Now that Deep Fakes are here
Hello real people,
It’s been quite a gap since the last newsletter. Now, I never promised regularity with this newsletter. Or a theme for that matter. That’s consistency. It’s been quite a busy quarter of work for me, leaving me no headspace to do much else. But I promise I am back to some semblance of regularity.
To bring all of you crashing back to reality (or the lack of it) of what CbW has always been about, this one is yet another of those inscrutable, dangerous-sounding things that exist in our world today.
Singularity, the idea that at some point technological growth becomes a runaway train with unintended and radical consequences to humanity in general, is no longer hypothetical. I suspect we are deep in the throes of its arrival. With AI, blockchain tech, crypto currencies, more and more humans are lagging behind as world changing events swirl around them. It’s too fast — and obtuse — to comprehend for most of us. We are all watching the demise of the world as we know it in real time like a postmodern simulation.
And talking about the demise of the world as we know it, let’s talk about deep fakes.
Fake Tom Cruise
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”
- Groucho Marx
If you haven’t still seen fake Tom Cruise, are you even living in 2021? I doubt we can proceed with the current events dystopia-juice without dishing out fake Tom.
Watch this first:
Just to be clear (in case you even have a small shred of doubt) - this is not really Tom Cruise. It kinda makes you wonder if Tom Cruise was really Tom Cruise to begin with. Imagine the possibilities for the future of entertainment. What fun!
Deep fakes are well and truly here folks. It’s come for Tom Cruise and now for your grandma.
Fake Grandma
“Experience your family history like never before,” says the Deep Nostalgia app from MyHeritage. Upload a photo of your great grandmother and watch it come to life like a small animated snippet. The first time you experience it, it is jaw-droppingly spectacular. After I discovered it, I ran it on a bunch of photos of long lost relatives and even random people and was in various parts sad, happy, amazed and freaked out. It’s a bit eerie, like it’s teetering on the edge of the uncanny valley.
It led me to this very obvious question: Do we really want our family members to be animated this way? I mean, in the scope of what this app does, the answer is a resounding yes. But, I have also seen the ‘Be right back’ episode of Black Mirror. Bringing back someone you love from the dead didn’t quite go as happily as planned.
This is the question. Will deep fakes drive us fully around the corner of reality and into the avenue of digital maya?
Fake Asimov
But more important questions first: Is the internet allowed to deep-fake Isaac Asimov, possibly among the greatest science fiction writers of a generation, lip-sync to The Pussycat Dolls song we all love? The answer, of course, is ‘why the hell not?’.
There’s Deep Fake audio too. Of course there is.
It’s already in the realm of technical feasibility that voices could be reliably imitated, with the tone, texture and emotional range of real actors. Replica Studios is creating realistic AI based voices for video games. You could potentially see the Simpsons being completely voiced by AI in the near future with the voices of your favorite characters (played by real actors) continue in existence well beyond the lifespan or contract-span of the actors themselves.
You know where this is all going.
All the gloriously horrible things
A mother in Pennysylvania deep faked photos of her daughter’s cheerleading squad ‘friends’ naked, smoking and dancing and sent it over to the coaches. You wouldn’t think moms in the list of those who’d viciously take advantage of deep fakes to create chaos.
96% of deep fake videos online are non consensual pornography. Thousands of deep fake pornographic videos are targeted at celebrities, actresses and famous personalities. An AI bot in Telegram has been generating deep fake non-consensual nudes of women and girls basis requests that contain an innocuous photo. An AI app generates nudes from pictures uploaded to it.
We all have pics everywhere (especially in Facebook and Instagram). I am here to say that the technology has gotten so good (or bad) that you can now generate fake nudes and embarrassing fake photos and videos from all the samples we’ve left on the internet. Looks like my policy of hardly putting photos of people in my Instagram may not be as paranoid.
Close on the heels of porn, like it usually does, comes politics. The potential of deep fakes to alter political fortunes, incite war, cause civil unrest and generally bring about the eventual apocalypse is immense. Here’s some sample scenarios:
A building explodes due to a gas cylinder but a typical early morning Whatsapp forward has a deep fake video of a member of a certain sect, religion, nation or race claiming that he created the explosion.
A world famous scientist is deep faked into saying that the vaccine is dangerous and those that got it must purge it from their systems
The leader of a country is deep faked as saying he wants to start a war and then the video spreads in a closed, authoritarian regime
Chaos.
Then there’s the economy, markets and corporates.
Here’s a scenario: Imagine someone going short on Amazon stocks. And then there’s a flawlessly executed deep fake video of Jeff Bezos being captured secretly in a meeting saying the most vile, obnoxious things you can imagine. The video gets viral and within a span of a day, the stock begins to fall driven by a sustained social media campaign. Then, when they are low enough, sell them all off and then sweep in and collect a large chunk of Amazon shares at a super low price and wait for things to resolve themselves. Rest of the market also swing. Millions lose a lot of money.
I mean, the possibilities are endless. One talented deep faker can change the course of the world in a few days.
Fight back feels weak
There are a bunch of tools and solutions now trying to identify deep fakes:
A tool looks at the blink of the eyes in deep fake videos to determine if it is real or fake. Apparently, deep faked people don’t blink as much because, get this, the AI does not have enough samples to know how those same people look with eyes closed (since you never uploaded enough pictures of you sleeping on instagram, I suppose). Ergo, unblinking zoids pretending to be you.
Hany Farid and Shruti Agarway in Darmouth college are building ‘soft biometric’ that can help detect deep fakes of major celebrities. Like a fingerprint, this model develops a biometric of your facial movement, expressions and actions that it can distinguish when it is being faked.
A new tool for detecting deepfakes looks for what isn't there: an invisible pulse. The color of your face shifts subtly basis your pulses (blood flowing into it) and this tool can identify those changes.
One distressing element here is - literally all of these feel like momentary tools until deep fakes get even better negating an approach to detecting it.
Facebook and Twitter have banned deep fakes as a policy. China has criminalized sharing deep fake media without explicitly calling it out as such.
How they enforce it is a whole other story. Imagine manual content moderators trying to use tools on individual media to identify if it is fake or not. Good luck trying to stay above the flood. On the other hand, if they let their models run with it, there is going to be quite the AI war between the detectors and the generator models. Humans will stand on the side and watch as the deep fakes get better and better with alarming speed.
Nothing is real
There’s a view of the world that I cannot peg as being either optimistic or pessimistic. Imagine a 10 year old in the current world of social media, spiralling digital content and constant connectivity. She is pretty much constantly being bombarded by conflicting information, fake news, deep fakes, memes and manipulated content every second of the day. I mean, a filter in a video app is in itself a conditioning to actively manipulate content (albeit for fun) that’s being put out.
A likely attitude that will be developed is that she develops a view of the world where nothing can be trusted, everything is fake and reality in the digital world is a farce. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that she is less likely to be manipulated by fake and will be careful (debatable).
The bad news, however, is that this cloak of cynicism and questioning of reality itself will be the very get-out-jail-free card that anyone doing morally reprehensible things needs. Remember that mom making a deep fake video story I told you about - now there are counter claims that it wasn’t a deep fake video to begin with. Perhaps those caught in video and audio can now claim that it is a fake and we will no longer be able to tell if they are telling the truth. ‘Deep fake’ would be the new ‘fake news’ cry for any politician.
Balaji Srinavasan predicts (and suggests) that the only way we are going to navigate this risky digital world is through the use of pseudonyms only on the Internet.
“Real names weren’t built for the internet. Billions of people can now stalk billions of other people. The next 20 years is going to see a huge shift back to privacy, encryption, decentralization, search-resistant identities. Ideally preserving serendipity while restoring privacy.,” he says. Of course, he has investments that benefit from these ‘predictions’.
Would we eventually sever any ties with our physical reality and have complete alternate reality online - that way you never have to reveal your true identity but earn the benefits of social status, points and rewards accrued from your continued valuable presence.
Would we then use decentralized technologies (Blockchain) to merit / demerit folks and not have a central authority (Twitter moderation team) judge if a certain account needs to be blocked or unblocked?
Who knows. Who fucking knows.
There’s a whole other newsletter to be written on decentralization, media cabals, free speech, crypto-cults and the war that’s brewing in our world between the centralized old powers, new power players using digital anarchists as pawns. Whiny powerful men in tech are complaining about cancel-culture. Woke circle-jerk armies going on witch hunts. Socialists are seeking rebirth. It’s probably all related, but that’s for another day, though.
Until then remember that it all…
Could be worse,
Tyag
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