The writers of Star Trek have though about this, because in their time video has a kind of authenticity verifying metadata put in there by the recording device. We will probably need to make that kind of system.
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I wonder if future legit videos may be able to incorporate hidden crypto ‘signatures’ that would allow one to determine if any later manipulation took place.
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The day Trump is subpoena’d by a grand jury to prove that yes, that is his wang, and yes, it is that small, will be a memorable day in jurisprudence, yes indeed.
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Gotta work the ol’ blockchain in there somewhere…
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As some have pointed out, fakery of this kind - with still photographs - has been an issue for quite a while now, yet photography isn’t dead, photographic evidence is still considered convincing more often than its called out as fake, etc.
WIRED did a profile of The Fake Detective in 2003, but he’d been doing his thing for a few years at that point. The fakes he dealt with were pasted together parts of publicly-available photographs, usually a photo of a famous person’s face combined with a photo of someone else’s body. His most convincing way of debunking such things was to find the various bits of source material and show the similarity with the fake.
That approach will still be possible with video, and it could be that the same “AI” technologies that make fakes easy to make will also assist in debunking them, by finding the source ingredients.
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Apparently some of these fakes are being pawned off as real celebrity sex tapes. Once people become aware of the existence of this kind of software, hopefully it’ll have the opposite effect - all stolen celebrity video and revenge porn will be assumed to be fake. I mean, I hope that’ll be the case, because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Now women are being harassed and losing their jobs because someone released a private video; if anyone could fake such a video, no one with any kind of social media presence (i.e. with sufficient photos or videos of themselves out there) would ever be safe, if it was taken seriously.
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Everyone exists in a different world and has a different idea of what better is.
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So, it’s porn vs. Bitcoin:
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I expect fake kidnapping, ransom, murder, and torture videos to follow. The types of spam emails we get now could take on a whole new level of threat in the not so distant future.
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In Mark Leyner’s novel Et Tu Babe there is a device called The Schwarzeneggerizer. I look forward to this:
“OK. I’d like My Fair Lady with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Professor Henry Higgins, Amadeus with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Salieri instead of F. Murray Abraham, The Diary of Anne Frank with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Anne Frank, West Side Story with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Tony, It’s a Wonderful Life with Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Jimmy Stewart, Ghandi with Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Ben Kingsley, Bird with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Charlie Parker instead of Forest Whitaker…There’s a documentary called Imagine about John Lennon…It’ll be Schwarzenegger playing with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and Schwarzenegger doing those peace things in bed with Yoko Ono and everything…”
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alright, well, I took a peek…for the sake of research. But seriously, I am not necessarily porn averse, though I’ll admit to being easily squicked out by a lot of porn. The whole subreddit made me sad. The effect has the look of a bizarre, very thin, translucent, often glitchy skin-mask pulled over the original performer’s head. It reminded me of psychos in movies who hire a prostitute to dress up as a woman they are obsessed with.
A sad and scary part of it is that it illustrates the fundamental objectification at work, that to these viewers, the sexual personality (or other personality traits for that matter) of the target actress don’t matter so much as just seeing a weird simalacrum of their facial features engaged in an abstract version of intercourse. There are many ways that this feels rapey and invasive, but, one novel way that it does is that it removes any curiosity or concern about how that person would tend to and prefer to have sex, how they would react to things, and what they would want. It’s a high-tech version of “put a bag over theor heads and they’re all the same.”
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However, those crypto signatures need a backdoor for law enforcement.
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Took a look, too. There sure were some terribly bad ones, but also some I found more convincing among them. Might be a case of know-how and optimization, unfortunately. Either that, or my eyes are less keen.
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Would you settle for a Nick Cage-izer?
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Moderately disturbing. A little bit too uncanny valley for me. I’ll wait for the tech to improve.
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FWIW I thought this was real:
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You can tell by the pixels.
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if that was possible then unbreakable DRM would be possible, but one of the constant refrains of this blog is that unbreakable DRM is not possible but also that Trek is really cool. The BoingBoing Conundrum.
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