The future of fake news is real-time video manipulation

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/31/the-future-of-fake-news-is-rea.html

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Happy-go-lucky billionaire masterminds use fake news to “fix” the world. What could go wrong?

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We’ve come a long way from Clutch Cargo.

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They’re going to put Bad Lip Reading out of business!

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Section Nine will handle the incident from here.

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Remember when The Running Man had video manipulation and we thought the future was going to be scary?

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I really wish I could find an image of the Trojan sheep from the particular episode but I’ll drop this particular hero from twenty minutes into the future:

Episode in question:
http://www.maxheadroom.com/index.php?title=Episode_ABC.1.6:_"Blanks"

Carter: "Let's change the course of history: the Trojan Sheep."
Bryce: (laughs)
Carter: "Aaaaaa."
Bryce: "Baaaaa."
Carter: "Baaaaa."
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When video is no longer authoritative by itself, it’ll be the credibility of the source for the video that’ll be the important thing - and that’s the bit that Americans seem to be bad at figuring out. We’re so screwed.

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Yeah, it’s technically possible, but this report is really overblown and alarmist.

I was just skyping with former president Bush, and he said this technology is decades away from being ready for market.

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What will one do when almost any kind of news and any evidence supporting the validity of that news can be faked? As willing as people are to believe fake news now, at least we can turn up contradictory evidence, or lack of supporting evidence. When evidence is devalued and news is worthless, will anyone have any idea what’s happening in the world in even a general sense? Firsthand experience or word-of-mouth second or thirdhand from friends who are actually in the affected area would be the only way to know for sure.

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Imagine if it had been used in the recent election. Whoever had this software could have shown Trump admitting to all sorts of crimes - tax evasion, sexual assault, whatever. They might even have made him lose the popular vote.

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Wow, that’s quite impressive.

time for law schools to fire up Fair Witness LLM programs

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Seems like every day some new piece of technology comes along that makes me look at Luddites in a whole new light.

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I agree. The biggest threat from this is not that people will use it to create false images, but the fact that its very possibility allows anyone to dismiss anything as having been doctored.

The second threat that I can foresee is that this will become another technological paywall opportunity, when only verified video can be truly trusted, there will have to be trusted gatekeepers, with some kind of DRM-like signing on media to prove authenticity…

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Goddammit, science! Stop being so freaking awesome!

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I see what you did there!

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I was just struck how all the facial image mappings looked like family members of Commander Data.

stubs toe on critical thinking tool

looks down

oh that’s where I left my iconoclasm.

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