55 TECHFEED AI
“It’s becoming increasingly harder for the forensic side to actually find those fingerprints,” he says. And even if those videos are shown to be false, they can still cause a lot of damage. Given our perpetually plugged- in world, a video might go viral and create chaos, while experts are still doing due diligence in trying to determine its authenticity. FAKE WAR “Countries like China and Russia, they want people to spend more time fighting
amongst themselves,” Anderson says. “The worst thing that can happen – and that’s exactly what foreign nation states want to happen – is the breakdown of trust between the government and the news media.” And it doesn’t help that trust in public institutions is near historic lows. According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of Americans trusted the people in Washington, DC always or most of the time in 1964. At the end of 2017, that number was down to just 18%. According to Anderson, what’s needed is
THESE RESULTS ARE HARD TO DISTINGUISH FROM REALITY a co-ordinated international effort to agree to norms of behaviour when it comes to this kind of technology. “But, right now, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea would never sign onto that,” he says. In fact, he’s seen no signs that international pressure is having any kind of effect. “I’ve been involved with the arrests of hundreds of individuals from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea,” he says. “And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t think it’s slowed them down one iota.” Deep fakes technology is going to have all kinds of fascinating creative applications. Onscreen performances – from the past and present – are going to become infinitely malleable. And flawless, realistic dubbing in foreign languages will become simple and cheap. But there’s no doubt we are entering a world where literally nothing we see or hear on our screens can be taken at face value. How do we negotiate this baffling onslaught of digital dopplegangers? Jordan Peel’s Fake Obama urges vigilance in his closing line: “Stay woke, bitches.”
FACE VALUE Consumer-grade computers can now process video in real time, replacing the face of the person in the video with someone else
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