
Tackling the misinformation epidemic with “In Event of Moon Disaster” - MindGods
http://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-tackles-misinformation-in-event-of-moon-disaster-0720
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gambler
The very idea that deep fakes are somewhere near the top of the list of
significant concerns for the media right now is in itself disinformation. And
it seems to be very persistent. I keep seeing articles and videos about it all
the time. Someone is pumping significant amount of money into this narrative.

The irony is that all this "anti-disinformation" research will clearly be used
to run better disinformation campaign if/when the primitive shit being used
right now stops working.

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nsnow70
Care to elaborate?

~~~
owenmarshall
I can't speak for OP, but consider: the very strong scientific consensus is
that the earth is warming and that warming is caused by human activity; the
best-case study I've seen showed 75% consensus among Americans and that's
sharply up over previous years.

The gap between scientific consensus and common belief has been driven by
"regular" misinformation campaigns: promotions of conspiracy theories,
manufactured doubt, cherry-picking of claims.

Why worry about the novel when the basics are still working?

~~~
mudsnail
What would you think about a deep fake depicting secret video footage (from a
cell phone) of real climate scientists at at a real conference discussing how
they are manipulating the data to convince the public and the lawmakers that
climate change is a real phenomena. This deep fake would contain real people
who really are climate scientists who really did attend a conference together.
Its just that this discussion never took place. It was created by deep fake
technology.

This type of scenario seems like a very real concern to me. You can extend
this example into practically any hot button issue.

~~~
pessimizer
I wouldn't think it would matter at all. Nobody would know who the scientists
were, so you wouldn't even need to use real ones for the same effect. I don't
even think most warming deniers would really care, and it wouldn't even spend
a week in the news cycle, if aired at all. Do a video of them sacrificing a
child to Beelzebub, and maybe you'd get some attention.

Just telling everybody that you were told that this meeting happened through
secret messages from a secret high-level traitor from the Soros Foundation
would work just as well. It would work on hundreds of people even if you said
that you were receiving these messages psychically or encoded through subtle
changes in reruns of _Law & Order._

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Press2forEN
There seems to be this hopeful belief out there that if only indisputably
correct information was available to the general public, at long last they
would finally support the correct policies and elect the correct leaders.

I think that is a false premise.

~~~
troughway
And yet even on HN this is disputed with such frequency as to warrant raising
eyebrows as to what kind of mess we're walking into.

Book burners are with us today, and they're embedded within the "cancel
culture" and every online upvote/downvote system.

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bsenftner
15 years ago I created a "pre-deep fakes" automated actor replacement visual
effects production pipeline. My ambition was to create "Personalized
Advertising" where ordinary people would appear in video advertising for
desirable products like film trailers, and various other products and services
that typically have a celebrity spokesperson - the basic idea was the
celebrity spokesperson would be "with you" in the advert explaining how great
the product was while you are depicted nodding and enjoying it.

The system worked, and still would work if I un-mothballed it. I even globally
patented the system, with an ungodly expense doing so:
[https://patents.justia.com/patent/7460731](https://patents.justia.com/patent/7460731)

However, nobody believed what I was pitching 15 years ago was possible. After
I'd demonstrate a scaled down implementation, I'd get interest and an
investment pool would start to form. Then one of the investors would realize
the tech could be used for porn, and then no matter how I explained the
economics of failure such an application would cause, their stupid dicks would
take over and I could not get them to realize "porn with anyone inserted" is a
lawsuit engine and not a sell-able product.

While pursuing this, I became extremely jaded about what people think occurs
in a film production, and the time and expense necessary to add visual effects
to any media. The majority of angels and VC I pitched were flabbergasted at
what current media and VFX productions are like, and their current level of
expense and sophistication. My proposing a fully automated incarnation struck
them as complete fantasy. Yet I had a working implementation. Slowly I'd
convince them of the possibility... and then they'd get fixated on porn,
ignoring the fact that there is no way to make money producing deep fake porn.

I eventually went bankrupt and left media production entirely. After creating
my fully automated VFX pipeline, working in VFX without my automation tools
drove me nuts. I work in facial recognition now.

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quacked
Forget faking news events. What about petty crime? The cops get sent a video
of you defacing property. Your phone data and several eyewitnesses tie you to
the area. How do you escape, without a blanket ban on video evidence? If
there's a blanket ban on video evidence, what if you have video proof that you
were somewhere else?

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neixidbeksoxyd
If this becomes a problem, I think cameras and smartphones would be upgraded
with a way to certify they are real videos. I have no idea how, and it would
likely have to keep evolving, but if the financial incentives are there I'm
sure someone will figure it out. Maybe the video gets signed by the phone and
can only be verified by that device?

This comment was generated by GPT-3

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JoshuaDavid
Flash the flashlight in a sequence corresponding to the most recent hash on
the bitcoin blockchain, then take a hash of the video and send 0.00000001 BTC
to that address from a wallet associated with your personal identity? Would
pretty much prove that a specific person recorded this video between two
fairly close together times, and the blinking lights would probably do things
with shadows that deepfakes aren't great at replicating (and retouching the
video to fix those artifacts would make the hash not match).

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mellosouls
Very interesting and quite creepy in this specific context - genuinely
enlightening as to wider possibilities.

The actual faked Nixon speech is in the "Special Report" starting at 3.37 here
(after a scene setting prelude):

[https://moondisaster.org/film](https://moondisaster.org/film)

The original contingency letter from which the speech is derived:

[https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-
libraries/events...](https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-
libraries/events/centennials/nixon/images/exhibit/rn100-6-1-2.pdf)

~~~
Angostura
Fascinating. It's good, but there are lots of little emphatic "head nods" that
don't make sense in the context of the speech - unless that was just an odd
mannerism of Nixon's.

~~~
owenmarshall
I wonder if a more recent subject would've been better. We all know the tics
and habits of our current president, but Nixon was half a century ago and I
wonder how many of us have seen his speeches in any real depth.

Hell, play me Billy West reading Nixon as "Richard Nixon's head" from Futurama
and I might buy it.

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camjohnson26
Here’s the video:
[https://moondisaster.org/film](https://moondisaster.org/film)

Not bad but the audio doesn’t sound quite right.

~~~
ghaff
The thing is that you know it's a fake and are looking for clues that it's a
fake. But for many purposes, it doesn't matter if you can fool careful study
or expert analysis, it matters whether you can fool a quick glance from
someone already predisposed to believe the contents who will retweet or share
on facebook and move on.

~~~
najarvg
Well said. Imagine a similar deepfake with a Nixon "confession" about having
to stage the moon landing to make America look superior. You now suddenly have
the next viral facebook or whatsapp forward for conspiracy theorists who are
fully convinced of their beliefs.

~~~
rightbyte
Ye but it has been doable with modern movie production technology for some
time without any fancy AI. The biggest difference is the price drop of it?

~~~
gowld
Not just price drop. Also co-conspirator drop, to reduce the number of helpers
you need to create the artifact.

But, overall, "deep fake" isn't a critical waterfall aspect. It one piece of
the overall trend toward fake archaeology. Fakeaelogy? Farkchaeology?

~~~
CamperBob2
The term "simulation" comes to mind as a description of the emerging art and
science of ultra-realistic bullshit generation.

From Baudrillard
([https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism...](https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/terms/simulacrum.html)):
"Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a
substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality:
a hyperreal.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor
even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the
real."

~~~
lioeters
> Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of
> consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality,
> especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.

> Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is
> fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear
> distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

> "The authentic fake." – Umberto Eco

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myself248
The irony is that the people most susceptible to this kind of BS also don't
believe we landed on the moon, so the effect may be somewhat muted...

~~~
smabie
Everyone is susceptible to deep fakes.

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ivanhoe
For some reason shirt collars seem to be the weakest point on all deep fakes??

~~~
acdanger
I noticed that, too. I kept noticing the chin skin tone "smudging" over the
shirt collar throughout the video.

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shadowprofile77
Cute and well made job. I suspected that the video simply took a standard
Nixon televised speech and used CGI to remake just the lower half of his face
(thus the odd head movements even though his words and lips synced correctly,
and if you look closely you can see that the lower part of his face looks
somehow "cleaner" than the upper half), what stumped me a bit though was the
audio. His voice sounds odd but recognizably his own, especially since Nixon
had a rather unique voice. so I thought maybe they cut together words he'd
said in different recorded contexts and digitally modulated the audio to
construct a speech with an even tone, but no, they actually faked his voice,
which impresses me more than the face CGI.

~~~
chrisdalke
I don't think they are using conventional CGI techniques to "remake" his
mouth/lips and lower face, if that is what you are suggesting. Seems like the
dialog replacement is using a technology called VDR:
[https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/cannyai-vdr-face-
replacem...](https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/cannyai-vdr-face-replacement-
as-a-service/). There's a demo video on that page and some more details about
the technique.

~~~
shadowprofile77
Sorry, maybe I'm conflating terminology, but I was referring to the use of AI
and digital editing to reconstruct the lower part of his face so that it looks
real while moving in ways that are false and say things he didn't actually
say. This is what they did in some way at least, no?

~~~
chrisdalke
Yeah, I see your point, AI-generated CGI is still CGI!

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foldr
To be honest, you could probably get more convincing results than this just by
using spaghetti-Western-style dubbing of existing footage.

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DubiousPusher
> an Information Ecosystem at Risk

At Risk? Where have these people been for the last 40 years? I don't want to
say the authenticity of information doesn't matter. But what clearly matters
much more is collective trust in information institutions and from that
standpoint the ecosystem has already utterly failed.

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prateek_mir
A really good example to showcase the capability of the technology !

In context of India, where news channels have reneged from due diligence on
evidently doctored videos, this is something which can have huge consequences.

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14
I am very curious how the legal system will handle deep fakes as they progress
to perfect quality that even forensics can not tell.

~~~
Nasrudith
There is already a tool in place that handles much of it, chain of custody for
evidence. The video evidence would need corroborating evidence to "pin it
down" essentially. Just showing say Hillary Clinton making infant stew
wouldn't cut it without a chain of evidence proving there was a location,
time, that a camera would actually be there, and there is some actual physical
evidence of her murderous cannibalism.

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jmount
A tangent: the movie "The Landing" (2017) is a fun treatment of a non-existent
Apollo 18 and disaster.

