Yeah, I worked with an Alex Jones listener at the time. I wish I had then known about the problems with Xerox copiers and how they by default screw up letters and numbers when they scan.
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There’s been multiple announcements of this sort of thing lately. From gpu makers, special effects software companies, universities. All automated lip sync and speach generation from previous recorded samples. And each announcement get greet with the same "the is the end of video evidence " sort of response.
And frankly it doesn’t really concern me yet. First these things have existed for a while (being especially common in vidja games). These announcements are about improvements and more advanced applications. Second not one of them has yet been all that convincing.
Look at the next nearest equivalent. CGI special effects. It’s been around for at least 50 years. And there are obvious tells. From clear flaws in lighting and animation anyone can spot. To markers in meta and encoding data. And less obvious technical markers in the images themselves. And it’s expensive. The best Hollywood can muster for replicating a person (see Rogue one) with half billion dollar budgets and crews of thousands of experts is easily suitable as fake. For the time being (and probably a long time being) you won’t be making fraud videos of Obama secretly. It’ll cost too much and involve too many people to keep it quiet.
Even as the tech has trickled down in more affordable fashion. It’s still really easy to peg. It takes knowledgeable people at best a few hours to break down and debunk all those fake cgi UFO and minster videos on YouTube. Even with all the tricks and techniques for obscuring lack of quality, hiding obvious artifacts and markers, and removing meta data or encoding info. And non experts in video or programming can usually do it just as quick by identifying the publicly available sources used to craft them.
In short we’ve got a long time before this is an issue. And once it is there will clearly establish and obvious ways of telling if it’s fake.
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I got the DVD set. I was kind of underwhelmed; most of the “hacking” consists of taking over surveillance cameras. There is little notion of a “cyberspace” or information services. (What there is looks like a Teletext service.)
OTOH, there are a few great episodes. The “Whackettes” one, for example. And the last-run-on-network episode about a bootleg educational system servicing poor kids on the fringes. That one ends with a scene that is wonderful way to end the series.
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It’s remarkable how big of a difference the dataset size and render time makes…in the final three examples where they were varied, I found the highest quality version incredibly convincing, even having been primed to notice the mistakes from all the previous versions in the video. I definitely feel that in an intentionally malicious context with the resources to craft a high-quality fake, I’d be fooled.
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The end of idiots using a Youtube link as alleged “evidence” to support complete nonsense??
One can hope!
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I am of the opinion that Youtube videos are not proof of anything substantial besides how amusing certain sudden injuries can be and how lonely some cat owners are.
And with Lyrebird they can use recordings of someone to get the voice right, then generate whatever words they want… so, once they get the lip-syncing down (and we can be assured that’s “merely” a technical obstacle) we’ll really have some interesting times!
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yes, as someone who was born deaf and can hear now, I can see him skipping all sorts of sands. Particularly the ones involving the tongue or curling the lips.
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Or God’s. Particularly when they’re on God’s side.
The researchers say that even though the video looks real, it’s easy to reverse engineer it and find out it’s a fake. But will this always be the case?
It’s irrelevant. Here’s how it’ll go.
FAKE OBAMA VIDEO: “I very much enjoy carnal relations with pigs.”
40% OF THE COUNTRY: ZOMG 0BUMMER’S A PIGFUCKER, THERE’S VIDEO PROOF
EVERY COMPUTER SCIENTIST ON THE PLANET: No, wait! The checksums don’t check out! It’s a fake! We’d stake our lives on it!
39.99% OF THE COUNTRY: ZOMG 0BUMMER’S A PIGFUCKER, THERE’S VIDEO PROOF
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Meh, who cares? You don’t need to alter video of Obama saying a thing. They can just claim he said it, and that works just fine. Likewise, having, say, Trump on video saying or doing something horrifying doesn’t do anything either.
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Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
And that’s sort of the only real concern here. The pearl clutching response is all about the death of confirmable truth. But that won’t really be an issue, at least not for a long time (if at all). There are already tons of people who are insistent that obvious fakes and falsehoods are 100% true. And there were long before modern technology existed.
I know some one who refuses to watch the Daily Show or acknowledge Jon Stewart because he saw something (swears to god he saw the video) where Stewart said on national TV that 9/11 first responders deserved it. Which makes literally no sense.
I’ve seen people swear up and down that THIS VIDEO OF AN ALIEN IS REAL. Even after its been firmly established that said video is of an easily recognizable action figure.
People are just prone to this sort of thinking.
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We saw Adobe doing arbitrary text to speech from samples just last year with VoCo.
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He did say that they deserve something…
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Most of what the controllers did wasn’t hacking but using high level access to just work the infrastructure.
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It worked extremely well for Giles and O’Keefe back in 2009.
Let’s creep in the frozen aisle and think one thought,
Trick the bridesmaid to get her to take it off
She’ll take the mushroom out, unzip the windflap and love!
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Dude basically retired from TV to make that happen. Point that out to the person in question and you get a repeated assertions that just after 9/11 Stewart was on national TV celebrating the deaths of cops and firemen in the recovery effort. Where the hell that idea comes from I have no clue. Person in question is generally a sensible, even handed person. Doesn’t buy into conspiracy theory. Agrees with Stewart on most things. And only very occasionally listens to Rush Limbaugh to annoy other people.
I have a friend who resembles that too. The leaps in logic (or lack thereof) can be extremely disconcerting.
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