Video is already barely a reliable proof of anything at all these days. We've already been creating a library of believable-looking fakes for decades: movies and TV shows. Sometimes someone samples something from that library and tries to sell it as real event, and people get tricked.

That costs a lot of money though. Hard for a Russian troll farm (or what have you) to whip out tons of fully fake clips the way Disney can in a film.

As the tech gets cheaper, this calculous changes.

It's hard for them to whip out fully fake clips, but it's easy for them to sample Disney, or SyFy, or news coverage, or comedy sketches that look very much like real interviews, etc. and cut them into a short clip to publish on social media.

Images and videos have always have lied to us since the beginning. Depending on the shot, the perspective, the focus, the stage, and the editing, you can make an image mean many things. Even before deepfakes, we cropped images out of context and cut videos into more coherent narratives. It's just that right now these problems have become highlighted, and people have begun wary of the danger of images.

And audio is only pedantically different.

It's been 3 years since Adobe first showed off their voice impression and editing feature (unreleased): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw

Though this is very impressive, it seems to take longer and longer to make those tiny improvements that make all the difference wrt believability.

N.B. The most convincing TTS I've ever heard (predating Lyre by quite a bit) generated things like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20190803012012/https://instaud.io...

I have real time voice to voice that runs on low end CPUs. You can impersonate celebrities and cartoon characters.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKBn...

I'm integrating it into a "Snapchat filter" type app with lightweight social features just as a means to bring it to market and hopefully attract Facebook or Snapchat or Tencent into buying it. I'm building it to sell, essentially.

I need capital so I can fund my real ambitious start-up of end to end computational filmmaking. Graph-based story language, light field camera optics, tracking and localization in prerendered environments, content-aware shaders, real time storyboard population and automated editing, posture estimation and mistake correction...

With patent protection, I think it could unseat Disney and make more money than they do with Marvel and Star Wars.

I need a lot of capital to build my lab. Optics (good sensors and glass), a modest studio with rigging and tracking set up for experiments, and a handful of engineers.

Hmm. I'd like to test that out, I did film audio for a decade so I feel like I could provide you with useful feedback. NDA is OK, same name at gmail if you want to get in touch.

So something like the Celebrity Voice Changer app?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/celebrity-voice-changer-face/i...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhDMZVoDR9s

Oh wow, I didn't do due dilligence.

I checked the Android app store and all the apps used text to speech before vocoding. I had no idea this existed on iPhone.

Thanks.

I wonder how this affects the gaming industry.

I hope it helps bring down world-building costs. Currently a lot of projects are impossible to indie developpers simply because of the amount of manual labour involved in modeling and texturing.

One of the effects of deepfakes is that it makes the inherent value of simulating reality to the utmost detail vanish over time. Our whole mass entertainment industry is built by worshipping the quality of simulation (for example, those flashy VFX effects, realistic landscapes, and Lapunzel's long hair.) Right now, those details are achieved by hundreds of animators, motion capture actors, and technicians, and by having huge render/simulation farms. When virtual realism becomes easily replicable (by regurgitating previous data through a deep learning pipeline), the old values of simulating reality will soon vanish over time, and therefore the indie artists would be able to compete in a fairer level than the entertainment monoliths.

However, one of the problems of deep learning is that you need to have a good dataset first, but how are you going to build one? Well, the big game companies wouldn't reveal their models and textures that easily. For indie artists to utilize this technology, there needs to be a centralized community project built around gathering and preprocessing data, rather than waiting for someone like Adobe or Autodesk do it.

Good points. Same holds for any other industry where data is important. Data is power, because it's legal to thwart competition by not sharing data. It's plain to see how without regulation this leads to uncooperative data behemoths.

Also film industry.

It depends how you see it.