'Deep fakes': How to know what's true in the fake-Obama video era

Krusty · Mar 3, 2018

A public crisis
Barack Obama has been made to lip sync. German researchers have controlled Vladimir Putin's face.

Dr Mehrtash Harandi, a senior scientist who researches machine learning at Data61, said the output of these deep-learning machines is often blurry.

If you pay attention, you can see lip movements don't entirely match the speech. Teeth are notoriously hard to synthesise realistically.

But the technology will improve, and quickly.

Beyond the morality of porn "deep fakes", an altered video of Donald Trump, for example, could have serious geopolitical consequences.

Doctored videos could show politicians "taking bribes, uttering racial epithets, or engaging in adultery", suggested American law professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron on the Lawfare blog.

Even a low-quality fake, if deployed at a critical moment such as the eve of an election, could have an impact.
Click to expand...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-03-04/deep-fakes-and-obama-videos/9490614

zapjb · Mar 3, 2018

It's all over. The stupid & closed minded have won. Can you just wait till I get off the planet before bringing back slavery & debtors prisons? You laugh & I so pray you're right.

mirimir · Mar 3, 2018

Basically, you can only trust video that's signed, with an verifiable authentication trail.

RockLobster · Mar 3, 2018

zapjb said: ↑

It's all over. The stupid & closed minded have won. Can you just wait till I get off the planet before bringing back slavery & debtors prisons? You laugh & I so pray you're right.
Click to expand...

The stupid win by statistical probability. By the fact of averages, 50% of the population have below average IQ. Add to them all those smart ones who have something to gain by the stupid winning and you have a guarenteed stupid majority.

caspian · Apr 13, 2018

zapjb said: ↑

It's all over. The stupid & closed minded have won. Can you just wait till I get off the planet before bringing back slavery & debtors prisons? You laugh & I so pray you're right.
Click to expand...

I agrre completely

Joxx · Apr 13, 2018

You don't need to alter digitally. Look at the recent so-called White Helmets videos from Syria; they're obvious, infantile acting pieces. They're so bad I smiled sadly. And yet Western audiences swallow them uncritically.
30 years of audiovisual dumbing down produced results.

RockLobster · Apr 13, 2018

The ISIS ones where they cut people's head off were clearly fake.

TairikuOkami · Apr 13, 2018

I saw a live feed video being altered (with 2-3 sec delay) in 2000, like adding/removing objects, people. I would not trust any video these days.

guest · Jun 16, 2018

State University of New York researchers have trained an AI to detect 'Deepfakes'
Researchers to the rescue
June 15, 2018
https://www.techspot.com/news/75116-researchers-have-created-ai-can-detect-deepfakes.html

The term Deepfake, for the unaware, usually refers to AI-created, fake pornography. This pornography typically involves a popular actor or actress' face being superimposed over that of a porn model's.

Communities focused on the creation and distribution of this sort of content have cropped up around the internet. As a result, services like Twitter, Discord, and Pornhub have deemed this pornography "nonconsensual," opting to remove it from their platforms.

With enough time and technological advancement, political speeches could be falsified, and "fake news" could become a genuine threat.
That said, researchers from the State University of New York may have found a way to fight fire with fire. The individuals in question taught an AI to detect 'Deepfakes' by closely monitoring eye blinking.

This is certainly a positive development, but it remains to be seen whether or not researchers will be able to keep up with the rapid advancement of Deepfakes in the future.
Click to expand...

"In Ictu Oculi: Exposing AI Generated Fake Face Videos by Detecting Eye Blinking": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02877.pdf

guest · Jun 18, 2018

Faked Video Could End Justice by Twitter Mob
June 18, 2018
https://www.wired.com/story/faked-video-could-end-justice-by-twitter-mob/

IT USED TO be that cameras never lie. We tend to privilege visual content, trust what we see, and rely on police cams, mobile recording tools and similar devices to tell us about what is really happening on the streets, in local businesses, and more.

After all, mobile videos and other cams provide transformative new avenues for justice, precisely because they can spread like fire around the world. But this kind of ‘justice’ landscape only works as long as we can trust the videos we see—and faked videos are on the horizon.

Using a tool like FakeApp (an app that uses deep learning to make face-swap videos), pretty much anyone can gather images and make a video without a lot of computational skill

Reddit banned deepfakes. But there will be other deepfakes. While consumers of information must be vigilant and remain critical when taking in public messages today, tech leaders must develop sophisticated but easy-to-use tools for average message consumers to be able to see doctored content.
Click to expand...

mirimir · Jun 18, 2018

I doubt that it'll end justice. But we'll need standards for authenticating source and chain of custody. We already have the necessary tools. For example, they're used in Debian package development and management. Stuff like collective signatures, using Shamir's Secret Sharing, and so on. Also tools developed for DRM. Such as watermarks and so on.

It won't be privacy-friendly, except in limited ways, with considerable care. But it can be reliably authenticated, from source to user.

xxJackxx · Jun 20, 2018

All Obama video is fake. He was never real. He was CGI all along...

guest · Jun 20, 2018

Truepic raises $8M to expose Deepfakes, verify photos for Reddit
June 20, 2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/detect-deepfake/

How can you be sure an image wasn’t Photoshopped? Make sure it was shot with Truepic. This startup makes a camera feature that shoots photos and adds a watermark URL leading to a copy of the image it saves, so viewers can compare them to ensure the version they’re seeing hasn’t been altered.

But beyond its utility for verifying AMAs, dating profiles and peer-to-peer e-commerce listings, Truepic is tackling its biggest challenge yet: identifying artificial intelligence-generated Deepfakes.
The need for ways to weed out Deepfakes has attracted a new $8 million round for Truepic.
Here’s how Truepic works: [...]

The abuses of image manipulation are evolving, too. Deepfakes could embarrass celebrities… or start a war. “We will be investing in offline image and video analysis and already have identified some subtle forensic techniques we can use to detect forgeries like deepfakes,” Truepic CEO Jeff McGregor tells me.
Click to expand...

RockLobster · Jun 21, 2018

So no one can create a truepic that applies the watermark AFTER the image has been edited?

brians08 · Jul 9, 2018

Yep, eventually someone will get the code and create a program to apply the watermark to any image.
Digital signatures and trusted sources are the only way to go, but how do we know which sources to trust?

mirimir · Jul 9, 2018

We won't

guest · Aug 1, 2018

What are deepfakes? How and why they work
July 31, 2018
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3293002/fraud/what-are-deepfakes-how-and-why-they-work.html

Seeing is believing, the old saw has it, but the truth is that believing is seeing: Human beings seek out information that supports what they want to believe and ignore the rest.

Hacking that human tendency gives malicious actors a lot of power. We see this already with disinformation (so-called "fake news") that creates deliberate falsehoods that then spread under the guise of truth. By the time fact checkers start howling in protest, it's too late, and #PizzaGate is a thing.
How to detect deepfakes
Detecting deepfakes is a hard problem. Amateurish deepfakes can, of course, be detected by the naked eye. Other signs that machines can spot include a lack of eye blinking or shadows that look wrong. GANs that generate deepfakes are getting better all the time, and soon we will have to rely on digital forensics to detect deepfakes — if we can, in fact, detect them at all.

If we are unable to detect fake videos, we may soon be forced to distrust everything we see and hear, critics warn.
Click to expand...

mirimir · Aug 1, 2018

Basically, shocking BS and outright lies generate tons more buzz than accurate reporting and analysis

guest · Aug 7, 2018

The Defense Department has produced the first tools for catching deepfakes
Fake video clips made with artificial intelligence can also be spotted using AI—but this may be the beginning of an arms race.
August 07, 2018
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...duced-the-first-tools-for-catching-deepfakes/

The first forensics tools for catching revenge porn and fake news created with AI have been developed through a program run by the US Defense Department.

"We've discovered subtle cues in current GAN-manipulated images and videos that allow us to detect the presence of alterations,” says Matthew Turek, who runs the Media Forensics program.

DARPA’s Turek says the agency will run more contests “to ensure the technologies in development are able to detect the latest techniques."

The arrival of these forensics tools may simply signal the beginning of an AI-powered arms race between video forgers and digital sleuths. A key problem, says Farid, is that machine-learning systems can be trained to outmaneuver forensics tools.
Click to expand...

hogndog · Aug 7, 2018

One of the first things i thought of when seeing this was this broadcast made by Orson Welles in 1938..

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/welles-scares-nation

guest · Sep 11, 2018

This tech (scarily) lets video change reality
September 11, 2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/11/this-tech-scarily-lets-video-change-reality/

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a method to turn one video into the style of another. While this might be a little unclear at first, take a look at the video below. [...]
In short, they can make anyone (or anything) look like they are doing something they never did.

The researchers created something called Recycle-GAN that reduces the imperfections by “not only spatial, but temporal information.” [...]
Recycle-GAN can obviously be used to create so-called Deepfakes, allowing for nefarious folks to simulate someone saying or doing something they never did. Bansal and his team are aware of the problem.

“It was an eye opener to all of us in the field that such fakes would be created and have such an impact. Finding ways to detect them will be important moving forward,” said Bansal.
Click to expand...

mirimir · Sep 11, 2018

[https://www.aphrodite.ai/] transforms your face to a currently limited set of target faces in near realtime. The neural network is not actually running in your browser but streams you webcam video via WebRTC to a high end GPU instance nearby and back. This is still very much work in progress on all parts: frontend, processing, ...
Click to expand...

The site requires WebRTC, so I don't see anything.

But there's an example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CugXYrV1MDg

If I could run this thing locally, I could actually have a webcam And look like whoever/whatever I want.

If it did a total enough job, anyway

guest · Sep 13, 2018

U.S. lawmakers call for deepfakes counter measures
September 13, 2018
https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/13/u-s-lawmakers-call-for-deepfakes-counter-measures/

Members of Congress sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats today asking for a report from intelligence agencies about the potential impact of deepfakes to democracy and national security.

“By blurring the line between fact and fiction, deepfake technology could undermine public trust in recorded images and videos as objective depictions of reality,” the three members of Congress said in the letter.

Following the proliferation of deepfakes videos in the past year and fear about their potential impact, a number of public and private efforts are underway to create AI capable of identifying malicious videos.
Click to expand...

letter: https://schiff.house.gov/download/letter-to-dni-national-security-threats-of-deep-fakes

Minimalist · Sep 17, 2018

Deepfake pics and videos set off Facebook’s fake news detector

Facebook will begin officially checking videos and photos for authenticity as part of an expanding effort to stamp out fake news, the company said last week.

Facebook has already responded to the fake news epidemic by checking articles that people post to its social media service for authenticity. To do this, it works with a range of third-party fact checking companies to review and rate content accuracy.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, though, and it was going to have to tackle fake news images eventually.
Click to expand...

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/20...-videos-set-off-facebooks-fake-news-detector/

Krusty · Sep 26, 2018

Can you tell a fake video from a real one?

Can you imagine a world where you see a video of a world leader engaged in some kind of damning act, but you can’t tell whether it’s real or a completely computer-generated fake?

What about a world where pretty much anyone could make that fake video on a regular computer using free tools?

It might sound like science fiction, but at least one respected researcher has dropped everything to warn the world that we’re hurtling towards that reality.

We’ll meet him later — but first let’s put your fake-detecting skills to the test.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

'Deep fakes': How to know what's true in the fake-Obama video era

Krusty Registered Member

zapjb Registered Member

mirimir Registered Member

RockLobster Registered Member

caspian Registered Member

Joxx Registered Member

RockLobster Registered Member

TairikuOkami Registered Member

guest Guest

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

xxJackxx Registered Member

guest Guest

RockLobster Registered Member

brians08 Registered Member

mirimir Registered Member

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

guest Guest

hogndog Registered Member

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

guest Guest

Minimalist Registered Member

Krusty Registered Member

Log in or Sign up

'Deep fakes': How to know what's true in the fake-Obama video era

Krusty Registered Member

zapjb Registered Member

mirimir Registered Member

RockLobster Registered Member

caspian Registered Member

Joxx Registered Member

RockLobster Registered Member

TairikuOkami Registered Member

guest Guest

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

xxJackxx Registered Member

guest Guest

RockLobster Registered Member

brians08 Registered Member

mirimir Registered Member

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

guest Guest

hogndog Registered Member

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

guest Guest

Minimalist Registered Member

Krusty Registered Member

Useful Searches