have more capital compared to some ID with low history/verification. Of course selling trust like this produces problematic externalities so this system would need large scale to overcome bad actors - if it could at all.
Child works and reposts are problematic too. Maybe could nest below origin content in a blockchain. Obviously re-saving jpgs & different video wouldn't hash to original so maybe it's more like you're cryptographically signing a perma-linked piece of content which is archived in something like IPFS or on this single source of truth blockchain. Maybe this would need scale and uniformity to create content standards; common meta tags to standardize media (og:video -> ipfs:mp4). Hard to get to content outside of always changing format and code let alone dealing with content which has changed in substance. Much more difficult than just PGP sign a block of text!
I would imagine in ~5 years this will primarily be used in apps for the purpose of vanity clips (ala Snapchat, MASQRD, etc) and otherwise trivialized, as well as probably some very profound and moving applications (think of a deceased loved one bringing to life heartfelt messages, dissidents using a dictators face to deliver messages to their troops, or even ones we can't begin to fathom until it's so easy that anyone with an iPhone can mask themselves with someone else's picture).
All of this, IMHO, will shape our general cynicism and distrust of recorded evidence, which will lead the way to us finding other heuristics to sniff out bs. I think this is an overall net gain, but I do agree, there will be some people who's lives are destroyed by what this enables, which really sucks, to put it lightly.
The upside, at least, is that we already have people looking to find ways to deal with this right now.
Men will start paying for a service that will create custom porn by swapping in the object of their fantasies. The only difficulty with choosing your hot neighbor instead of someone popular will be that the service will have to fetch their face from their facebook profile.
They can sell a LinkedIn Premium equivalent service.
X people used your face as a swap in for a pornstar. Y$ a month and you can see which state they're from. Z$ to meet the top 10 reviewed individuals near your zip code.
This guy is really into you! Except he adjusted the width of your hips, decreased your breast size, got rid of the tattoos and went for mixed nigerian / inuit race, the latest fad. This is only 65% of the typical customization level!
Send a message? [Y/n/generate]
Adjust profile picture to his preferences? [Y/n/half way there]
While the objectification is bad, I think the issue of determining truth from lies should be solvable: public key cryptography seems simple enough.
Have every public figure have their own key pair, and each official production have its own key pair. Then publish a signed hash or similar for each production the figure chooses to appear in. Any production without such a signature or with one that can't be verified is probably fake.
Would be a big shift in process, and would only happen if this sort of thing becomes a serious problem, but once it did such a scheme would stop it in its tracks.
I am disappointed in the level of fear-mongering pearl clutching; it could[0] get so much worse!
First, the person creating the fakes is using an off-the-shelf algorithm[1], adapted accordingly.
A system designed purely for the purpose of swapping faces (or morphing a particular face into others, one-to-many style) would obviously yield improvements.
Secondly, it's the work of one person without commercial backing[2].
A studio that invested in lidar or used multiple cameras would be able to incorporate volumetric information.
Third, it's limited to individuals where you have a performer that's an approximate body double for the target in question.
Why involve real people at all?
That limits the kinds of scenes you'll be able to shoot, and it's clearly a production bottleneck besides.
Since it's feasible to create realistic animations of locomotion via deep reinforcement learning[3], applying the same technique would remove the need for human actors.
With that in mind, we can invent scenarios substantially more terrifying, for which this is but a teaser trailer.
As computation becomes cheaper and AI knowledge more widespread, the delay between when something becomes possible and when it becomes ubiquitous grows ever shorter.
Once custom pornography is just another something-as-a-service, the question becomes how do we optimize it? IoT sensors and wearables can provide the data needed to customize an experience tailored to your particular tastes on a moment-by-moment basis.
Facebook is sinister, but it's sinister in the sense of a malevolent external force with inscrutable goals; you can defeat it by not using Facebook.
The idea of a machine that can produce something more compelling than most stimuli available in the external world is scarier, because all it would be doing is giving you exactly what you want.
Okay, so the riff on wireheading in the style of Infinite Jest might not be adequately terrifying.
How about something more realistic, like character assassination campaigns?
We've seen how intimations of sexual impropriety can damage a politician's electoral chances or outright cause them to resign.
Sometimes, the thing that allows them to hold on to office is the fact that there's no convincing proof beyond circumstantial evidence.
However, if you've already primed the public with rumors, a fake sex tape might be the just the thing to push past the tipping point.
Imagine: a future where an individual could effect a bloodless coup using nothing more than a Twitter botnet to spread slander and a few GPUs to generate scandalous footage.
No? That's perhaps more in the vein of William Gibson.
The last thought that came to mind was along the lines of "the future is weird and terrible, yet somehow boring and familiar" a la Neal Stephenson.
The redeeming value of porn is that there's at least some intentionality behind it.
Real people had to be involved, from the actors to the crew to the guy who wrote the script in traffic on the way to the shoot.
The future will be endless porn spam, half-coherent plots generated by LSTM-char, just glitchy enough to be discernible as fake, yet seemingly unavoidable due to the sheer quantity made possible by automating the production pipeline.
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0. And when it comes to AI, "could" should be read as "will" but with an indeterminate time frame.
2. The reddit account of the artiste in question: https://www.reddit.com/user/deepfakes (not exactly safe for work, but not particularly unsafe, either).
Eventually but consider how much long-term damage will be done before most of the people living when that technology becomes commonplace stop voting. Think about Brexit and the US 2016 elections, both decided by generally old people who believed factually untrue but widely repeated claims – there’s no easy way to reverse something like leaving the EU or not dealing with climate change even if a decade later the average voter is considerably more savvy.
Imagine: a future where an individual could effect a bloodless coup using nothing more than a Twitter botnet to spread slander and a few GPUs to generate scandalous footage.
Turns out you don't really need the scandalous footage
Chances are that we overestimate the completeness of information coming from our own eyes, except for obvious extreme cases. People, actions and events may and do look not what they really are.
I mean, with the fall of eye-trust we will barely lose something important; it's only perception bias.
Imagine an AI generated 5 second clip of Weinstein saying something scandalous about raping women, or imagine Trump retweeting _anything_. People choose to believe something that fits with or reinforces how they think - emotion and reaction is easier than checking if something is true. Even if it's reported to be a fake after, people would rather question the reporting ("well that's what he'd want you to believe" / "of course they'll report it as a fake") than acknowledge the fake.
I hate to be a harbinger of trouble, but I can see a lot of people having their lives destroyed with this.