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This thought provoking and somewhat frightening article in Vanity Fair describes the state of play of technology which has the potential to warp our world-view far beyond anything before.
At corporations and universities across the country, incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake. Or, in the simplest of terms, advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news—real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews—in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways. One research paper published last year by professors at Stanford University and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg demonstrated how technologists can record video of someone talking and then change their facial expressions in real time. The professors' technology could take a news clip of, say, Vladimir Putin, and alter his facial expressions in real time in hard-to-detect ways. In fact, in this video demonstrating the technology, the researchers show how they did manipulate Putin's facial expressions and responses, among those of other people, too.
This is eerie, to say the least. But it's only one part of the future fake-news menace. Other similar technologies have been in the works in universities and research labs for years, but they have never really pulled off what computers can do today. Take for example "The Digital Emily Project," a study in which researchers created digital actors that could be used in lieu of real people. For the past several years, the results have been crude and easily detectable as digital re-creations. But technologies that are now used by Hollywood and the video-game industry have largely rendered digital avatars almost indecipherable from real people. (Go and watch the latest Star Wars to see if you can tell which actors are real and which are computer-generated. I bet you can't tell the difference.) You could imagine some political group utilizing that technology to create a fake hidden video clip of President Trump telling Rex Tillerson that he plans to drop a nuclear bomb on China. The velocity with which news clips spread across social media would also mean that the administration would have frightfully little time to respond before a fake-news story turned into an international crisis.
Audio advancements may be just as harrowing. At its annual developer's conference, in November, Adobe showed off a new product that has been nicknamed "Photoshop for audio." The product allows users to feed about ten to 20 minutes of someone's voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice. The resultant voice, which is comprised of the person's phonemes, or the distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in each language, doesn't sound even remotely computer-generated or made up. It sounds real. This sort of technology could facilitate the ability to feed one of Trump's interviews or stump speeches into the application, and then type sentences or paragraphs in his spoken voice. You could very easily imagine someone creating fake audio of Trump explaining how he dislikes Mike Pence, or how he lied about his taxes, or that he did indeed enjoy that alleged "golden shower" in the Russian hotel suite. Then you could circulate that audio around the Internet as a comment that was overheard on a hot microphone. Worse, you could imagine a scenario in which someone uses Trump's voice to call another world leader and threaten some sort of violent action. And perhaps worst of all, as the quality of imitation gets better and better, it will become increasingly difficult to discern between what is real behavior and what isn't.
Regardless of what ideology you subscribe to, what politician you support, what media source you visit; you fundamentally must be able to trust the information you see. If there is no way, barring forensic analysis, to tell truth or falsehood, how can we know anything? Plausible lies could literally be the end of the world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:08AM
See, this is where the conclusion starts to go wrong. To learn anything, you must fundamentally distrust all information you see and hear. Even the most honest source imaginable may be honestly mistaken about something.
There is a real way, though, to sort through it:
1. Apply Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit.
2. Avoid speculating beyond that which has been reported from multiple angles, ideally with videos or hard evidence.
3. Be more consciously skeptical of those with biases you agree with than biases you don't. So, for example, Republicans should be particularly wary of claims they hear from Fox News or the Wall Street Journal, while Democrats should be particularly wary of claims from MSNBC or the Washington Post, Libertarians should be wary of Reason magazine and the Cato Institute, and so forth. Your natural tendency will be to be less skeptical of sources you agree with, so you need to consciously counter that.
4. "I don't know" is always an acceptable answer when you don't really know.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driven on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:47AM
This is all fine, but as time marches on we all need to continue to live and make decisions in real time. If you distrust almost all of what you hear, what information do you base your decisions on? How do you feel about certain issues, especially issues that happen too far away for facts to be independently verified by yourself or people you know?
When you can't trust anything, you get people making snap judgements about this person or that group of people or that country, and so on. This is not heading in a good direction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:51AM
Or you get people who withhold judgement.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:48AM
Withholding judgment is a rare skill.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:43AM
It's not just about dis-trusting sources that have biases that match yours.
Its more about dis-trusting stories that really, really confirm your biases.
Like pizzagate - those people hate hillary so fucking much that they literally wanted to believe she was part of a child molestation ring and were willing to completely suspend all disbelief because they wanted it so, so bad to be true.
Don't do that.
If fox news says something mildly positive about trump, its probably true. If fox news says something about some miracle trump pulled off, probably not really the whole story...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @12:42PM
The equivalent stories to pizzagate on the other side of the political aisle: (A) Donald Trump is some kind of Manchurian Candidate completely under the control of Vladimir Putin, and (B) The Russians changed the vote totals to ensure that Trump won.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Some call me Tim on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:53AM
Why must you make decisions in real time? Why can't you wait a week for the real story to come out and make your decision then? This is the real problem with internet "news". News site makes fantastic claim, everyone twitfacebooks it as the truth never ending and it turns out to be total crap later. Sadly it's too late and the damage is done. No one believes anything and the wharblegarble fest continues. There are too many idiots and not enough Darwin to even things out.
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:07AM
Where can I obtain this wonderous item? Sounds very useful.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:57AM
Search the web or go to the library? It seems that the most obvious and direct way is the most difficult, confirming the lack of critical thinking in the first place.
(Score: 5, Informative) by stormwyrm on Tuesday January 31 2017, @06:43AM
See The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark [wikipedia.org] by Carl Sagan (1995). ISBN 0-345-40946-9. An excellent book and required reading for everyone. This is the Baloney Detection Kit [fu-berlin.de], which appears as Chapter 12 of the book.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @01:44PM
From that text:
Wait, isn't Aristarchus a regular poster here? That would be a good use of his journal! ;-)
(Score: 2, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:00AM
Yes, except there are "reasons". First, Sophocles wrote plays. Second, Democritus is actually dead. Third, two parts: The best philosophers, like Socrates, never write anything down; and I forgot what was in my lost books. That is why they are lost.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:14PM
Knowledge is power. France is bacon.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Tuesday January 31 2017, @01:06PM
you fundamentally must be able to trust the information you see.
Why start now?
how can we know anything?
We can't. Deal with it.
The search for absolute Truth has always seemed to me to be a religious thing. In a world of chaos, $BOOK has the infallible answer.
But this recently-emerging term "fake news" seems to me, well, fake. You don't put a qualifier in front of something unless you want to distinguish it from the rest of the group. The fact that we say "red light" implies that there are other possible colors of light, else we would just call it "light".
So... "fake news" suggests that there exists somewhere any other kind of news. Not in my personal experience. Every newsworthy event I've experienced in person has been grossly misreported. As just one example, I was at a political event that drew I would guess about 10 thousand people and flooded several downtown streets from curb to curb.* The newspaper the next day had a front page photo of a mom and her 3 kids at the event. 100% true, but totally misrepresented the size of the gathering.
News, almost by definition, describes the deviations from reality. You don't get a million stories per day "Bob Smith safely drove to work today." But you get the one story "family drives off bridge into freezing lake". This distorts your perception of what's happening and the risks you face.
News is crap and reporters are professional liars who talk as if we are all idiots. Not only that, but virtually all of them have a strong, thinly veiled political slant to everything they say.
* It was a long time ago and it doesn't really matter what we were protesting.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @01:18PM
Lets put this into a doctrine - All news is paid for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:05AM
- All news is paid for.
Oh, you little Cuban Cheroot! You are a mercenary! How can you give away such fake news for free? HUH!! Who's paying you, you astroturfing shill for powers that prefer to stay in the dark? How much did they pay you to say this about news? Huh? Thirty pieces of bitcoin, eh? Is that all your soul is worth? Have you no decency, Sir? At long last, have you no decency?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by cubancigar11 on Friday February 03 2017, @05:50PM
Off-topic :D Finally my karma took 1 hit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @03:23PM
What's been notable is that when you hear people talking about "fake news" on the TV or in newspapers, what they are talking about isn't demonstrably false and misleading stories finding their way onto the front page of the New York Times, but small scale news outlets. So the push about "Don't read fake news" isn't about whether those sites are reporting true or false information at all, it's about major industry players trying to cut down on the competition.
I'm not sure all reporters are professional liars. I'm reasonably certain at least some of them are professional dupes who are fed all sorts of "creative" information by professional liars. The overwhelming desire of reporters is to get "the story" out as quickly as possible, rather than to do the much slower work of figuring out whether the story is true or analyzing the effects of whatever is being reported.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:39PM
No, those aren't reporters. Reporters are the people who go on scene and report...and while to call them "professional liars" may be overstating the case, it's not doing it by much. In every case I've witnessed they carefully collect only the "interesting" angles on the story. So that's the first level of editing. Then they take it back to the shop and summarize it, cutting out the parts that are "less interesting". These stories are then presented to the editors (their bosses) who decide how much of which story can be used, and what of the remaining needs to be cut. And they do this largely based on maintaining "interest".
And in NONE of these steps is the main concern telling a complete version of the story. It can't be. And when they are deciding "what's interesting" their biases are being imposed. They cut out parts that look "ugly" or "unattractive". They "tighten the narrative"...in fact they construct the narrative by deciding what the story-line is. Was this fire about the little girl who got out with her puppy, or is it about the insurance inspectors report being ignored, or was it about dangerously overloaded electrical fixtures or... but notice that ALL of those are a part of the same event, event though they are separate stories. And sometimes they thing the story should have a political slant, but this doesn't mean their story isn't about something that happened, it may well not be a lie, exactly, but merely a microscope focused on something that would otherwise be minor.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 31 2017, @06:51PM
So... "fake news" suggests that there exists somewhere any other kind of news.
There is. Even Fox does basic fact checking.
Definition of fake
: counterfeit, sham
As in, it's meant to look like news but its completely factually wrong and the author knows it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @01:37PM
Why should I trust that?
Well, can I have a different-angled view of that recommendation, please? With hard evidence?
I guess I should be extremely sceptical of this one.
Is it? I don't know.
(Score: 2) by hellcat on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:26PM
Your references are excellent. Thank you.
Even Carl is a bit guilty. It took more than a little digging to get close to the reference he used for Francis Bacon's work to find the correct passage (#49). I didn't find the exact translation, however, and so Carl becomes complicit in the tendency towards losing trust.
I would like to suggest that there is truly, no such thing as "news." Information can be considered new, and hence news, but until it is old and corroborated and tested, it should be on probation.
Today's talking heads don't even provide information, but tell stories. Very different. No corroboration needed. It only serves to help me feel, alive.