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There's a relevant and insightful thread on Twitter posted by David Roberts here:
https://twitter.com/drvox/status/988144274720964608
His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust. That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to, so in order to form a comprehensive viewpoint on anything, one much choose whom to trust. And that it's this part of the process of "understanding" which has been exploited. That people have been encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence.
In this light point, when facts are irrelevant -- and if fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust then I fear for those advocating fact-backed positions. It's clear they'll face an uphill battle.
> "His thread references the "debate" over climate change, and his point is that the debate most people participate in isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust..."
Spot on. What the more purely science-mind can't seem to grasp is facts are only as good as the receivers' trust of the source. The irony is, there's plenty of science to support this. Yet, ironically, science too ignores itself.
If Science were a brand it would be in need of a makeover. But instead of owning it's many shortcomings and past transgressions (e.g., consuming Y is safe only to find out it causes birth defects, cancer,etc.) Science blames the customer/consumer.
That too, as we all know is a big mistake.
Sure, I side with Science. But I also know it could use an extensive education in dog fooding if it wants to regain its traction (read: credibility and trust) in the market.
>That matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure to
In the case of climate change it is actually possible to self-inform yourself about some of the key aspects of climate change. Raw data is freely available (noaa and others), and some simple scripts can answer questions like "are the claimed warming trends real or artifacts of bias due to adjustments or other factors".
This was part of my path into figuring out who to trust, and it did take a while. Not everyone is going to have the time or inclination, and this is only 1 of a few dozen important political issues to understand!
By the way my conclusion was that yes, global warming is absolutely a real thing, and absolutely caused by human activities.
I heartily agree with your core point.
> encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence
To offer up some compassion to those people, you have to remember that we're daily barraged with p=0.05 experiments getting breathless coverage in the media. "Scientists say peanut butter cures cancer." "Scientists say peanut butter causes cancer."
Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?"
The media's coverage of science does not portray research in the proper light, does not give context, etc.
So I have a lot of sympathy for people who are skeptical of trusting "science."
> fake videos are used to compromise the voices of those which deserve our trust
Which leads to what needs to be considered the greatest sin and betrayal of all: The creating and promoting of such videos.
No one creates a false video by accident. They know what they are doing, and their intentions are clear.
And this is not free speech.
Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech.
> isn't truly a debate over facts, but rather a debate over trust
Spot-on.
This is severely exacerbated players like Google & Facebook, whose algorithms favor "engagement" and "virality", with zero regard for truth. It/s been shown [1] that falsehoods sperad faster, in part because they contain more 'surprise value'.
The result is that these info vendors effectively create an editorial environment favoring falsehoods.
Google has done a bit to clean it up on their search engine, e.g., the Flat Earth search generally points to debunking entries, but the same company's YouTube site contains a bunch of fakes in the top 10 results on the same search.
It is no exaggeration at this point to say that these tech giants are significantly undermining our society by failing to exercise responsibility over their implicit/explicit/algorithmic editorial decisions.
[1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/study-false-news-s...
This is similar to the pre-elightenment skepticism of alchemists. Soon after the printing press, scientific communication was invented as a way of addressing the trust issue. The internet might be forcing a similar shift.
I wrote a bit more about this here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.scholarpedia.org/2013/11/0...
This assumes that there is indeed no difference between fact and fiction. However, facts need to be consistent among themselves. In such a case where a fact can be disproved by a lack of consistency with directly observable phenomema, no appeal to trust is required. For eg. the earth is not flat, etc.
> matters of complexity are too distant from any one individual to have direct exposure-to
But in the case of climate change anyone over thirty-five or so knows damn well the weather has gone funny.
People are scared, way deep down where it's hard to think about, because they know on a cellular billion-year-old level that you cannot escape the weather.
Once you grasp that, climate denialism is an obvious coping mechanism to prevent mass blind panic. It is a terrible thing to face the destruction of all that you love.
- - - - -
In any event, deepfakes are a shocking thing to have to deal with and we are sooooo unprepared. The only thing I can think of is to spread the word about it far and wide and hope for the best (meaning hopefully people and society will "innoculate" themselves against the onslaught of concrete dreams.)
I think it's important to note that the truth has never been widely available, to the point where it might be useless to think of truth as being a real concept to begin with. One could say that for a blip of time, we lived in a world where a large percentage of human were pushed largely accurate (if incomplete) information by mass media, allowing for something resembling consensual reality and informed democracy. We have always had to delegate verification of information to third-parties, whether those be text books, media organizations, or government officials.
I don't think we should be overly sentimental about the passing of this "golden age". We have never been a society ruled by facts and logic and we have been regularly misinformed all along. The difference now is perhaps a decentralization of who is controlling this misinformation and the realization by elite institutions that they now have to contend with their loss of monopoly, either by combatting perceived and real falsehood or coopting it.
It is admittedly deeply unsettling, but only to what was probably a false sense of security. Maybe instead of fretting about how to obtain more truthiness in the face of these new dynamics, the more fundamental question remains how can we achieve human welfare in a world where informed democracy is an illusion?
Similarly, it's also worth noting that the means of verifying a story or claim weren't widely available for a long time either. Seriously, go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so. How did you verify any claims at all?
You usually just took people's word for it, or assumed their writings/paintings/memories were accurate. Unless you had the means to actively verify a claim yourself and the claim was about something you still could verify (aka the people involved weren't dead and the organisations and places there still existed), you never really could be sure.
And the same sort of setup goes for other forms of evidence too. Audio evidence, video evidence, even things vital to crime solving now like fingerprinting and DNA testing are all new in the greater scheme of things. For most of human civilisation, being at least somewhat unsure of what's true and what isn't has been the norm, and the time periods where forms of evidence were easy to obtain and hard to fake few and far between.
So yeah, it's definitely like a reset back to the olden days, and the challenges are certainly more about how to deal with informed democracy becoming an illusion again.
> the more fundamental question remains how can we achieve human welfare in a world where informed democracy is an illusion?
I think the way is to change the incentives. People in our society have various skills and abilities. Some of them are highly skilled at accumulating influence. They use that influence to get wealth. Then they leverage the wealth for more influence. Our society is structured to move those people into positions of greater and greater influence and wealth. And those without such skills are marginalized and suffer.
I think a democratic society with pure socialism would not suffer from this problem. It would contain people who are good at accumulating influence, but they could not use that influence to gain more money (to leverage for more influence). Without the power-multiplying effects of wealth accumulation, influencers would be limited in their reach. That society would be less likely to develop an upper class with disproportionate power, nor marginalized middle and lower classes.
One point that is often lost on the discussions of fake video/"deepfake" is that this development won't only make it easier to fool people into believing something that's made up, but it might also make people more distrustful of things which are actually true.
When it's been spread out enough that anything can be doctored to an indistinguishable extent, everything becomes deniable by those being caught, and the skepticism explosion is going to raise the bar for investigative journalism / actual evidence to standards high enough that few will have the resources to produce them.
The optimist in me wants to say that this in turn might lead to people actually researching stuff and forming their own opinion instead of just going along with whatever headline they see first, but the pessimist in me says that's probably a pipe dream
This is arguably what Putin's trolls are really after. If western societies stop trusting themselves, both internally and externally, it's an easy target for his men to pick up what's left of them.
Note that non-democratic government's are much more resilient to this type of attack on trust, because there's much less of it to begin with.
It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet.
Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it. Most people understand how easy it is just write someone else's name down, so they look for provenance to help decide what is real. An article by "Barack Obama" on the Wall Street Journal website is going to be believed much more readily than an article by "Barack Obama" on some random blog.
The same thing will happen with video. Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet, will generally not be believed until they're authenticated by some trustworthy source. This already happens with "amazing" web videos; they attract "this is fake!" comments unless they're vetted and vouched for by (for example) a news service.
> Anyone can write an article and sign it "Barack Obama," and post it online somewhere. Not many folks will fall for it.
That's just stunningly naive. Imagine if Pizzagate or some other such nonsense was accompanied by a video of Podesta mumbling something about sex slaves. Fake News is a a real thing even without video corroboration.
> Naked video files, found at random places on the Internet,
You honestly think Breitbart of FOX wouldn't have run that in a heartbeat?
"The problem with quotes found on the internet is that they are often not true." --Abraham Lincoln
Here's "Barack Obama" giving a thumbs-up to repealing net neutrality: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755251
>It seems like fake video can be handled the same way we handle fake text. We're just not used to doing that yet.
What happens when someone synthesizes fake anchors in fake news segments and posts them on fb/twitter?
You're severely underestimating how news propagates.
The point of the article was that, while one might be skeptical at first, the provenance of data is forgotten faster than the data itself.
The emotional impact of a video will be remembered long after it was discovered to be fake.
But not fake narratives, fake writing or fake news.
Convenient that new media celebrities and individuals have greatest audience creation power through video, whereas traditional media still holds sway in print / news.
So clearly, understand the origins of the narrative that "fake video" is more dangerous: creator videos are stealing mindshare from traditional media. So of course trad media wants to believe it's dangerous. Because it is dangerous to them. But not for the reasons it pretends. At least not more than fakery in trad media.
Which there is plenty of. Including disguising a defense of their (failing?) business model, as a moral polemic, a subliminal plea that you need to trust "authority" outlets like them, more.
But funny how the concentration of "authority" power, which occurs in places like fact check /snopes, is the very thing those places pretend to be against.
Better in this distributed age to trust a sea of independent creators than a few authority sites, right? Even if the creators are all russian bots the concentrated few could all be pushing a single line.
Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience. And get more of that, instead of more exposure to media.
Buzzfeed and Vox are pushing this message, but they are by no means "traditional media". They're online-only publishers who are heavily oriented towards short-form video and social media sharing.
It's a much more straightforward issue of media literacy. The Facebook feeds of most people are littered with "news" from anonymous sources with unknown funders and unknown agendas. This created a major vulnerability in the media landscape that has been ruthlessly exploited.
I know Vox, I know their editor, I know most of their leading journalists. I know their political opinions and their potential biases. I don't necessarily trust them, but I am forewarned of their agenda and forearmed against any conscious or unconscious efforts they might make to influence my opinion. I understand the world view that Fox, CNN, The Guardian, WSJ, HuffPo and Drudge are trying to sell me. If I learn about something from one of these sources, I know how to find a contrasting perspective.
I have no idea who is behind "American Journalist", "Political Feed" or any number of other anonymous "news" publishers operating on Facebook. I'm a reasonably savvy media consumer and know not to give them credence, but the lack of an explanatory framework for their biases makes me much more vulnerable to subconscious manipulation. My psychological immune system hasn't been inoculated against these pathogens, so to speak.
This is a serious issue with stark ramifications and we shouldn't be so glib as to dismiss it as just media companies fighting a turf war.
I perceive your comment as nothing more than an ad hominem attack, so I struggle to understand why others have apparently voted it up.
The main reasons I trust any sources of information is that I trust that they hold themselves to a standard of journalism - such as verifying their sources. Doing original primary research into subjects.
When a video shows up in my Facebook news feed, I'm now more suspicious of it than ever before. Especially if it's from some source that I do not believe holds themselves to any journalistic standard.
I'm not pretending authority is an easy problem - it's not. I trust my pediatrician to be my proxy into understanding the world of pediatric medicine, I trust her as an authority. My family trusts me to be a proxy into understanding the world of technology, they trust me as an authority. And I have learned over time that some journalistic sources are good at reporting - they have a good track record, given the perspective of time.
And it's not even "old" versus "new." I quickly trusted the perspective of fivethirtyeight.com. Even in the crucible of debate, I find snopes vastly more right than they are wrong.
Video evidence used to be entirely damning. We should all ask harder questions now, rather than just taking some random video on faith.
> Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience. And get more of that, instead of more exposure to media.
This is fine for certain contexts, but what about cases that can be important for individual people but outside their personal experience?
Did Trump sign an Obamacare repeal (an example from the article)? That kind of thing matters for being an informed voter, but few people were physically present through the various bills that went before Congress.
For much of day-to-day life, I agree with you. I just also think that reputation matters.
>Or maybe people should just trust themselves, and their own experience
My own experience wouldn't inform any democratic actions I might take at all except how to vote about net neutrality.
People don't underestimate it, they just don't know what to do about it. That's arguably more of a technological problem than a policy problem, the technical and philosophical problem of how to detect fakes.
People do underestimate it, especially people who see themselves as critical thinkers. Your conscious mind might know that a photo or video is fake, but your unconscious mind still gives it some credibility. Our ability to remember and process facts is much worse than we think and we're highly prone to creating false memories. No-one is immune to these shortcomings.
Fake images on social media are much more than just a nuisance - they represent a fundamental threat to liberal democracy. Our brains simply aren't evolved to cope with convincing but fake images and we don't have any effective countermeasures.
Technological solutions will help, but software to spot fake videos will lead to an arms race between video creation and video classification.
The more promising angle is imho the society angle. Most people view their memory as the best source of truth, when in reality it's well established in psychology that our memory is incredibly unreliable. Previously this was mostly a problem for the justice system, now we risk entire nations being gaslighted. What we should be doing is trusting our written word, not our memory. Basically writing diaries and keeping newsletter articles, and checking both from time to time to keep wrong memories from manifesting
All of that is very teachable
Well I'll tell them what to do:
Throw billions of dollars at data science prizes to create open sourced ways of detecting deep fakes. Have western intelligence agencies keep some methods private too, so we can detect it when someone has a way of getting through the open sourced scanners. Figure out how then did it, then open source a third way of detecting what they did while keeping the private scanners private.
This is so obviously a problem to everything that we simply cannot allow this threat to be tolerated. Truth itself cannot be under attack. We simply must be able to trust video.
So are they advocating for tougher libel laws? The photo and video used as examples are pretty obviously fake, but even if it was indistinguishable, what then?
Fake photoshopped images are so common now that ppl should assume any highly controversial/compromising photo that isn't corroborated by AP or Reuters is probably fake. Doesn't stop people from believing in fake photos or fake stories, but that's how it's always been and fake videos are the next logical step.
Only solution I can see is to make it easier to prosecute entities that have demonstrated intent to defraud the public with fake news/images/video. The press would absolutely hate that, and rightfully so.
So what? If I didn't have access to any news outlets for the past 2 years, my life wouldn't have changed at all.
Let's say there's a percentage of the population X% which is capable of being tricked by the current level of fake news. Do you think with new technologies, X will increase drastically? I guess that it will not change at all.
I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of "We have fake images and fake news, how is this any different?", as well as "It's not like we could trust everything before, this doesn't really change anything".
While both of those are true, they neglect two important details: 1) Fake videos are much more realistic than fake images, in the same way that fake images are much more realistic than fake text, and thus more believable 2) A large fraction of the population doesn't fact check anything and believes most anything that is spread around the internet, the logic being "if this many people viewed it and liked/reacted/shared this, it's probably true"
I want to believe that we, as a society, have learned our lesson about fake news from the recent US presidential election, as well as Brexit. But I doubt it.
There will be a plethora of "Deepfake" apps for your pocket computer tomorrow. People will learn quickly not to trust video. They will have no choice because they don't want to fall for pranks.
Humanity will stand through this.
I really don’t think anyone is underestimating it. We’re just not buying into the hype. We somehow managed highly-realistic fake images. Why can’t we do the same with video?
History rhymes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
I developed an automated actor replacement VFX pipeline back in 2008, and patented the idea of automated actor replacements. My desire was to create a Personalized Advertising service where you and your family/friends appear in the ads on streaming video services. The system worked, I acquired the patents, globally, but needed VC or other financing to create the advertising service and agency. I got financing nearly closed with a number of investors, but every time a clause that the technology could not be used for porn was cited as their reason for pulling out. That issue was debated and I did not cave, as I knew an automated "insert anyone into porn" service was nothing I wanted to be associated. I pointed out the endless other possible applications, all high revenue, but simply having any limitations placed on the investors soured their ambition on the idea. Simply getting investors to understand it was difficult, even after demonstrating live actor replacements to them, and even then they were skeptical. I ended up pivoting to a game avatar service, and am now using the technology for facial recognition.
If fake videos become ubiquitous, people will not believe videos any more.
Only complete idiots will riot over the content of a video. (The little problem there being that we have complete idiots.)
There is one main problem with videos losing their credibility due to faking: namely that videos are a good weapon for documenting some nasty shit done by bad people.
Is there not a chain of trust here that can be enforced with fairly simple technology. And then the trust in the technology is something like a "kite mark" - a global standard of handling video content.
Let's take a simple example - I am a journalist who videos Obama talking. My raw video footage is tagged in each frame with a hash of the pixels in the frame. then I process the video, making linear cuts etc.
If i publish the whole lot as a package, anyone else can come along and rerun the processing and check the hashes match up.
This should be decentralisable and scalable. and we just have to get used to clicking the kitemark to check if anyone has verified the process or even run it ourselves.
one could imagine a cottage industry of verifiers
I've been afraid of this for years.
I guarantee you that there exist (or will exist) highly profitable consultancies which specialize in faking evidence. Just think about how easy it would be to launder a million here, a million there, disguised as legal fees in some of these large cases.
We're approaching the limits of the traditional legal system with human juries. I don't how to solve this in the long term. I'll speculate that the solution will involve blockchains and a new, more minimal, totally decentralized legal system.
Weaponized Mandela Effect?
Don't we get some version of this effect with fictional movies and TV shows? Your brain parses it as real, so you accept it at some deep level, even when you know it's fake.
I think it's safe to say that today any "evidence" without verifiable provenance can be entirely ignored. Absolutely anything can be forged, and in many cases using consumer PCs and readily available software.
That means anonymous evidence or evidence with dodgy sources has zero credibility whatsoever.
Do we need digital signing on every image/video in the news?
Perhaps there's a need for an archive or registry of original video so that we can see all known footage of an historical figure. I'd like to have some way to combat the coming memes of John Wayne advocating for arming teachers and banning video games.
We've been able to make convincing fake video since the 60s (see Kubric). Even impersonators with good makeup can get pretty close. I don't see how new tech changes anything.
What about fake photos?
Reminds me of an old science-fiction where all events on the media were computer-generated fakes.
There has been no "underestimating" of that potential.
"Mind-warping" has been researched and is being research extensively by the CIA for some time. Most of that research is still top-secret, but well known are the extreme psychological manipulations of subjects during the MK-Ultra experiments.
I will focus on the CIA and it's influence in the past, as this is more controversial and influential than that of other agencies/countries. The influence of MI5/6 or Mossad is great, but a lot of it is still hidden. The influence of the KGB was different, as the citizens did not really believe much in them to begin with. The Chinese are going a whole different way again.
The CIA also did experiments involving the manipulation of the control of subjects in social media, like facebook. But it did not stop there.
After the peace-protests during the Vietnam war, the CIA has infiltrated into the press and media and anti-war movements. They now use that influence to bend war and destruction into a peace-giving action. So we had "Freedom fighters" in Afghanistan etc. Which was portrait in the Rambo movie. And the US supported Saddam fighting Iran with US made chemical weapons. Later the US fights the parties that it created and armed. Some strange thing that keeps repeating in the US history.
At the same time the CIA has the Phoenix program and other society destructive programs. They worked together with the "economic hitmen" and with local crime-lords to strengthen their destructive programs.
The influence of the CIA in other countries was great, but it also worked into influencing the US elections. Jesse Ventura found himself talking with the CIA after he was elected, because they did not expect a "third party" candidate to win. And they wanted to prevent that in the future.
Whistleblowers also show that they spy on political candidates, and pressure them (via blackmail?) before they even get into office. That way they can have direct influence on decisions. One well known example is that they spied on congress when they where investigating the CIA-torture program. Also they were able to destroy much evidence before it became public. Whistle blower Kevin Shipp explains how the CIA is out of control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQouKi7xDpM
But the CIA is not the only US-agency influencing the US elections. Every company is doing it too. Represent us: Corruption is legal in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig And just a few companies own all the press and media in the US.
So while we are looking at potential fake videos, we have a fake press and fake democracy underneath that.
It does not mean that everything is fake, but that it is controlled by agencies and companies that have their own agenda. And indeed we see videos and other media repeating agendas of certain political parties or of certain companies over and over again.
We can actually stop this by putting the agencies and companies back into democratic control, and back into justice. And both need to be moved out of the democratic system. For example: Flint can never get fresh water if the companies and politicians involved can do whatever they like.
It does not mean that other countries all do it better. Most have different kinds of corrupt systems in place. Small communities like Iceland, seem to be able to stop corruption. Maybe we can learn from them.
So how can we counter this mind-warping?
Well: How can you spot propaganda?
If the same thing is repeated over and over again. When no evidence is shown. When a certain party or person is portrayed as "Hitler" or "devil" or as "heroes". When a problem is shown as black and white. When people are "just crazy". If you are only limited to 2 bad choices. If investigations are shallow, and many important questions are unanswered.
Usually you can spot them with logical fallacies. So we need to learn to use logical fallacies and use critical thinking in all the news. And we need to be critical of all ideas. This includes your own ideas as our confirmation bias is also our downfall.
And this brings us back to the story. If our mind is bend, we can learn to bend it back via critical thinking. And stop watching the news, if the same thing gets repeated over and over again.
Except all video is fake, that is, all videos are artifacts, artificial things.
"We’re not so far from the collapse of reality" -- am I the only one who finds this inane? No video is real.
Critical thinking as applied to the written word applies equally to the image. It's not rocket science.