These deep fake articles are becoming a meme. They mostly seem alarmist, and yet they're not authored by people actually in the industry.<p>Deep fakes automate what deep pockets and state actors could already do with Photoshop and other professional tools. The world isn't going to become a scary place because the barrier to entry got lower and the technology has been democratized. People are smart. Fakes will be detectable through entropy measures, corroboration, common sense, etc.<p>FWIW, I've been working on real time voice to voice style transfer.<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKBn9aqGy" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKB...</a><p>There are already a few other (non-real time) players in this field.<p>I'm hoping to spin this up as a small social app or filter and sell it so I can fund my capital-intensive film making startup.<p>I think this tech <i>should</i> be widely available. Not only will it make people think and question more, but it'll be fun too.<p>It's also amusing (and terrifying) to see all the anti-1st Amendment legislation aimed at combating deep fakes. The truth is that there is nothing to fear except our freedoms being taken away.
This pretty much describes the end of the internet as we know it. Even before AI generated "content", the internet has become lower signal-to-noise as time has moved forward.<p>It is already the case that for many everyday searches I do, I am forced to be very creative in my search phrase in hopes of filtering out the garbage sites that manage to dominate the first results page.<p>Watching less tech-saavy people use computers (such as elder family) is enlightening and frightening. They either cannot tell real content from fake content, or worse they are satisfied with what they get from obviously suspicious sites.<p>Maybe my concerns of polluted websites are less relevant considering the general population is getting more of their "information" from within Facebook rather than even going to search engines (of which they use the default for their browser!).
Considering video, audio are accepted as evidence in most courts without any independent verification; I'm seriously worried about the implications of deep fake on justice.<p>There is an urgent need gap[1] on detection of deep fakes.<p>[1]:<a href="https://needgap.com/problems/21-deep-fake-video-detection-fakenews-machinelearning" rel="nofollow">https://needgap.com/problems/21-deep-fake-video-detection-fa...</a>
We've had fake photographs for decades and it hasn't seemed to make a big difference in politics. But I think that's because in the past you had gatekeepers, like the editors and factcheckers of "respectable" publications, who would ascertain the legitimacy of a picture before using it. They'd make mistakes sometimes, but got it right 99% of the time.<p>Now news spreads horizontally through social media and group chats. It's common to see, say, a clip purportedly of police brutality right now in country X, which is actually 7 years old and from country Y. Someone will correct it, someone will dispute the correction, whatever - the damage is done. So I don't think deepfakes will move the needle much. The real damage is the end of gatekeeping, and that's already happened.
Well, this probably means end of unsigned content ; every line of text, every article, etc should be / will be signed by living person's key, or it will be heavily penalized in search engine output; governments will run keystores with citizens' keys, and content signatures will be checked against such keystores to ensure content authenticity (or lack thereof) . Time to reopen GPG , I guess.
I was experimenting with this stuff and you can too here [1]. It's kind of impressive but not convincing. The main impression it gives is it doesn't know what subjects affect which objects, what one kind of relation implies about another relation and so-forth. Still, it gives a sequence of words with a consistent "feel" which is impressive.<p>However, I would still only find it's text convincing for producing ... a marketing blog since such things just seem like a contentless stream of buzzwords to begin with. If anything, it gives a certain idea of how marketing speech require something, a stream of words with certain feeling, but not real logic.<p>[1] <a href="https://talktotransformer.com/" rel="nofollow">https://talktotransformer.com/</a>
OTOH: I'm pretty excited that these technologies are maturing so that they can be harnessed for empowering common people, or workers in enterprises to make their content beautiful, simple & into effective stories.<p>One example: Pentagon's slide decks. <a href="https://archive.org/details/MilitaryIndustrialPowerpointComplex" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/MilitaryIndustrialPowerpointComp...</a>
The effects of an ever-higher velocity of fake news isn't clear, but there is no "solution".<p>Real news not believed, fake news believed has been an unsolved problem for a long time. For example, the history of medical advances show doctors not believing exceptionally solid science in many cases.<p>There are a number of quotes about progress along the lines of "First they say it's impossible, they they fight it, then they say they believed it all along".<p>This is a people problem and a media velocity problem going back to the famous quote "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."<p>You can't stop people from believing a lie after it has been released. Removing the lie doesn't help. "Reputable" sources not repeating the lie doesn't help.
We shouldn't talk too much about our skepticism on this becoming problematic. Otherwise believable skeptic text can be generated by malicious actors through AI once it does become problematic so that they can drown out real concerns with virtual trolls.
This has been true long before ai. Writing and journalism have always been weaponized. The opposite could be true in that it's easier to recognize automated fake news than well crafted hand done human deception.
People very concerned about this should spend some time reading ${opposing political group} social media. As you'll discover, people will believe what suits them. Veracity is of remarkably little interest to a remarkably high percentage of the population. Most people, and this is not an exaggeration, would sooner kill/die than change their mind. And if that's true, then consider the mental acrobatics individuals are willing to go through before they even reach that point.
I have personally yet to be convinced of AI generated media content (read articles, videos, photos) maybe the bias that I know that they are AI-generated, but to me it’s equivalent buying a cheap knockoff iPhone from China: it’ll work if you don’t really think about it, or do not know the difference.<p>We have to top-up education and teach media-awareness in school, while giving badly researched and generally toxic content the cold shoulder.
I try to take a different direction. Let's suppose some ai generated content is better than human created content (IMHO we are quite there). Let's go further: maybe in the future we will trust again only some "trusted sources" (newspapers? HN?) while everything else will be not taken into account because the quality will be low (like some comments saying the source is not in the industry...).
All tech demos without strong use cases yet. Machine-generated content, spinning content, etc. are black hat tactics employed for decades in order to game Google. Works (just look at what crap ranks high) but the foundation for new huge industries? No.
I am going to take the contrary opinion here. AI-generated fake content will inflate away the informational value transmitted by whatever it is trying to fake.
It's like 'deep fakes', they'll just destroy trust to video.
I might be wrong, but on some social networks as Reddit, many comments or shared links seem too weird, like if they were not real, and some posts that get resposted always end up with the same comments or similar words.