Hit it toots!
And I was kinda like, what an idea!
You're fired!
In the past year,
a powerful new technology has emerged. Do you by a savvy investment in a thriving business?
It's what enables the face swap videos you may have seen on social media,
but some believe it will have far more profound implications for politics and society.
Software powered by artificial intelligence can now create wholly fake images, video and audio.
They're called deepfakes and they are increasingly indistinguishable from reality.
Which one do you think is fake? Can I, can I watch them again or, yeah.
They literally all look real. Yeah. I need to watch it again.
Can you spot the fake? Three of these video clips are of the real Barack Obama,
one of them was entirely generated by a computer.
Can you spot one? No. Wanna watch it one more time? One more. All right.
To test the current state of this technology,
we showed people on the Venice beach boardwalk these clips to see if they could
spot the deepfake. This is crazy. This is a totally fake video. Wow.
Foremost in all of our minds has been the loss and the grief.
Wow. Couldn't tell. That's good. I visited with the families of many of the victims on Thursday.
As deepfakes get more realistic,
pundits and lawmakers say we need to take action to control this scary new tech.
They could be anybody from a transnational group to cyber hoodlums and vigilantes,
and we are not ready for it. We are not ready for it.
They claim that the rise of deepfakes will bring to an end the very idea of generally accepted truth.
Seeing is no longer believing.
We are entering into a future where anything can be faked,
well then nothing is going to be real.
You can literally manipulate the news as it happens. In this dystopian future,
even a 4chan using basement dweller could alter the course of international politics.
It could have me say things like,
President Trump is a total and complete dipshit. Does it scare you? Yeah.
Yeah because we were fooled on a lot of them. Yeah.
A recent Pew poll found that 77% of Americans
think that government needs to step in and restrict altered or made up videos or images.
Do you think that the government should make that a crime?
Yeah, I do think so. As long as it doesn't infringe, as long as that doesn't bleed over for, you know creative laws.
But does this technology really represent an unprecedented assault on truth
that requires new restrictions on speech?
What the most breathless predictions overlook
is that deepfakes are just the latest extension of a tradition of manipulation
that goes back to the earliest days of captured and reported media.
Deepfakes not only don't pose a threat to society,
the technology has many exciting potential applications that could be stymied by legal restrictions.
Now it's true that deepfakes are getting more realistic and easier to create.
Stay woke bitches.
Using a single selfie from a user, Chinese app Zau can replace a celebrity in a movie scene
with anyone holding a smartphone.
Stanford researchers have developed an algorithm that can edit talking head interviews as easily as texts.
Subtracting or adding words the subject never really uttered.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
I love the smell of French toast in the morning.
And several companies have unveiled software that can sample just seconds or minutes of someone's voice.
I kiss my dogs and my wife.
And then put any words into that person's mouth that can be typed into a computer.
I kissed Jordan three times.
They had their faces plastered on other women's bodies in pornographic videos.
Redditers recently started posting videos that superimposed celebrities into porn scenes
using a product called Fakeapp and the short lived app, DeepNude allowed users to virtually undress a celebrity
or anyone else.
That's scary cause it's like, how do you prove that's not you? You never thought of that did you?
No, I didn't. But yeah. I think the technology's definitely scary.
Reddit and other sites quickly banned these concoctions,
and many deepfake software providers limit the availability of their tools on ethical grounds.
But many people we spoke to think only the state has the power to halt the spread of deepfakes.
I'd like to think that if this is
a concern for the people, that our government would take the right strides to protect us.
So-called deepfakes that enable malicious actors to foment chaos, division, or crisis.
What you have is not a threat to our elections, but a threat to our republic,
a constitutional crisis unlike we have ever faced in the modern history of this country.
The House is considering legislation called the Deep Fakes Accountability Act,
or the defending each and every person from false appearances by keeping exploitation
subject to accountability act,
which would make it a crime to post quote synthetic media,
unless it's labeled by irremovable digital watermarks.
It's kind of like South Park. I mean, you know, in South Park, that that's not who it's being portrayed to be.
I don't know. There is a weird gray area. I do think it should be illegal, but at the same time, people should,
Do you think it's possible to make it illegal without sucking up stuff like that? That satire?
Yeah I think so, I think so.
But the proposed law would be impossible to enforce
without also ensnaring vast amounts of benign and creative speech.
The bill is vague as to what should count as synthetic media,
and its response to software that can alter any image is to make it a crime to post images
that can be altered by software to remove watermarks.
You're the government and you're trying to, you know, define what a deepfake is
so that you can ban it or you can regulate it. How would you define it?
As long as the parties involved are all informed and consensual, then it's fine.
But if I don't know,
cause then we're going back to the South Park thing where it's free, it's free use to
Like, let's say for example,
I take this video and I put your face into the Avengers. Should it be banned?
Yeah. Yeah. It should be banned because like I said, you didn't have my consent,
but then isn't there already laws like that?
Yes, there are. Existing defamation, libel, and fraud laws
already make it a crime to knowingly lie about what someone said or did to cause them harm.
And those civil libertarians debate their constitutionality.
Revenge porn laws do exist in most states explicitly banning the posting of sexual content
without the subject's consent.
Proposed regulations on deepfakes thus inherently take aim at certain types of speech,
regardless of any actual harm.
Come on.
So how would law makers use new powers to restrict so-called synthetic media?
A recent viral video featuring house speaker, Nancy Pelosi, put the question to the test.
President Trump tweeted out a video of the house speaker that was edited.
The clips were slowed down to make the Congresswoman sound intoxicated.
Give this president, the opportunity, to do something historic.
Facebook marked the clip has doctored and limited its distribution,
but when executives refused Pelosi's demands to remove it from the platform all together,
she called them quote, willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election.
That video was not an AI assisted deepfake,
but rather a crude manual manipulation that some have called a cheap fake.
Nonetheless, the is virality on social media demonstrates the scale of the challenge we face.
The Pelosi clip also demonstrates how lawmakers would quickly take aim at nonsynthetic media.
As such low tech fakes can be just as convincing.
So what makes deepfakes a unique threat to the truth?
Some argue that their spread will enable politicians to dismiss every major
caught on video moment as a fake. You can do anything. Whatever you want,
Grab him by the pussy.
He's not claiming that the infamous access Hollywood tape is doctored,
that this is a fake tape.
President Trump's recent attempt to spin his notorious access Hollywood appearance as fakery
has only fueled this fire.
Alarmists conjure a future in which even scenes of presidential inaugurations
could become a battle of discerning whose video is real.
This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period.
Actually that already happened in 2017.
In fact, none of these worries are new, nor are the calls for government intervention.
Photographers have been convincingly altering depictions of reality
since the invention of the medium, including for political reasons.
For example, Stalin's right-hand men,
Nikolai Yezhov was famously erased from this photo following his execution.
So you'd rather see them police it, then people learn to question sources of things?
There's too many dumb people out there man, I don't think you can, um,
I don't think you can trust people to be able to recognize it all the time.
Radio was also once considered a medium for dumb people.
Because it was piped directly into American living rooms,
some feared that it would drown out the more sober reporting you might find in newspapers.
This occurrence possibly has nothing to do with the disturbances on Mars?
After Orson Welles' radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds in 1938
tricked some listeners into believing there was an actual alien attack,
newspapers seized on the incident to rally support behind restrictions on the scary new technology.
Similar calls have followed the emergence new technologies from the Telegraph to the internet.
Fake video going viral on social media.
The real image on the right, Emma tearing up a target post,
not the constitution.
A bill to cut down on Photoshopping of models in magazines.
Do you think that this represents sort of a fundamental shift in manipulation of news?
That Photoshop or deceptive editing in the past have not?
No, I think it's the same. The same thing.
People still believe Photoshop pictures as well. Yeah.
Do you think there should be similar rules for like Photoshop photos?
Yeah. I don't know, that's a hard one man.
Most of the people we spoke with,
including those who favor legal restrictions on deepfakes
have adapted to the existence of photo editing software
and no longer view it as a threat to the nature of truth that requires government intervention.
Do you think things like Photoshop photos should also be regulated in the same way?
No.
There's always going to be someone, they're gullible enough to believe,
but usually they're going to believe whatever they advocate.
And to be honest I wouldn't care if that person's fake, if the news is correct.
Cause a lot of times we get the correct person but the fake news,
which would you rather have?
It's horrible for us to have to like question everything we see on the news or online.
It's like is that real or is this fake news? But you should question.
So I guess the more people know about deepfakes like the better cause then you know to question.
The technology behind deep fix could allow real time language translation in video chat.
Or give back a voice to people who have lost theirs to illnesses like ALS.
I want to sound like me.
It could help actors age up or down for movie roles and create opportunities for
underrepresented, indigent, or disabled artists.
Laws supposedly targeting deepfakes could stymie these and other exciting potential applications.
And they could also give powerful people the ability to censor any content they find embarrassing.
You want to keep your money and your freedom.
Deepfakes may be the latest front in media manipulation, but like the people we interviewed,
most consumers have adapted to past technological leaps and will continue to do so.
And just as technology enabling deepfakes is advancing,
so with technology that can identify them.
Software and development can analyze metadata and the video itself,
using AI to detect subtle signs of manipulation.
And the company Amber uses cryptography and the blockchain to verify the time location video is captured,
as well as its content.
These tools are hardly foolproof but they'll continue to get better.
Even so software already exists to spot realistic fake images made with programs
like Photoshop.
But the people we talked to said they still find tried and true media literacy
strategies more useful.
A lot of people like will send me something and they'll be like look,
and I'm like that doesn't seem right.
And so if I think it's like something weird,
I'll like Google it and like look it up. Yeah.
I do like every other good person. I Google it. Or I Snope it.
Or I call the local drunk down the street who's going to the barber shop cause he knows everything.
But the main thing I do is I will go and check for other sources.
Do you think that you could still do that for deepfakes without having to have it government regulated?
Yeah. Yeah.
Like it's there for me to do if I want to do it and really, really figure out.
So Americans may want to reconsider whether there really is a coming
techno-apocalypse that will send society into a tailspin of lies.
Perhaps this brave new world isn't really all that different than those that
have come before. And whether the fakes are obvious, and it will be huge,
or subtle, foremost in all of our minds, media consumers can and will adapt.
You believe what you want to believe. You find what you look for.
If somebody wants to believe that Hillary Clinton was in a threesome with Donald Trump
and a boa constrictor, they'll believe it.
It's up to you to determine whether it's fake or true and look a little deeper.
[inaudible].