54 TECHFEED AI
Deepfakes made and published porn videos with Taylor Swift, Gal Gadot and Maisie Williams. All it took was a home computer, training data in the form of publicly-available videos and photos, and a machine learning algorithm. Soon another Reddit user, deepfakeapp, released FakeApp, an easy-to-use application for those who didn’t have a background in machine learning. Fakeapp user tutorials are widely available on YouTube and the internet. Reddit has already suspended the deepfakes account, citing a violation of its content policy, specifically its rule against involuntary pornography. But there are still deep fake pages up on Reddit, including videofakes and a DeepHomage page, with dozens of deep fake videos of the safe-for-work variety. They include some amusing and creative work – including the replacing of Zachary Quinto’s Mr. Spock with Leonard Nimoy’s, Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman with Gal Gadot’s and Schwarzenegger’s Terminator with Dwayne Johnson. And inserting Nicolas Cage into deep fakes videos has become its own subgenre. Some of it is still rough around the edges but it’s improving all the time. In April, actor/director Jordan Peele famously used FakeApp to put words in Barack Obama’s mouth in a video available through BuzzFeed. (“You Won’t Believe What Obama Says In This Video!”, BuzzFeedVideo: https://youtu.be/ cQ54GDm1eL0) “We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time,” Obama seems to say. “Even if they would never say those things. They could have me say things like, I don’t know, ‘Killmonger was right’ or ‘Ben Carson is in the sunken place.’” The words, with lip sync automatically created by the AI, were spoken by Jordan Peele, who does a decent impression of the former President. The video itself is creepily realistic. “This is a dangerous time,” Fake Obama says. “Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet. This is a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources.”
DANGEROUS TIMES Barack Obama is just one world leader who has been a test subject of deep fake videos
FAKE POLITICS Deep fake videos aren’t necessarily the top concern when it comes to risks posed by artificial intelligence. Experts and regulators are worried about job losses, about military applications and cybersecurity, and about national competitiveness. However, the topic of deep fake videos came up in a hearing in June in the US House of Representatives. “AI techniques are increasingly able to generate convincing fake images and videos — including fakes of politicians, such as Vladimir Putin and President Trump,” OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman told the House subcommitee on research and technology. The theme of the subcommittee was ‘Artificial Intelligence – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility’. “In 2014,” Brockman continues, “the best generated images were low-resolution images of fake people. By 2017, they were photorealistic faces that humans have trouble distinguishing from real ones.” Earlier this year, the Max Planck Institute went further, when it published a paper, Deep Video Portraits. Its new AI improves on previous techniques and allows for
photo-realistic re-animation of portrait videos using only an input video. FAKE-CRIME In fact, fake celebrity porn and funny Nicolas Cage videos are just the start of what the technology can be used for. Experts are already worrying about the risks of child pornography, revenge porn, extortion and misinformation. Videos could also be created with the goal of damaging corporate brands or political careers. Nation-states could use this technology to quickly and easy create videos designed to manipulate public opinion – both in their own countries, and elsewhere. “If you could take different videos of people of stature, and convincingly change their messages around the world – what kind of chaos can it cause?” asked cybersecurity and counterintelligence expert Bob Anderson, a principal at The Chertoff Group, a global risk advisory firm. It can be hard to prove that these kinds of videos are fake, he says. Sometimes, there’s embedded data or other forensic evidence that shows that the video has been altered, but that’s changing.
WHAT’S NEEDED IS A CO-ORDINATED INTERNATIONAL EFFORT TO AGREE TO NORMS OF BEHAVIOUR WHEN IT COMES TO THIS KIND OF TECHNOLOGY
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