good morning John good morning it's a
reunion videos wait what is happening
okay so you're looking at something
right now called a deep fake which was
created by a professor at the University
of Washington named Ryan who trained a
model to learn how to map our faces so
that he could superimpose a mustache I
had once on to both Hank and me thereby
giving us a glimpse of just how bad Hank
would look with a mustache as well as a
reminder that I myself am no Tom Selleck
sorry I'm not as good as Ryan at deep
fakes hi good morning Hank it's Tuesday
it's real me or is it right so this
technology has been used to make Donald
Trump and Barack Obama and many other
people say things they haven't actually
said and you might be thinking ah the
tech isn't that good I can still tell
that it's fake and fair enough but I'll
remind you that in 2007 YouTube looked
like this like 2019 deep fakes look
better than 2007 reality it's not gonna
take deep fakes long to catch up in a
famous 1938 essay Virginia Woolf wrote
that photographs are simply a crude
statement of fact addressed to the eye
- witch Susan Sontag would reply decades
later the truth is photographs are not
simply anything
photography's crude statements of facts
have long contained fictions like way
back in the u.s Civil War Mathew Brady's
celebrated battlefield photographs were
often staged with corpses moved this way
or that to make them more photogenic
this widely distributed world war 1
photo
totally faked that's not even a person
it's a figurine the London milkman on
his delivery route during the Blitz in
World War 2 was not a milkman he was the
photographer's assistant wearing a
costume and the deep fakes of the past
have long been spreading disinformation
and even changing history like Mussolini
didn't want you to know he needed a
horse trainer to look like Napoleon
Joseph Stalin frequently ordered
erstwhile allies airbrushed out of
photos when they became enemies like
here's Stalin with his head of the
secret police Nikolai Jakov and here's
the picture after Stalin had Yadav
executed Hitler did it to gurbles Lenin
did it to Trotsky and the same thing
happened all the time in China most
famously in this picture from mouths
funeral now without the gang of four
unless you think democracies are immune
from this kind of stuff this photo
reporting to show John Kerry with Jane
Fonda at an anti-war rally was widely
distributed in 2004 during the
presidential election even though it is
completely fake in 1939 the Canadian
Prime Minister had poor King George the
sixth cut out of a photo because he
thought he would look more powerful
talking to only the Queen Mum and in
1950 Maryland senator Millard tidings
probably lost re-election because of
this forged photo which purported to
show tidings talking to the leader of
the American Communist Party people who
have or want power devote lots of
resources to these forgeries because
they work it's really difficult to
develop a distrust of our sensory inputs
like I might know intellectually that
juicy pear jelly beans don't contain any
actual pears but they still taste like
pears and I understand I'm witnessing a
cropped and posed and filtered moment
when I see a photograph of someone
looking absurdly happy lounging in
idyllic surroundings but even so their
lives feel vivid and thrilling in a way
that my own does not on some level
Stalin's images worked even if people
knew they were cropped because we trust
our eyes back in 1977 Susan Sontag wrote
reality has come to seem more and more
like what we are shown by cameras it is
common now for people to insist upon
their experience of a violent event in
which they were caught up a plane crash
a shootout a terrorist bombing that it
seemed like a movie this is said other
descriptions seeming insufficient in
order to explain how real it was I don't
think humans will ever transcend their
senses enough to decouple the visible
from the real but we better learn how to
live in a world where we truly cannot
believe our eyes Hank I'll see you on
Friday or images of you anyway