Already nowadays the whole thing about fake news and alternative facts has segments of the population flat out not believing the truth. This may very well be greatly exacerbated in the future where, regardless of the amount of evidence you bring, people will just disregard it as fake.
Verifying the legitimacy and accuracy of 'news' claims and representations has always been very difficult for the lay person. We are now well into an era when 'the truth' is even harder to find.
'Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see' (Edgar Allen Poe) has now become 'believe nothing of what you see' too, at least until you have verified to your level of satisfaction...
And perhaps it should... if average people have the technology now, how long has it been in the hands of police departments, newspapers, militaries, and intelligence agencies?
We tend to focus on fakes with high-profile people like politicians and celebrities, but it can clearly be done with everyday people as well. The author was able to produce a fake video segment of a well-lit, animated conversation involving his wife. She's directly in front of the camera, speaking and making hand motions for several seconds. How much easier would it be to insert a face into grainy security camera footage, or a shaky clip of a large crowd at a political rally?
With a few sources you can build an accurate single model of an event. You then edit that event as you see fit and then generate as many "independent" sources from different viewing locations as you want. Then upload them to different social media sites at different times.
And the real verification would come from ultra-high-res captures from drone cams, self-driving car cams, traffic cams, etc that are constantly running and recording everything, so that you can't realistically fake soemthing without simultaneously compromising uber, amazon, walmart, etc.
This only works in large events. What if you film a politician lying at a small event, but his image team makes 20 fake videos showing the event in a different light? I guess you're the liar then.
Secondly, your analogy is wrong. The new hypothetical you present is equivalent to the old model where you are all giving verbal accounts and his staffers lied. If you are going to compare to an old-tech scenario where you one-up them with a more detailed recording than they have, you need to do the same with new technology to keep the comparison accurate.
Thirdly, why aren't you the liar?
Fourthly, you can always go one level up. Show the footage of them constructing doctored footage.
To be honest with you, when I was younger I bought into this.
Nowadays....it kinda seems like with the open source community, consumers are getting stuff first. Not always, of course, but often enough.
And police departments are one category that I can be quite certain are lagging behind, they are definitely not getting stuff before consumers have it.
Frankly, the suggestion that government agencies -- let alone local police departments -- have sophistication in AI/ML years ahead of publicly known work from academia, industry, or even side projects on reddit, will verge on comical to anyone who's actually worked with these folks.
Only a few cops will have the ability to edit videos, the problem is almost all cops in his department will lie for that officer on the stand.
Most of those people are average. Intelligence agencies can be assumed to have more advanced technologies in a number of areas but the gap between what they have and what's out in the more public world has narrowed.
We've already had image tampering technologies for a long time but there's not been a significant problem with fakes in the press or as evidence.
It is an important issue anyway and figuring out ways to being able to differentiate the genuine from the fake, with cryptographic signing in cameras for example, are worthwhile.
Apple signing key -> your phone's key -> signature over hash of the media (edit: for video, embed signatures every so often to you can verify a shorter clip out of the whole). Embed Apple's signature and your pubkey in the metadata of the image, and TwitYouFace will verify on upload that it's authentic.
Of course, you can't fix stupid unless you talk about a complete overhaul of public education... And even then, people are people.
If you make your fake video after the event, the location and time will be obviously off.
It would be basically the macOS Developer ID software model applied to photos.
It boils down to trust, not whether the original video was real or not.
To put it another way, reputable news organizations already go to great lengths to ensure that their stories are well sourced. At the end of the day, they are putting their reputation on the line.
In other words, 2 main stereoscopic sensors, each recording their cryptostream to their storage. In addition to that, you have 2 UV sensors doing the same thing, and 2 IR sensors as well?
The idea being that it's much, much harder to fake something if you have to take IR and UV into account.
Isn't this also where something like a blockchain is useful? Where data is dumped into it realtime by this mythical secure camera, with all its associated metadata.
Then you can ask: "does the time the data was added agree with the time the camera says the data was recorded?" "Does the blockchain agree that the data hasn't been modified after it arrived?"
Add to that the possibility that there are multiple cameras all recording this incredibly detailed video from different angles, and the evil counterfeiters will (hopefully) have a dickens of a time faking all this.
Although with all this wonderful processing, networking and storage power to enable this secure camera, you can probably create a faking system too.
Philosophically though, I think it's a good thing that many are learning not to trust information from self-proclaimed authorities :-)
If there are no known exploits, a signed video, marked as having a network based timestamp, is at a minimum incrementally more reliable than a video without such metadata.
What might be worth trying would be some sort of verified badge if this became common enough that players could meaningfully highlight its absence, similar to the way browsers are now showing non-HTTPS sites as insecure. If Facebook badged the video with a big “this iPhone video doesn’t have the usual signature” message that might slow people down.
For the deepfake porn or fake news problem I also wonder whether there’s a useful fuzzy ID service where a player could display a “this is substantially similar to <source video> and may be a copy” warning which wouldn’t be so inaccurate that nobody would heed it. That could be really important if we started seeing political fakes where someone is shown accurately but their words are faked.
Facebook / Twitter / etc verify the crypto signatures on media ingress. Then they can give proper attribution and show a checkmark or something that attests the media hasn't been altered.
So in your feed, there will be some media with checkmarks and some without and you can choose which to believe more.
Alternatively, a competitor could come along and reject all media that doesn't pass cryptographic verification.
Of course, depending on how that's implemented it could just be another vulnerability in easy-to-use proofing.
But if there was some way to add an abstraction on top of the raw keys, keeping them still accessible if the user is keen, then that might be a step in the right direction.
The otherwise is already covered by DSLRs. Canon has it, and I'm sure Nikon does. Law enforcement has been using this stuff for years.
http://www.canon.co.jp/imaging/osk/osk-e3/index.html
Apparently it was broken in 2010 (found while googling for this).
Even when scandals do break, it’s not a picture or video that’s proof, it’s a picture or video that produces witnesses.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/mar/17/yanis-va...
https://youtu.be/Vx-1LQu6mAE?t=127
Youtube Video with subtitles with Böhmermann.
or there was that time a german variety show 'false flagged' the germans by doctoring a video of yanis varoufakis to have him 'stick the middle finger to germany' during a talk he gave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-1LQu6mAE). There were witnesses; but they didn't stop the confusion and outrage that ensued due to the effects of viral media. Would this pass a sophisticated technical analysis of the video? No - is there time and public understanding for the results of said sophisticated technical analysis to prevent the damage before it is done? no.
The notion that witnesses or forensic analysis can combat the speed of information, especially across borders, is a bit quaint.
In your example they modified a very clean source video, image is perfectly stable, very little motion and they edited a very small portion of it for a very short duration. TFA is about replacing one person by an other while they're talking and moving on a potentially lengthy video clip. Doing this convincingly by hand would be hard work.
I think a good example of the difficulty is with the infamous "moustache removal" for reshoots of Superman in the Justice League. It cost a fortune and the results were not exactly seamless. Also the re-created Princess Leia in that Star Wars movie, not bad but definitely still in the uncanny valley.
I edited the post you replied to with "in a video." in the first sentence to clearify
(And the GAN is the neural network model which does these transformations)
—Jonathan Swift
Captain disillusion on youtube has a great channel covering all of this. Here's an example of a fake lightning video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPRtCW5sRk
Deepfakes has made it so the average user, with no knowledge of Aftereffects / composition, to basically run a python script so long as they have high res images + several angles / expressions of the target user. That same folder set of images can be replicated in multiple scenes with just the cost being GPU rendering time
Deepfake videos can also have a much higher resolution than "viral videos" with aftereffects to fake effects.
Deepfaking also leads to a lot of legality issues as well.
TL;DR deepfakes does make faking videos much cheaper, higher resolution, and easier now
https://www.sapeople.com/2015/06/19/fake-images-claim-photos...
Someone finds very crude photoshop work that undermines the 'official' version of a news story.
There are already fake news sites out there that are "so bad" you'd think nobody would believe them, and yet...
Still, it's important we inform people this is possible, so that at least the more reasonable among them can view future videos through a skeptical lens. I'm sure by now many HN readers are not surprised by this technology, but many outside of HN would be blown away.
However, distrusting digital media isn't the solution either - there are plenty of trash magazines publishing conspiracy theories and other absurdities. Plus, digital media has revealed huge segments of America are becoming culturally isolated and undemocratic. A return to print media might shift funds back to deep professional investigative journalism that covers those issues... or just give owners better returns.
It's really two problems. One, making people say things they didn't say. And two, allowing people to deny things they really did say.
You mean the last election right? A lot of people believed it was faked.
It's worrying to think of how this technology could be used in parts of the world where there is much less widespread understanding of this level of digital manipulation.
It's all about which sources you trust. In fact, it has always been that way.
Deepfakes just makes it more obvious. Which is maybe a good thing.
It takes a lot more to make it undetectable as fake though, and I guess the same applies to deepfakes. Once people get used to the fact such face swaps can be done, they'll be more sceptical and demand realness verification in case of published sensitive material.
You really think those same people will actually question if a video was real in the first place, particularly if it reinforces their world-view?
I think one answer can be found in device-level signing of images and A/V feeds. A recorder can integrate its cryptographic signing and keystore on the same chip as its CCD/audio controllers, like Apple’s T2 chip does, so that it has the ability to sign direct feeds from the hardware as being such. This might be more complicated for A/V than still images, since a large enough recording would have to be written to disk. Perhaps some rolling scheme could be devised.
For an added measure of verification, the SoC could upload them (optionally encrypted) to a distributed public store like a blockchain or IPFS, proving that they were created at/around a certain time.
This seems like it would be useful in concert with other tools for news agencies (who should be leading the way in providing as much documented research and evidence for things as they can, as a matter of course, while protecting their sources), law enforcement (who is losing the public’s trust when it comes to the chain of custody and testimony), etc.
We jumped very far ahead both in how much importance we place on digital documents and in how easily we can forge them, so we need to catch up fast on finding robust mechanisms for verification.
On a bright side, young aspiring actors can make porn movies to get some cash early in their career without necessarily having to fear it will ruin their career many years later - those movies will exist anyway.
https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
http://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-jesse-watters-bizarre-...
I can't make my mind up if this will make the current fake news / filter bubble situation worse, or if it will make it so bad that people learn to distrust any kind of digital media entirely.
I'm still not sure, given that the use of these tools for political gain seems inevitable at this point how we will actually verify a video is real in the near future.