
Memers are making deepfakes, and things are getting weird - jpindar
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/28/1007746/ai-deepfakes-memes/
======
echelon
Deep Fakes are merely the next iteration of Photoshop. Before the 90's, faking
photographs required extremely labor intensive processes performed by experts.
Multiple exposure tricks, splicing, painting.

One could have expected that the development of Photoshop would have been
hailed as the end of trustworthy information, but instead we got memes and
photo manipulations such as [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shark-attacks-
navy-diver/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shark-attacks-navy-diver/)

I think Deep Fakes are good. They're going to breathe new life into media and
make it significantly easier to make films, music, and all kinds of art.

The public will come to understand AI-generated media as a part of daily life.
People are not _that_ stupid. The media (the only ones decrying this) need to
stop with the Luddite hysteria.

I've actually been quite involved with deep fakes and wrote a few pretty big
sites to help democratize the tech (the average person can't run Google colabs
and Python) :

[https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes) (over 40 celebrity and cartoon voices)

[https://trumped.com](https://trumped.com) (just Donald Trump)

I've already got a real time voice conversion software nearly finished. I can
do Discord/Team Speak and talk as Trump and Gilbert Gottfried.

I'll probably do the same for video soon.

~~~
theptip
> merely the next iteration of Photoshop

I think you're significantly understating the impact here.

You're talking mostly about content-creation, and in this context there are a
lot of positives; I certainly agree with your statement:

> They're going to breathe new life into media and make it significantly
> easier to make films, music, and all kinds of art.

BUT. I don't think you can, with a straight face, say that there are going to
be no negative impacts of this technology. You make a claim that this is just
like Photoshopping in the 90s, but I think the key difference here is that in
the '90s, there was a fallback medium; when photos became unreliable, you
still had video, which couldn't easily be faked.

Looking forward to the next 5-10 years, how does anyone figure out what's true
when photos, video, and voice can all be trivially faked by anyone? What
reliably medium can we fall back to? This could lead to a real epistemological
crisis!

> The public will come to understand AI-generated media as a part of daily
> life. People are not that stupid.

My problem with this position is that it hand-waves away some pretty
fundamental changes to the fabric of our reality. How exactly do you propose
that people are going to understand the world, post-'fakes? If any video you
see in your twitter feed could be fake, how can anyone make any inferences
about the world outside of their own immediate direct experience?

~~~
megameter
There was a time before video, before photographs, before writing even.

So, not new at all. We've got thousands of years experience in dealing with
truth under limited circumstances with false claims. Consensus reality was a
passing fad.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think this is actually a good thing. The more the average person is familiar
with deepfake tech, the less likely they are to get misled.

~~~
SQueeeeeL
I like the philosophy, but tricking people isn't very hard. Apparently, some
shaking camera footage of a computer monitor was all it took to discredit a
political dissident [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/world/asia/cambodia-
faceb...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/world/asia/cambodia-facebook-
disinformation.html)

~~~
mythobit
It seems like as soon as it confirms their bias they are willing to ignore if
something is real or not.

~~~
Spivak
You say "they" like this isn't something that every single person in the world
does constantly -- nobody is immune to it. Confirmation bias is just a
derogatory term for people having priors.

~~~
makomk
Yeah, and it really is _everyone_. For example, remember when the White House
Press Secretary tweeted a video that had apparently been doctored to make it
look like a journalist had attacked one of their staffers? There was a really
clear, convincing comparison that overlaid a semi-transparent version of that
video on the original, showing that it leapt ahead in the part where his hand
went near her because it had been sped up to make the interaction look more
violent. Many people spread it, including YouTube debunker Captain Disillusion
with this message: "Getting lots of requests on the topic, but there's nothing
for me to examine. This person has examined it, very simply and clearly. And I
concur."
[https://twitter.com/cdisillusion/status/1060564297103917056](https://twitter.com/cdisillusion/status/1060564297103917056)

Now, having compared the two videos myself and not found anything like this,
obviously I had a look at it - and worked out the trick almost immediately.
The comparison had the overlay ahead of the original by the same number of
frames the whole way through from frame 1, but it was so faint that during
normal viewing the difference was only visible in fast-moving parts, creating
the illusion it leapt ahead in those parts. Easiest trick imaginable, could
probably have been done trivially with film a century ago, and fooled someone
who'd built a career and reputation around debunking faked videos along with
many others.

(As for the White House video, that's a long story but the short version is
that it seemed to be pretty much exactly what it purported to be, and the only
actual "doctoring" was probably the obvious, intentional stuff like repeating
parts of the video zoomed in.)

------
tjr225
This doesn't look very convincing.

Also, I didn't know you could run python in google drive.

~~~
soared
>There’s a telltale wonkiness to the faces in the videos made with this
algorithm, which makes its handiwork easy to recognize; that is part of the
deepfakes’ humor. These imperfections—and the surrealist quality

Part of most meme's style is purposeful bad photo editing, so the poor
deepfake quality is part of the format.

------
throwaway743
Relevant shameless art project plug. Nlp+voice clone model of Joe Biden.
Streaming on hold until interactive chat is tested and complete.

Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of either of the two parties. Trump version to come.

[https://twitch.tv/biden_unleashed](https://twitch.tv/biden_unleashed)

