These boffins' deepfake AI vids are next-gen. But don't take our word for it. Why not ask Zuck or Kim Kardashian... Once again, artificially intelligent software has been demonstrated automatically editing videos of talking heads to make them say things they haven’t actually uttered. And it's getting better at it. Today, it's altering footage of boffins, and Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian, but next it could be you. Probably not. But …
The only down side to making it publicly available is that all the other people currently researching the same techniques can cross-check their work and maybe gain insights into other solutions, thus improving their own.
" It was scary stuff, but radically advanced. It gave us ideas, took us in new directions. I mean, things we would have never..." - Miles Dyson
you can't be serious, they didn't create them to keep it on an offline hard drive, they made them to make handsome, hopefully HUGE profit by selling their idea to an "undisclosed" buyer. All their "concern about such deception and misuse" is the usual hypocritical pretenses.
The very frequency with which these things emerge these days prove it's almost inconsequential what you do with this kind of tech; the point is, assuming you can just bury it or something and the world will be safe for the foreseeable future is flat out delusional. Someone else right behind you will perfect it very soon after you, and will end up using it for whatever you didn't want to see it used. Which is not to say you should dump it on the world because "oh well", but you should be aware it makes almost zero difference whether or not you do.
Justice can be very slow, the first time I saw the announcement that Bill Posters would be prosecuted was in the '60s and I have seen that announcement again recently, so has justice been done before and the current announcement is a case of recidivism or is the original case taking a long time to get to court?
>>>rated to be real 59.6 per cent of the time. So, yeah, they’re not convincing enough right now to dupe most people.<<<
I may be out on a limb here but 59.6% does equal 'most' to me, it certainly a lot more than the 40.4% left who called fake or don't know.
Or to put it bluntly, if you can convince 59% of the population, then you can get yourself elected.
Although given that not everyone bothers to vote (fucking useless slackers, just spoil your ballot if you don't like any of them but at least fucking participate), you only need about 30% of the population to get elected in the UK (The Conservative Party got about 29% of the total population to get into power in 2017 [src]).
not everyone bothers to vote (fucking useless slackers, just spoil your ballot if you don't like any of them but at least fucking participate)
Why should anyone waste their time spoiling a ballet when it changes nothing and has no effect?
Merely participating perpetuates "the system is working just fine and there's no need to change anything".
It would be different if the number of spoiled ballot papers were more publicised but, until they are, driving down turnout to such a level that it's obvious the system is not fit for purpose is the most effective way to have discontent widely observed.
Spoilt ballot counts are given in UK elections, it's just that the number is rarely of any significance and hence ignored by the media. If you can convince enough people to spoil their papers to make a difference you might as well stand for election yourself and put a voice to the problem.
"Why should anyone waste their time spoiling a ballet when it changes nothing and has no effect?"
On its own it has no effect and shouldn't do, but if everyone who doesn't vote spoiled their ballot paper it would have a very significant effect.
If you don't vote, nothing can be inferred from it. Not all people fail to cast a vote because they don't believe in the system, so you can't say X people didn't vote so the system must be broken. Having an election where a large proportion of votes were spoiled would send out a signal things were broken.
If 25% of the electorate spoiled their ballot and the highest candidate only had 20% of the vote, they would have a very hard time justifying the candidate should take up a seat at Parliament. Having 25% of people not participate can never be allowed to mean anything, as the meaning will be inferred by the people in power and we don't want that.
So if you want to change the system, participate in the current one, otherwise don't complain you're being ignored.
"It would be different if the number of spoiled ballot papers were more publicised but, until they are, driving down turnout to such a level that it's obvious the system is not fit for purpose is the most effective way to have discontent widely observed."
What would you suggest we replace our democracy with, comrade?
Why should anyone waste their time spoiling a ballet when it changes nothing and has no effect?
Vote for some obscure 3rd-party candidate then. Heck, your vote is worth more to *them* than to the "major" parties the mindless masses are voting for (such as getting enough votes to gain official status for that party).
You don't need to fool many people at all, because people WANT to believe something bad about the "other guy". Even if it the video looks a bit odd to many of them, and some people are saying "using analysis program XYZ it is clearly a fake" if the "other guy" is on video doing/saying something bad they'll believe it.
A lot of that will be because the hardcore believers (who would follow their guy even if he murdered someone in front of them) shout the loudest and will proclaim anything criticizing the legitimacy of the video is propaganda from the other side because he got caught. That's the amplification you get from social media, the hardcore believers are the ones posting thousands of times to get their message across and drown out more reasonable voices. That makes it easier for those reasonable voices to question themselves and come to accept the view of the hardcore believers.
So, deep fakes are getting good enough that they're convincing. Good enough that you can make anyone say or do anything.
This is great for privacy.
After a few years of embarrassment, people will stop believing video and we can all go back to doing whatever the hell we want without fear that someone is recording us. Huzzah!
They're not. What you're seeing is SVG markup: in this case, it's describing a drawing path (you have the back end of the <path> tag). You'll see commas as well as periods. The numbers are actually floats and seem to be following a pattern of FROM,TO FROM,TO...
May be this is not...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/12/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-privacy-emails-report
"the edited videos were rated to be real 59.6 per cent of the time. So, yeah, they’re not convincing enough right now to dupe most people."
It sounds very much like it does dupe most people.
Even if it was less than 50%, you could say the same of Donald Trump - but look where we are anyway...
This technology, while very dangerous, does have one potential legitimate use.
Movies could now be dubbed in other languages without worrying about making the new dialogue match how the actors' lips moved in the original. So more accurate translations of the dialogue could be used, and yet the actors would look to be saying their lines with completely accurate speech movements, as if the movie were originally made in the target language.
This would make a better moviegoing experience available to people speaking less-popular languages that don't have large economies to support a large movie-making industry.
Movies could now be dubbed in other languages without worrying about making the new dialogue match how the actors' lips moved in the original. So more accurate translations of the dialogue could be used, and yet the actors would look to be saying their lines with completely accurate speech movements, as if the movie were originally made in the target language.
Whatever was wrong with subtitling? I much prefer that to dubbing. Must be weird watching dubbed stuff and hearing same voice associated with several different actors (as I seriously doubt there is sufficiently large pool of just voice actors)
As a bonus, subtitling might even help learning a foreign language.
It's quite simply not for everyone. You see it with anime, with camps pretty evenly divided between reading and hearing it in English. I'm personally of the dub camp, though thanks to DVDs and BDs the argument's been settled by simply including all options and letting the viewer decide. I'm like that with mainstream movies, too: I prefer English but wouldn't mind roaming once in a while.
Finally got around to actually look at the Zuck video - voice/tone discrepancies aside, hooooooooly crap is it bad. The mouth movement is barely in the most tenuous of relationships with the sound - if I were watching this at home I'd be reaching for the "shift voice sync +/-" button after the third second of it, and it still wouldn't match. I have no doubt lots of people would take it at face value, but anyone feeling a modicum of scepticism should immediately realize it's a) a fake and b) a pretty bad one.
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