
Fake Barack Obama delivers a PSA about “deep fakes” using a deep fake video - jmheinkle
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed
======
white-flame
> _It 's a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources_

That's the rub, isn't it? Who's a "trusted" new source? All the major players
have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Lots of people therefore
consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don't to be
more "trusted" in response.

We shouldn't "rely" on single points of perceived trust, especially in this
massive for-profit, for-power media industry. We need to be broadly informed
from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable
sense of what's going on.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
The problem lies in the motive. News organizations are (not surprisingly)
entirely motivated by profit. Breaking even is not enough. Doing well is not
enough. Improving profit drastically quarter over quarter is the goal.

To do that, you cannot simply "provide news" anymore. You need conflict. You
need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that
induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the
details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to
increase it.

It's no longer a partisan issue. I'm 40 years old. I remember when you had to
really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and
look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It's almost surreal. They were still
biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some
emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It's
weird to watch now.

A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the
leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the
start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has
caught up. Because they had to.

It's a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can't trust any of them anymore.
Not 100%.

~~~
colordrops
> News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit.

That's an over-simplication.

Sure, Jeff Bezos probably wants to make a profit with his purchase of the
Washington Post. But the profits there are probably not his main objective as
they are too small to make much of a difference to a person of Bezo's wealth.

Bezo's goal is to have a mouthpiece to push his agendas, such as pushing
Amazon and trashing Musk properties. So you say that the purpose in doing that
is to make more money. But the problem with that line of thinking is that you
could reduce almost any action to "profit". You could reach further back and
go a level lower and say that making profit is motivated by reproductive
fitness, and thus "News organizations are entirely motivated by sex". But at
some point you have to let go of the circuitous route from action to final
motivation and focus on the immediate drivers of an action.

Politics, money, sex, job security, prestige, etc all all motivations for news
organizations, as well as many other organizations.

~~~
ggg9990
Thinking that Bezos wanted WaPo to advocate for Amazon and trash Musk is to
treat him as a rich person, not the wealthy person that he actually is.

~~~
kelnos
Could you explain what you mean by the difference in a person who is "rich"
vs. "wealthy"? I don't think that's coming through in your comment.

~~~
ggg9990
It’s a question of mindset, but often correlated with scale. A rich person is
a successful car dealership owner who has a net worth of $50 million, drives a
Lamborghini on the weekends, lives in an 10,000 square foot mansion, has a
sweet private movie theater, and owns a 60 foot powerboat. His economic
activity is focused on consumption. He wants to leave his kids enough money to
be rich for life. I can’t give many examples because these people are soon
forgotten, but Donald Trump was almost one of these guys until he got some new
ideas late in life.

A wealthy person has a net worth of $100 billion, is driven around in a
Mercedes S600, has a 120 foot sailboat, goes to private parties at Sundance,
values their time above everything else, and is focused on his legacy and
place in history. His economic activity is focused on investment. He wants to
leave his kids with enough money, connections, and capabilities to become
among the great American families, shaping policy and public life for
centuries. Think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates.

------
walrus01
Here's what I'm worried about with fake video. If you think fake Russian bot
news in US politics is a problem, consider the following.

Facebook is increasingly populated with a large number of new users from
developing nations who are basically one or two generations removed from
subsistence farming. The level of naivete and rumor spreading that you can see
in Pakistani Facebook is alarming. Now combine nation-state funded agitprop
campaigns with naive users and fake video. Read the following article and
imagune how much worse it could be if a malicious organization with funding
decided to further weaponize content on myanmar-oriented Facebook groups and
pages.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-
faceb...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-
hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis)

~~~
adamson
Why should we assume that being one or two generations removed from
subsistence farming implies that a user is naive? There are plenty of naive
persons worldwide who grew up in middle class households in the West who are
just as naive. I don't think the connection is that clean.

~~~
walrus01
As an example:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-
facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/)

My spouse, who is a native fluent speaker of the languages, follows a large
number of Dari and Urdu language Facebook groups and friends. If you think
_Americans_ have a problem with reposting stupid things that can be easily
debunked by Snopes, you would not _believe_ the amount of naivete on display
daily in those language formats. It's hard to explain unless you've seen it
firsthand.

People who are one generation removed from subsistence farming are not less
intelligent than others. However, they and the family have had a lot less time
to view mass media bullshit (tv cable news, internet, etc) and develop the
mental callouses necessary to understand the nature of media biases, who owns
what media organizations. And in general have had less formal secondary
education at the post high school level that teaches critical thinking,
skepticism and gain some degree of innoculation against propaganda.

~~~
cheez
Your example is literally of a farmer who is 0 generations removed from
sustenance farming.

~~~
walrus01
And on a scale of 1 to 10, since I doubt he knows of the _existence_ of
advanced video fakery techniques, how likely do you think it is that he could
be completely fooled by a faked video of a Myanmar domestic celebrity or
politician?

~~~
cheez
I'm saying that people 1 or 2 generations removed from the farming WILL get
it.

------
ezoe
I don't know, for this type of fake video, you don't even need a face mapping
or a voice mapping implemented by deep learning.

Just take any random Barack Obama video which we have plenty of, use similar
male voice, or copy&paste convenient Obama's voice without context, and some
people believe it.

It won't fool everybody but that is not that important. Some people still
believe it and act accordingly(Pizzagate conspiracy theory) and that's more
than enough to achieve the malicious intent.

------
minimaxir
BuzzFeed's article with the backstory behind this video:
[https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-
pe...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-peele-psa-
video-buzzfeed)

(Disclosure: I work for BuzzFeed)

~~~
passivepinetree
Off topic, but what is working for Buzzfeed like? I used to hate everything
Buzzfeed-branded, but it seems like it's been improving journalistically
recently. How are the working conditions? Do you believe in your purpose?

~~~
eropple
Even "lately" is unfair, I think. They hired Mark Schoofs (ProPublica) in 2013
and have steadily been doing _work_ since probably even before that.

------
jdoliner
I think people are seeing the risks of people creating fake videos but there's
another risk that I think is being overlooked. As convincing fake videos
become a reality and articles like this inform the general public of that
reality it becomes incredibly easy to dismiss any inconvenient videos as deep
fakes. If Mitt Romney had made his 47% comment in the present climate he
likely would have been able to skate by saying that was a deep fake, created
by political adversaries.

------
Mc_Big_G
Many people already fool themselves by simply refusing to fact-check anything
that doesn't support their biases. If you thought "alternative facts" were bad
now, just wait for this tech to hit 100% believability.

~~~
aphextron
The disturbing fact is that this stuff is progressing in near real-time. A
year ago these things were still totally unpassable. Now this Obama video
could very easily fool a good percentage of people on mobile. I've no doubt it
will be imperceptible within another year or two.

~~~
millzlane
It doesn't take much for people to panic.

------
ppod
The voice sounds wrong, is the voice AI? I'm sure I've seen better AI voice
demos than this --- though the video is impressive.

~~~
tschwimmer
The voice is just Jordan Peele (comedian) doing a Barack Obama impression. The
'AI' is in the video, specifically the lip syncing.

~~~
comex
What’ll really be interesting is if someone gets deep voice conversion to
produce a plausible output, and combines it with this technique. As is, I
think it’s still not enough to really fool people, at least with that
particular voice actor... But people really tend to trust voices.

~~~
georgemcbay
Adobe has demoed software for this (interestingly, Jordan Peele also in this
video):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw)

Whether the demo is accurate or massaged, I can't say as I've never used the
software myself. But if it is anywhere near as good as their demo suggests, it
produces output that is more natural than the current deepfakes video outputs
(though it also isn't perfect).

------
nlawalker
Can the misleading headline be fixed? The actual headline is more clear about
what this is.

~~~
jmheinkle
Added “Fake” in front of Obama. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

------
tbodt
Can we get the link changed to the non-amp version?
[https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-
new...](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-
barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed)

------
illustrioussuit
Non-Amp (Canonical) URL: [https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-
fake-new...](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-
video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed)

Speedtest comparison:
[https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X...](https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X6_31f1012439e81cf8edeff5385b1f6cfb,180417_JG_9bac43c1583615cbfa464953736f2861)

~~~
gowld
Another comparison (goes the other way after 4.5s)
[https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_F...](https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_FK_cee1cf11d92a90a01c8354ae88bef2d3,180417_PE_d9c937eab738e6e85f82ee1253f72094)

------
paul7986
that doesn’t sound like Obama.. ppl would definitely comment wondering why he
sounds different.

~~~
kelnos
Right, it's just Jordan Peele doing an impression. I agree that a lot of
people would immediately notice the difference and get that it's fake, but I
expect there's also a significant number of people who wouldn't.

------
TillE
That sounds like a really bad Obama impersonator. The video is OK but still
obviously fake.

If you look at the progression of film CGI, with its persistent flaws despite
massive budgets, there's no reason to suspect that indistinguishable fakes are
coming any time soon.

~~~
da_chicken
We've been able to fake voice recordings for decades. Doing it again is not
the impressive part of the video. It's a tech demo for the video showing how
close it is to working. The point of the video is that this was made with
Adobe After Effects and FakeApp and 56 hours of rendering time. COTS software
on COTS hardware.

You won't even need a good impersonator, however. The same technology behind
FakeApp that blends this video together could be used to blend _audio_
together.

This is supposed to look fake and sound fake because you're supposed to see it
as fake. What happens when that isn't true anymore?

------
otakucode
I'm a little disappointed that it took this long for people to get over the
'OMG celebrity porno' thing about deepfakes to actually start dealing with the
real potential consequences. Deepfakes open up an amazingly large list of
questions, from the mundane to the truly challenging. That someone will see
imagery that fulfills a sexual fantasy is, by far, one of the most trite and
harmless possible uses of this technology.

Realtime video synthesis has been around for awhile. I recall reading in 1999
that if you watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, the advertisements on the
buildings you see won't be the advertisements that are actually present in
real life. They were being replaced on the fly with different ads. Now, it's
basically possible to replace people. Everywhere that people appear. And this
isn't something we can deal with simply by going off of gut reaction and
intuition, it really raises significant questions.

Who will be the first politician to use a younger version of themselves to
promote themselves? Which celebrity will be first to replace not the face, but
their body, in film to make themselves more attractive? Which movie studio
will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right
they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? Or
maybe they'll only bring in the actual celebrity for close shots?

This can be done on commodity hardware, and will only get easier. It will be
used for schoolyard bullying, for amazingly uplifting and important artistic
works, for debasement and aggrandizement. It's one of these things that we've
got to do some thinking about as a society.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and
> then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just
> faking them into it?

I believe that studios have done with dead actors. Paul Walker and the guy who
played Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One being examples that came immediately to
mind.

~~~
pixel_fcker
That’s using fully digital versions of those actors though. We’re a long way
from being able to use AI for those kind of performances yet.

