Deepfakes - When you no longer know what you're looking at

[frozenrunner]

Time magazine had an article a very long time ago speculating, in part, that this would happen eventually. I think they speculated that part of an invasion strategy would be faking the leader of the invaded country giving a press conference telling the people to give up, something like that. A fascinating idea, and one I always assumed was coming eventually.

Hot take: Deepfakes will be the answer to the death of privacy: "it isn't really me, someone Deepfaked me."

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

Just mentioning the possibility of something being fake, edited or otherwise, will bolster confidence in accusations and defenses.
With it being fresh in the mind they'll see their own brand of fake news everywhere.

Also, I remembered this bit from Starship Troopers 3 that's heavily related.

I didn't even know there was a sequel.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

I didn't even know there was a sequel.

It's okay, they're all terrible.
I like them, but they're terrible.

 

[Slap47]

I wonder if the push for this has gone far enough for the next election to have live "factchecking" during debates, courtesy of CNN.

The Trump debates did have factchecking, they were less than factual.

Hillary told people to go to CNN for factchecking and Trump said she was going to jail.

 

[Not an_ime g_irl]

The implications of this technology are potentially enormous, ranging from concerns that unscrupulous figures could use it to spread dangerous misinformation and destroy reputations (...)

And yet all we have is fucktons of deepfake celebrity porn

 

[Hellbound Hellhound]

What I find scary is this being used as an argument to blindly follow 'trusted sources of information', as this video is trying to promote.

Fakes will get better, as will our (technological) ability to detect them. The real danger is the notion that 'true' information can only come from a select few sources. This is really what Buzzfeed is trying to promote with the video - the idea that you should only trust them, and others like them, to tell you the truth in a world of credible fakes.

I would say this works both ways. On the one hand, it is certainly true that unscrupulous corporate media networks could use this technology to control information and discredit alternative sources of information, but on the other hand, it could also lead to a situation where disreputable conspiracy cranks are viewed with equal credibility to legitimate journalists thanks to the ease of disinformation.

The eventual result of this could be a world where no one knows what to believe anymore, and where people are forced to rely only upon their own prejudices to decide the truth. That's quite a scary prospect, when you really think about it, because one of the central promises of communication technology is that it is supposed to bring people and ideas together, not cause them to become more entrenched.

I find the giveaway for deepfakes is the fake face seems to always be anchored to the nose and eyes of the model and does't change perspective properly when the model turns their head and may look floaty. I see the same problem with Hollywood anti-aging CGI but most people don't seem to notice.

That is true now, but think where this technology might be 5 or 10 years from now. Everyone laughed at the CGI Arnold in Terminator Salvation, but just 7 years later, they were able to do it pretty seamlessly for Terminator Genisys. The technology has come a very long way in a short span of time.

On reflection, one thing I didn't think about when initially posting this thread was what this technology might mean for the ethics of obscene material. Suppose an AI algorithm could generate photorealistic 4K footage of a child being raped, how would/should society respond to that?