![]() “A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on,” warns David Doermann, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Buffalo. Says Nick Dufour, one of Google’s leading research engineers, deepfakes “have allowed people to claim that video evidence that would otherwise be very compelling is a fake.” 4Įven if reliable modes of detecting deepfakes exist in the fall of 2020, they will operate more slowly than the generation of these fakes, allowing false representations to dominate the media landscape for days or even weeks. In 2020, however, campaign operatives will have technological grounds for challenging the authenticity of such revelations and competing testimony from attendees at private events could throw such disputes into confusion. The accuracy of these recordings was undisputed. ![]() And in 2016, Hillary Clinton dismissed many of Donald Trump’s supporters as a basket of deplorables. In 2012, Mitt Romney was recorded telling a group of funders that 47% of the population was happy to depend on the government for the basic necessities of life. In 2008, Barack Obama was recorded at a small gathering saying that residents of hard-hit areas often responded by clinging to guns and religion. “If AI is reaching the point where it will be virtually impossible to detect audio and video representations of people saying things they never said …, seeing will no longer be believing.” Worse, candidates will be able to dismiss accurate but embarrassing representations of what they say are fakes, an evasion that will be hard to disprove. If AI is reaching the point where it will be virtually impossible to detect audio and video representations of people saying things they never said (and even doing things they never did), seeing will no longer be believing, and we will have to decide for ourselves-without reliable evidence-whom or what to believe. Teasdale : But I saw you with my own eyes!Ĭhicolini : Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?Īs the 2020 election looms, Chicolini has posed a question with which candidates and the American people will be forced to grapple. Teasdale (the redoubtable Margaret Dumont) : Your Excellency! I thought you’d left.Ĭhicolini (Chico Marx disguised as Freedonia’s president) : Oh, no, I no leave. To illustrate the challenge posed by this development, I note the warning offered by the unforgettable boudoir scene in Marx Brothers comedy classic, “Duck Soup.” ![]() 3 Because the Israeli researchers have released their model publicly-a move they justify as essential for defense against it-the proliferation of this cheap and easy deepfake technology appears inevitable. Unlike previous methods, this one works on any two people without extensive, iterated focus on their faces, cutting hours or even days from previous deepfake processes without the need for expensive hardware. In August 2019, a team of Israeli researchers announced a new technique for making deepfakes that creates realistic videos by substituting the face of one individual for another who is really speaking. The longer run may come as early as later this year, in time for the presidential election.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |