
Ask HN: Any solution to photoshop and deepfakes? - lmilcin
Hi community,<p>With deepfakes around it is going to be really difficult to sort truth from everything else. Is there any effort at righting this situation back to where I, as an information consumer, could establish veracity of the images and movies that I am receiving from the Internet?
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tlb
I predict: No.

It's been possible for a long time for big-budget studios to make convincing
fakes. The new thing is that it's being commoditized so anyone can do it.
Studios had to worry about being sued for libel or appropriation of
likenesses, but individuals with an axe to grind won't be deterred.

We lived for a short time in a world where amateur recordings were more
convincing than professional ones. Before the 90s, fake-news photos were more
likely to be amateur since professionals had some sense of ethics and, while
they enjoyed making fictional photos, generally labeled then as such.

So we're going back to the world where only the professional reputation of the
photographer is a guarantee of authenticity. It may be better overall.

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indescions_2018
A "deepfake" generated on an nvidia gtx 1080 gaming laptop in hours is not
fooling any expert level human. Or even a median one. And would undoubtedly
contain compression artefacts detectable via image analysis.

Training a custom deep generative model on massive prior data that can then
synthesize image output would require significant cloud GPU resources. And be
beyond the level of commitment of all but the most determined of
counterfeiters.

However, if this indeed becomes a problem. Propaganda from bad state actors,
for example. The real solution is exhaustive "reverse" video and image search.
Given the output, determine which patches were sampled by the generator. A
perfectly reversible process ;)

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znpy
No, because it's not a problem. It's just a thing that we have to acknowledge:
it's possible and someone will do something nasty with it, as with everything
and every new invention.

Also: you are already unable to "establish veracity of the images and movies
that I am receiving from the Internet" so why bother?

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earenndil
An interesting solution I read, I think here on HN, was to make a blockchain-
based system where the hashes of videos were placed, thus proving that a given
video was produced before a certain date.

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shamirallibhai
I have been thinking about this problem for awhile.

The short answer to your question is yes, it is possible. We have a prototype,
called Amber, that establishes authenticity for audio and video recordings by
fingerprinting and tracking provenance. Even if the video is cut or combined
with other content, we can tell you whether it is the original
(notwithstanding the edit in length). It is lightweight and needs the recorder
to participate.

For most people and most video consumption purposes, it is not pertinent. But
for certain companies and certain areas of the government, establishing fact
or minimizing trust in visual/aural evidence is critical, especially when you
have stakeholders who are independent or even antagonistic.

We are early stages and seeking to test it out with potential customers and
their use case applications. The splash page is here:
[https://ambervideo.co](https://ambervideo.co) and we hope to release the demo
web / mobile apps soon.

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liamcardenas
I wrote a longish post explaining some of the methods we could use to
differentiate between real from fake content — but this led me to think of a
more interesting scenario.

As society integrates more and more with cyberspace, we will have new metadata
to verify events.

This is even happening now. Is it more likely that you won’t get hired at a
job because of a photo of you doing something bad, or from a social media
post? Most likely the latter.

Imagine a world wherein all our interactions are digitized— we would likely
have no choice other than radical transparency, as all of our actions would be
as traceable as our current day social media activity.

This increased amount of data associated with our actions allows for more
sophisticated verification techniques, and ultimately would render video
obsolete as a form of evidence.

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throwawayyawawo
It seems like a great opportunity to finally do something useful with
blockchain.

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sgwae
How do u serve high resolution video on the blockchain

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billconan
maybe just save the perceptual hash ?

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Assossa
I don't believe much can be done with amateur videos, but official videos of
celebrities could be cryptographically signed with a key only known by that
celebrity/their PR manager. That of course could lead to celebrities not
signing unfavorable videos. Also the average info consumer wouldn't bother
downloading and confirming the signature.

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coralreef
I'm sure there are image forensics that could be done, ex. thresholding the
image and looking for odd patterns.

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konschubert
Learn which sources to trust

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yakitori
That's a form of appeal to authority. Something you are taught as a freshman
not to do.

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konschubert
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy when making an argument. The term has
nothing to do with how we humans source information.

As a matter of fact, most of the information we consider true comes from
sources we trust.

Have you ever run the measurements and calculations yourself to prove yourself
that the planets and the sun aren't rotating around the earth?

I've studied Physics and I sure haven't.

Unless you're studying math I'm pretty sure you're trusting some sources.

