“We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make anyone say anything at any point
in time.”
Jordan Peele created this fake video of President Obama to demonstrate how easy it was to put
words in someone else’s mouth-
moving forward we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet.
not everyone bought it, but the technology behind it is rapidly improving, even as worries
increase about its potential for harm.
This is your Bloomberg QuickTake on Fake Videos.
Deep fakes, or realistic-looking fake videos and audio, gained popularity as a means of
adding famous actresses into porn scenes.
Despite bans on major websites, they remain easy to make and find.
They’re named for the deep-learning AI algorithms that make them possible.
Input real audio or video of a specific person- the more, the better- and the software tries
to recognize patterns in speech and movement.
Introduce a new element like someone else’s face or voice, and a deep fake is born.
Jeremy Kahn: It's actually extremely easy to make one of these things… there was just
some breakthroughs from academic researchers who work with this particular kind of machine
learning in the past few weeks, which would drastically reduce the amount of video you
need actually to create one of these.
Programs like FakeApp, the most popular one for making deep fakes, need dozens of hours
of human assistance to create a video that looks like this rather than this, but that’s
changing.
In September researchers at Carnegie-Mellon revealed unsupervised software that accurately
reproduced not just facial features, but changing weather patterns and flowers in bloom as well.
But with increasing capability comes increasing concern.
You know, this is kind of fake news on steroids potentially.
We do not know of a case yet where someone has tried to use this to perpetrate a kind
of fraud or an information warfare campaign, or for that matter, to really damage someone’s
reputation// but it’s the danger that everyone is really afraid of.
In a world where fakes are easy to create- authenticity also becomes easier to deny.
People caught doing genuinely objectionable things could claim evidence against them is
bogus.
Fake videos are also difficult to detect, though researchers and the US Department of
Defense, in particular, have said they’re working on ways to counter them.
Deep Fakes do however have some positive potential- take CereProc, who creates digital voices
for people who lose theirs from disease…
There are also applications that could be considered more value-neutral, like the many,
many deep fakes that exist solely to turn as many movies as possible into Nicolas Cage
movies.