The Era of Fake Video Begins

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: April 29, 2018 at 7:41:00 PM EDT
> To: "E-mail Pamphleteer Dave Farber's Interesting People list" <ip () listbox com>
> Subject: The Era of Fake Video Begins
>
> The Era of Fake Video Begins
> The digital manipulation of video may make the current era of “fake news” seem quaint.
> FRANKLIN FOER  MAY 2018 ISSUE  
> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/realitys-end/556877/
> EXCERPT:
> in a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in 
> all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the 
> videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial 
> intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for 
> another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the 
> core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax.
>
> This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who 
> goes by the nom de hack “deepfakes.” And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of 
> deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to 
> refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or 
> an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be 
> required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic 
> purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire 
> even greater verisimilitude.
>
> The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to 
> the addictive trickery that governs Facebook’s News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place 
> where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the 
> very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet’s history to 
> date—and probably only a low-grade version of what’s to come.​..
> ​
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  
>
> This message was sent to the list address and trashed, but can be found online.



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