Buzzfeed guide on how to detect "deepfaked" videos

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/20/buzzfeed-guide-on-how-to-detec.html

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Y’all just got played. That was actually a deepfaked video of Jordan Peele made using Obama’s voice.

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Double fake!

They were both deepfakes of Steve Buscemi, also using Google’s Tacotron to change the voice.

…But seriously, it’s scary what’s gonna happen when those two get combined.

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That was priceless. Now to leak it to Breitbart…

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I do love Peele and Buzzfeed’s intentions here…but it’s moot. Guys, the people that are falling for fake bullshit don’t care that it is fake bullshit. They care that it says what they want to hear. They care that it blames a brown person for their lot in life. They care that it calls a two term president a muslim because he was a left wing liberal and black. They care that it champions their savior Trump. They care that it makes them feel better about themselves and helps them forget the fact that their own stupidity, laziness, and terrible choices are what got them where they are…not because affirmative action somehow fucked them over from something for which they were entitled.

That is the reality. The fake bullshit is their echo chamber. They like their echo chamber.

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The same people who defend sharing fake news by saying “But the principle remains!”

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FTFY.

Obama was a living deepfake.

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…instead of the moderate Republican that he was. Greatest political disappointment of my life.

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The technology is only going to continue to improve until it will be impossible for a human to tell the difference. Ultimately this won’t be about detection but about critical thinking and media literacy, two disciplines absent from the curricula of most American K-12 schools.

In the not too distant future I can imagine politicians and celebrities putting a cryptographic signature on every piece of video and audio featuring their words or actions (this is actually one of those rare no-trust situations where using blockchain makes sense – anyone want to start a company with me?*).

What that won’t protect against are their unofficial and unscripted outrageous statements, which will all be immediately dismissed as deepfakes.

[* ETA: a company is already doing this]

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…my life was Clinton winning the Democratic nomination. I would’ve considered moving to the US after a couple of terms of Bernie (who would’ve fucking crushed Trump by ten points).

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Pft, we know the truth.
image

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“The fact that I could believe it really says something!”

e: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

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“Yeah, it says a lot about you having a walnut for a brain!”

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Oh, but they DO teach critical thinking and media literacy! I became one of the most super-duper-skeptics with a two-ply tinfoil helmet because my math and science teachers were SO BAD! If every time you ask a science-y question, you get a reply straight from an Urban Legend stated as a fact, you really start to mistrust anything that isn’t printed by Wiley, et al.

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Why would you trust anything printed by companies that feel obliged to place the requirements of Texas conservatives over everything else?

It sounds like you had a lot of bad teachers over your own school career, but there are a lot of good teachers out there who regularly challenge or omit bad content in textbooks. What’s missing in the schools are formal media literacy programmes that allow the kids to start questioning things on their own.

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Agreed.

My biggest un-answered question to Clinton supporters goes roughly thus:

"Hillary saw the polls. She was well-aware that she was not liked by Democrats, and wildly hated by Republicans. She knew that the polls said that any centrist Republican would destroy her, that a fringe one would be an uphill battle, and that even (then)-hilarious lunatic Donald Trump would be a struggle for her to defeat. She knew that running would very likely throw the election to Republicans. She infiltrated the DNC with her own hand-picked staff (per the Donna Brazile book) in order to lock the nomination. She used that power to lock Sanders out of the DNC voter database at a critical early point in the election to slow his momentum. Everything she did was exactly what you would expect from a horrible, power-hungry jackass that didn’t give a single shit about what would definitely happen if the most likely scenario took place and she lost.

So. Why the FUCK are you defending her, because she is clearly the slightly-less-retarded Democratic Trump?"

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Oh, I came from a poor, rural school district that covered - get this - TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND SQUARE MILES!

Look at the bright side - let the Texans choose to be stupid, and their Creationist/Flat Earth textbooks will trickle-down subsidize the Handbooks of Chemistry & Physics for the literate schools.

Edit: Holy crap! Did I say square miles? I meant ACRES, 25,000 ACRES!

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I wish it were so, but Texas notoriously dictates textbook standards across the nation.

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Hey, we have to live near them. They keep sneaking across Oklahoma and into my state. No one ever looks at Texas and says, “I wish we had more of them here.”

I had GREAT teachers and I grew up in Tulsa. Well, it was decades ago…

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