Deep fakes: Starred in any porn videos lately? Are you sure?
“Deep fakes.”
According to Great Britain’s “The Guardian” newspaper, that’s the next big threat to privacy rights, economic stability, and the remaining vestiges of civil discourse.
A “deep fake” is a high-tech forgery using a machine-learning technique called a “generative adversarial network,” or GAN. It’s a realistic computer-generated replication of a person saying or doing whatever the “puppet master” software user wants them to say or do. Think Photoshop on steroids.
I have dreamed of such technology being used to give the world an inexhaustible supply of new performances by long-departed stars such as John Wayne or Lucille Ball, but I now fear that nefarious abuses would outweigh the good.
When I was growing up, we never imagined such opportunities for mischief. We might put “devil horns” behind someone’s head during a class picture, but nowadays a video could have viewers conned into gasping, “Look! They’ve killed the opposing team’s baby seal mascot and are sacrificing it to the Lord of Darkness himself!”
Think of the social impact if the face of a squeaky-clean actress were superimposed on the writhing body of an X-rated starlet, if a virtual Bill Gates announced that all Microsoft products would spontaneously combust in 24 hours, if the lily-white police chief of a powder-keg city seemingly started singing “De Camptown Races” at a press conference, if a special-effects Vice President Mike Pence failed to don gloves and provide a chastity belt for a little old lady before helping her cross the street, etc.
Deceptive editing has already provided Facebook and YouTube with a plethora of misleading videos. When marginally savvy troublemakers can up the ante and use artificial intelligence to manipulate the words and gestures of politicians, businessmen, and religious leaders, we’ll be more polarized than ever, since most people follow the mantra of “Seeing is believing.”
“Seeing is believing, unless I’m seeing a socialist country like Venezuela crash and burn. Then I say they just need to double down and increase the taxes on that rich guy wrestling a stray dog for scraps from the garbage can.”
On the other hand, the long-term danger is that people will get burned one time too many and start disbelieving simply everything they see.
The algorithms that power “deep fakes” are growing more and more sophisticated. Actually, the software fine-tuning is just overkill in the case of people who already see what they want to see. “Yeah, those stuck-up private-school girls are obviously guilty of shooting at JFK from the grassy knoll. I saw it on my Etch A Sketch. With corroborating evidence from my Wooly Willy and Spirograph, I might add.”
There is currently a frantic arms race to find ways of identifying and debunking fake videos before evildoers concoct ways of making them even more realistic. Maybe truth and justice will triumph, but only if the forensics experts aren’t deceived themselves. “I know I’m supposed to pull a double shift scrutinizing campaign ads, but an anonymous tipster just sent me a video of my wife having an affair with James Dean and Clark Gable. I gotta go home and see if this marriage can be salvaged.”
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
How to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or letter to the editor to The Independent
Do you have something to say? Want your voice to be heard by thousands of readers? Send The Independent your letter to the editor or guest opinion piece. All submissions will be considered for publication by our editorial staff. If your letter or editorial is accepted, it will run on suindependent.com, and we’ll promote it through all of our social media channels. We may even decide to include it in our monthly print edition. Just follow our simple submission guidelines and make your voice heard:
—Submissions should be between 300 and 1,500 words.
—Submissions must be sent to editor@infowest.com as a .doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf file.
—The subject line of the email containing your submission should read “Letter to the editor.”
—Attach your name to both the email and the document file (we don’t run anonymous letters).
—If you have a photo or image you’d like us to use and it’s in .jpg format, at least 1200 X 754 pixels large, and your intellectual property (you own the copyright), feel free to attach it as well, though we reserve the right to choose a different image.
—If you are on Twitter and would like a shout-out when your piece or letter is published, include that in your correspondence and we’ll give you a mention at the time of publication.
Articles related to “Deep fakes: Starred in any porn videos lately? Are you sure?”
Dixie State student, St. George resident arrested on child pornography charges
Album Review: Tame Impala’s ‘Currents’—hipster wet dream or post-Beatles porn?
