Donald Trump covers Rick Astley: Behold the Deep Fake Revolution

[Gman]

One picture is worth a thousand words.
Thanks for posting that.

It's a fake.

[Justin]

I'm totally ignorant of how this works...aside from what I've just read in this thread. I've heard of it recently but haven't given it much thought.

So, if someone fakes a photograph or video or whatever, is there a way to tell it's been faked? Like the Garth Brooks video above. Instead of just singing the song, someone has a fake Brooks saying all kinds of horrible things in say a private setting. Obviously it wouldn't work while he was on stage. But is there some type of analysis that could be done to tell if the audio/voice was not really Brooks, but a faked Brooks?

As I understand it, at a high level, it kind of works like this:
You take two sources of video; one that has the body you want to superimpose the face onto, and another video of the person who's face you want to use.
In the software, you do some level of stipulating in each video to track the faces in it.
Then you run the software, which uses inbuilt artificial intelligence to take the face from the source video, and then read and match things like the angles, lighting, facial expressions, and mouth movements to the target video.
From the little I know, the more video you have, and the higher quality of the source face, the better it works. Also, the longer you let the software chew on the video, the better the result.

If you contrast this with the traditional way of doing something like a face replacement for a movie, that process is much more involved, and requires you to do things like hire actors who are willing to wear makeup dots on their face that can be used to do facial tracking. You then have to build a highly detailed 3d model of the face you want to superimpose, give it convincing lighting and skin textures, which is a time consuming art form in and of itself. You then have to animate that face, usually by hand, or maybe with some automated tools you can streamline the process somewhat. Facial animation is also, in and of itself an art form.
Going this route is very time consuming, requires a lot of specialized 3d animation and compositing software, and the labor of specialized animators spending weeks on end, often for a result that isn't completely convincing. The best example of the traditional sort of face replacement work that I've seen was the work done for the Star Wars: Rogue One movie where they brought back Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fischer.

The thing with the AI stuff is that a lot of it is self-learning. A few years ago, Google made kind of a stir when they released their Deep Dream AI image analyzer, and it generated a lot of really trippy images. This new deep fake stuff is the outgrowth of a lot of that sort of initial work done with AI-based image analysis.

Frankly, I only see the quality getting better from here on out.

[Gman]

Just grow a beard to throw "them" off...

[JohnnyDrama]

There was a scene in "Running Man" where the game producers fabricate a scene about past "winners". What do you know, the future as depicted by Hollywood is here...

[Aloha_Shooter]

There was a scene in "Running Man" where the game producers fabricate a scene about past "winners". What do you know, the future as depicted by Hollywood is here...

More like the future as envisioned by Philip K. Dick is here ...

[FoxtArt]

I'm totally ignorant of how this works...aside from what I've just read in this thread. I've heard of it recently but haven't given it much thought.

So, if someone fakes a photograph or video or whatever, is there a way to tell it's been faked? Like the Garth Brooks video above. Instead of just singing the song, someone has a fake Brooks saying all kinds of horrible things in say a private setting. Obviously it wouldn't work while he was on stage. But is there some type of analysis that could be done to tell if the audio/voice was not really Brooks, but a faked Brooks?

In all likelihood, experts could determine if something was faked probably for the next decade or so. But therein lies the problem. If the user can't tell it's faked, they rely on manipulated sources who proclaim to be "experts".

E.g.
Liberal sources report the deepfaked anti-conservative video to be real... some* people believe it's real.
Liberal sources report the legit video from their "guy" of whatever time to be deepfaked, people believe it's deepfaked.
Conservative sources report the deepfaked liberal video to be real... some* people believe it's real.

People already believe the obvious fake crap today, because we are so polarized and drowning in dissonance. This lets the respective camps build up impenetrable bubbles of insanity. Who are you going to believe, your talking heads or theirs? Both are going to inject their respective bias into their analysis. And at the end of the day, it still looks, acts, and talks like the person.

[Bailey Guns]

That's got the potential to be some pretty scary stuff. I can see this being harmful in a lot of ways.

Lucky for us the government would never abuse this sort of technology...

[Gman]

[Justin]

In all likelihood, experts could determine if something was faked probably for the next decade or so. But therein lies the problem. If the user can't tell it's faked, they rely on manipulated sources who proclaim to be "experts".

E.g.
Liberal sources report the deepfaked anti-conservative video to be real... some* people believe it's real.
Liberal sources report the legit video from their "guy" of whatever time to be deepfaked, people believe it's deepfaked.
Conservative sources report the deepfaked liberal video to be real... some* people believe it's real.

People already believe the obvious fake crap today, because we are so polarized and drowning in dissonance. This lets the respective camps build up impenetrable bubbles of insanity. Who are you going to believe, your talking heads or theirs? Both are going to inject their respective bias into their analysis. And at the end of the day, it still looks, acts, and talks like the person.

On a deep psychological level, it doesn't matter if you are consciously aware of whether something is fake or not. Once you've seen it, the instinctual part of your brain accepts it as truth regardless of whether or not your conscious brain knows it's fake. This is why movies can evoke emotional reactions in us, even though we know the characters are all fictional people portrayed by actors.

So, once this becomes a thing, even news reports that start off with "KXYZ has verified that the following video of Senator so-and-so having relations with a farm animal is in fact a deep fake. In case you haven't seen it, here's the video."

Your brain will still have a visceral reaction, and it won't matter if what's in the video is real, you'll still get sick just at the thought of the Senator, who's career is now DOA.

[FoxtArt]

On a deep psychological level, it doesn't matter if you are consciously aware of whether something is fake or not. Once you've seen it, the instinctual part of your brain accepts it as truth regardless of whether or not your conscious brain knows it's fake. This is why movies can evoke emotional reactions in us, even though we know the characters are all fictional people portrayed by actors.

So, once this becomes a thing, even news reports that start off with "KXYZ has verified that the following video of Senator so-and-so having relations with a farm animal is in fact a deep fake. In case you haven't seen it, here's the video."

Your brain will still have a visceral reaction, and it won't matter if what's in the video is real, you'll still get sick just at the thought of the Senator, who's career is now DOA.

Exactly. The reason for this is we aren't as conscious as we'd like to think we are, most of our apparent decision making is almost entirely done subconsciously. In FMRI studies, they can "see" the decision you're going to make (studied on selections of very simple items) up to eleven seconds before you even know you're going to make that decision. Our stream of consciousness is truly the tip of the iceberg and mostly an illusion.

So even if you consciously know something is faked, that logical determination only exists at the last 5% of the mental railroad tracks. Your brain circuits are always doing most of the mental processing under the hood and incorporating that imagery subconsciously in many tasks.... and it processes it as if it's true. You may not realize this as the "memory" may not enter your stream of consciousness, yet the consideration of it has already entered your decision making on a subconscious level, eliminating your ability to consciously reason it away.

A big reason why people are so easy to manipulate.