SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Brace Yourself for the 2024 Deepfake Election:
Artificial intelligence was once something the average person described in the abstract. They had no tactile relationship with it that they were aware of, even if their devices were often utilizing it. That's all changed over the past year as people have started to engage with AI programs like OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the technology is rapidly advancing.
As AI is democratized, democracy itself is falling under new pressures. There will likely be many exciting ways it will be deployed, but it may also start to distort reality and could become a major threat to the 2024 presidential election if AI-generated audio, images, and videos of candidates proliferate. The line between what's real and what's fake could start to blur significantly more than it already has in an age of rampant disinformation.
"We've seen pretty dramatic shifts in the landscape when it comes to generative tools—particularly in the last year," says Henry Ajder, an independent AI expert. "I think the scale of content we're now seeing being produced is directly related to that dramatic opening up of accessibility."
It's not a question of whether AI-generated content is going to start playing a role in politics, because it's already happening. AI-generated images and videos featuring president Joe Biden and Donald Trump have started spreading around the internet. Republicans recently used AI to generate an attack ad against Biden. The question is, what will happen when anyone can open their laptop and, with minimal effort, quickly create a convincing deepfake of a politician?
There are plenty of ways to generate AI images from text, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It's easy to generate a clone of someone's voice with an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs. Convincing deepfake videos are still difficult to produce, but Ajder says that might not be the case within a year or so.
"To create a really high-quality deepfake still requires a fair degree of expertise, as well as post-production expertise to touch up the output the AI generates," Ajder says. "Video is really the next frontier in generative AI."
Some deepfakes of political figures have emerged in recent years, such as one of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his troops to surrender that was released last year. Once the technology has advanced more, which may not take long considering how quickly other forms of generative AI are advancing, more of these types of videos may appear as they become more convincing and easier to produce.
"I don't think there's a website where you can say, 'Create me a video of Joe Biden saying X.' That doesn't exist, but it will," says Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information. "It's just a matter of time. People are already working on text-to-video."
That includes companies like Runway, Google, and Meta. Once one company releases a high-quality version of a text-to-video generative AI tool, we may see many others quickly release their own versions, as we did after ChatGPT was released. Farid says that nobody wants to get "left behind," so these companies tend to just release what they have as soon as they can.
"It consistently amazes me that in the physical world, when we release products there are really stringent guidelines," Farid says. "You can't release a product and hope it doesn't kill your customer. But with software, we're like, 'This doesn't really work, but let's see what happens when we release it to billions of people.'"
If we start to see a significant number of deepfakes spreading during the election, it's easy to imagine someone like Donald Trump sharing this kind of content on social media and claiming it's real. A deepfake of President Biden saying something disqualifying could come out shortly before the election, and many people might never find out it was AI-generated. Research has consistently shown, after all, that fake news spreads further than real news.
Even if deepfakes don't become ubiquitous before the 2024 election, which is still 18 months away, the mere fact that this kind of content can be created could affect the election. Knowing that fraudulent images, audio, and video can be created relatively easily could make people distrust the legitimate material they come across.
"In some respects, deepfakes and generative AI don't even need to be involved in the election for them to still cause disruption, because now the well has been poisoned with this idea that anything could be fake," says Ajder. "That provides a really useful excuse if something inconvenient comes out featuring you. You can dismiss it as fake."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Friday April 28 2023, @07:37PM (9 children)
Maybe it's time for me to start shutting off social media during election years.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28 2023, @08:12PM (8 children)
Sometime in the future, we're going to have mass distribution of digitally signed video like we have PGP for e-mail.
Certified signature of the cameraman, the reporter on-camera, the news agency distributing the story, and the retail channel who is showing it to you. The player apps will verify that the video and audio data is unaltered from the sources, or not. The signatures can indicate original run-length to give some sense of when things may be edited out of context. When you share the video with your social media circles, your signature gets appended to the chain so your friends know it's really you sharing this and not some scammer.
Facebook already needs this. I have friends whose profile pictures and description details are being copied by scammers who setup accounts copying their names, one (CEO of a little company) happens on a fairly regular basis.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Friday April 28 2023, @08:41PM (5 children)
I see a couple of things happening in the not-too-distant-future- First is a suspect's video/photographic evidence is thrown out because AI is regenerating an image based on what it's learned landing in a false positive. Second, and this is a good deal more extreme, all smartphone-based photos are no longer considered to be compelling evidence because of lack-of-confidence with the image reconstruction model.
I think you're right that they're going to address it in the way you described but I fear people will find ways around it. If I were the betting sort I'd put $100 on film cameras making a big big comeback. I don't mean as the storage medium, rather a backup for verification. I wouldn't even be surprised if digital artists start using printers for a similar reason. ermm... Im getting fanciful and babbly so I'll just end this post here. :D Man I get bored when my computer takes 10 mins to finish a task.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28 2023, @09:15PM (3 children)
I doubt chemical film is going to have any sort of major resurgence. The lowest cost for consumers was around $1 per print back in the day when you factored in cost of film, development and printing - that's like $5 per photo or more today, compared with 0.0005 cents per photo basically in depreciation cost of the phone and maybe 0.0001 cents for electricity.
For people who care (how many people use PGP e-mail or any other kinds of signatures today? Like 0.1%?) it would be simple enough to have an "app for that" which signs you in with fingerprint or swipe pattern or password or whatever and any combination of the above, generating a basis of trust that "it is me taking this video" and then signing that video - both a signature every 30 frames or so, and an overall signature on the entire clip so that you can edit it later and still have the original recording signatures on the smaller chunks, and also put your signature on the editing work.
I have known how to do all this since in practice the 1990s, studied it in school in the 1980s, and, yet, the only application I have ever made of it since then is signing software updates for field distribution for work.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29 2023, @01:45AM
Having said all that, our new neighbors with four kids who just paid $1M for a house that was appraised at $385k back 10 years ago when we moved in, their middle daughter has some sort of polaroid contraption that prints photos immediately after taking them. I haven't looked at it closely, but the styling is anything but retro, kinda looks like a purse with holographic prints on it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Saturday April 29 2023, @02:15PM (1 child)
No, it is far from simple. That's the sad truth about security. Common sense tells us it should be simple, unfortunately it really isn't. If it were simple, we would all be using PGP already.
In order to use security (in any meaningful way) the users first have to actually understand the underlying principles - which requires actually thinking about the problem. That's a non-starter for most. Then you have to ignore everybody who tells you they have an "easy" solution (because they don't... otherwise we'd all be using it already).
Once you sufficiently understand the problem, you're ready to go. Now you get to deal with everybody else who doesn't understand what or why you are doing this, and listen to the endless repeats of "you should use this [insecure system], it's much easier!" and "no, that's too hard, it's common sense that it should be easy!".
Then people loose their keyfile and/or forget their passphrase, and get upset because there is no backdoor.
Not that I am suggesting you haven't got the right idea, it's just the implementation is impossible without users actually understanding the problem domain. And users won't spend the time to learn because the siren call of "easy" lulls them into the false expectation that just because they can imagine an easy solution that reality should match accordingly.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29 2023, @02:44PM
Implementing the cryptography is simple enough, managing the keys is virtually impossible for the bulk of the population, as demonstrated by so many people who lost their bitcoin because they lost the keys.
The cryptocurrency ecosystem sort of demonstrates how digital security does, and doesn't, work for "real" people. Most are using key escrow agents who provide those virtual back doors for when the average customer loses a key - but you've got to trust them like you trust a bank, and being unregulated.... Sam Bankman-Fried (ironic name IMO) and similar cases are to be expected.
There's not really anything the general population takes more seriously than money, and even money isn't serious enough for most people to do security right - so, yeah, e-mails and video "evidence" are taken on a whole lot of faith and not much more.
You can educate people all you want about how to keep a secret, there's still going to be a significant number who will seriously hurt themselves by screwing it up when they protect something important (like their retirement savings) with that secret.
Verbal contracts are still legally binding, even if they're all but impossible to prove in court. The complexities of building trust other ways than a single all powerful secret key (because most people can't handle an all powerful secret key) are what keep these systems from being simple, easily built, maintained and understood. We still use verbal contracts, backed up with recording, written signature, witnesses, various proofs of identity, and threats of legal prosecution for fraud in all those systems. If we're ever going to truly be a global society of billions of people interacting one to one with each other, powerful secrets seem to be the best way to make that practical, instead of the many costly layers of imperfect trust that have evolved over the centuries.
My prediction is that we will slowly evolve toward the one to one use of powerful secrets, those who learn how to use them safely and effectively will benefit from the improved efficiency, and those who don't will be paying layers of trust agents on top of the strong secret users. First in money, but video journalism is another kind of currency that has similar needs...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday April 29 2023, @09:13AM
A good thought, but if I show you a photo print, how do you know the original image source wasn't a high res digital fake?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 29 2023, @04:35AM (1 child)
Sure, PGP for e-mail exists. But mass adoption? We must live in very different worlds.
What I could imagine is the camera leaving a digital signature as watermark. That would not only prove that the material was authentically generated by a camera, but also allow to trace back which camera it was recorded on; law enforcement would like that, which makes it more likely that it actually eventually becomes a law.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:18PM
The trick there is keeping the camera's secret secret. A few years ago (like 5 or less) just about any data on any IC could be read for a couple thousand dollars and a few weeks time by any one of a handful of service providers scattered around the world. Secure chip manufacturers have recently stepped up their game and the latest secure chips are harder to read, but it's probably just a matter of time before they can be read by more sophisticated (costly) processes.
I agree, individual uptake of secure video tech is likely to resemble PGP for email rates. It astounds me what passes for digital evidence in court and that forgery as a defense isn't more common. I am thinking that deepfake video is going to raise awareness, if only slightly, and that some sort of secure watermarks are going to start augmenting the present (hopelessly insecure) chain of custody system.
In 2010 I wrote an FFMpeg extension to add (100% insecure) standard military metadata on mpeg2 video. They need that metadata embedded in the video files because they have so much video they would lose track of where it came from without the embedded info like time and location. It would be a small step to take cryptographically secure hashes of the video data itself and sign them with secret keys, including those signed hashes in the metadata along with the time, location, altitude and other data (which itself should also be included in the hash input).
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Friday April 28 2023, @08:20PM (17 children)
If journalists lie and use propaganda, that's good. If anyone else does, especially those from the "other" political side, thats doubleplusungood and a threat to democracy.
With a side dish of discrediting the concept of democracy by changing the definition to now mean 'leftist politics'. Sure, I oppose democracy (only the new definition).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2023, @08:48PM (8 children)
yeah... it's totally the left damaging democracy and not the party booting elected officials, rioting over losing a presidential election, made-up bullshit to reduce mail-in voting, stacking judges judges to remove medical freedoms, banning books in school, tackling inflation by checking out hunter's dick pics, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:13AM (7 children)
Which side was in favor of unprovoked violence?
"Punch a Nazi" ring any bells?
And just because you call someone a Nazi neither makes it true nor makes it ok to punch them,
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:27AM
Which side wanted to legalize running over protestors?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 29 2023, @04:11AM (2 children)
Your kind never did like your own tactics being used against them....karma's a bitch, ain't she?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2023, @11:41PM (1 child)
It will be, once you wake up the sleeping dragon.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 01 2023, @03:36PM
Stop stealing my lines. The "sleeping dragon" isn't your merry little band of beer-bellied cousin-fucking wannabe Hitlerjugend. It's all the normal, sane, decent people in the country.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday April 29 2023, @03:19PM (2 children)
You specifically said "unprovoked" violence.
Nazis advocate for genocide, very much a lethal threat to their chosen targets. Nazis have formed organizations that regularly engage in the beating of their targets and vandalism of their property. Nazis have repeatedly encouraged murder sprees on their chosen targets, whether we're talking LGBTQIA+ bars and clubs, synagogues, churches, or grocery stores with lots of black people shopping. Nazis were directly involved in attacking the US Capitol building with the stated intent of murdering members of Congress and the Vice-President of the United States. And police have been pretty consistently minimal help to protect against this threat - as an example, at Charlottesville, a Nazi fired a gun towards a crowd right in front of a bunch of cops, and the police didn't even pull that guy aside to ask a few questions.
That sure sounds like provocation to me.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @01:36AM (1 child)
You forgot to say wearing a red cap is an automatic conviction for all of the crimes you listed and thereby makes it ok to punch you.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 01 2023, @03:39PM
As stated elsewhere, tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. While I wouldn't hit you unless you hit me first, I also have no compunction about mocking you mercilessly :) And something tells me you would rather be hit than mocked, somehow. Well, too bad, asshat :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday April 28 2023, @08:50PM (6 children)
Sorry, but democracy *is* failing. The partisan sides have gotten more extreme, and don't listen to each other. Pointing to individual cases where one side was right and the other was wrong doesn't address the actual failing. And it's not happenstance. The social media sites intentionally designed their interactions to foment strife, because it caused greater engagement, which brought in more money from the advertisers.
Now what to do about this is a separate question, but this is the kind of thing that tore apart the Eastern Roman Empire. (I.e., it's not a failure of democracy, it's a failure of human nature.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Friday April 28 2023, @09:03PM (5 children)
capitalism is ruining democracy. its more powerful and its controlled by a smaller elite group.
the fox tv network kingdom is an example. rupert is hell bent on destroying what is good about the west, for some damned reason. maybe its the joker concept: he just wants to watch the world burn, cause he can afford it (?)
at any rate, the powerful have decided the world is their plaything and as long as they dont have to deal with fallout, anything goes.
I have another 20 or 30 years left in me, but for those that are starting out in this world, I pity you and what a horrible future you may have.
I do think we have seen mankind's best. we've peaked and are now on the down side, world-wide. real shame but this is what mankind is, at its core.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2023, @10:37PM (4 children)
There's a description in one of Bob Wilson's book about why.
He describes the two views of the future as rising and falling expectations.
Rich people promote the view of falling expectations because (paraphrasing because I don't have it to hand) "every time someone asked why things weren't getting better despite technology, unfriendly eyes would turn to the small group of rich old primates who owned and controlled almost everything"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 29 2023, @12:19AM (1 child)
That was in part of the Schrodinger's Cat collection.
He's got a lot of good points, but don't take him as gospel. The solutions he proposes wouldn't work either. But he does see the problems.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @01:39AM
I live my life according to Tenets of the Church of Bob.
There are no fnords in the advertisements.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday April 30 2023, @03:47AM (1 child)
yet another reason to be depressed: in the US, we have a political group that has completely given up trying to govern (at least based on what people really want) - and they are grandstanding and hoping to 'win' on social media. this passes for elected officials. they want to do all they can to make the other party look bad, even to the point of shitting in your own backyard.
so we can look forward to 2 years, roughly, of this kind of crap and total waste of time, lack of progress and strong attempts at regress.
zero care for making the world (or the country) actually better in any way. they only want to appeal to their fan base, and they are almost entirely religiously based (beyond ration) and they want to force their narrow extreme religion on everyone.
THIS is what we have for the next 2 years. and if things go horribly wrong, maybe another 4 years after that.
things look quite bad for the US, in the short term. prove me wrong. please. I beg you.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @04:01AM
You know, from outside the USA, I really don't know which political group you are referring to.
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 29 2023, @04:37AM
No, it's not.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2023, @02:20AM
It doesn't matter if it's fake or not. Like those old Clutch Cargo cartoons, only their lips move. Don't believe anything you see or hear from them.
(Score: 3, Touché) by SomeGuy on Saturday April 29 2023, @01:00PM (1 child)
Mis-information and propaganda is not new. It has been around since the beginning of politics. Heck, it is in integral component.
The real problem is the decrease of reliable news sources and the increasing belief that people don't need reliable news sources.
But let's beat the deepfaked surrealistically artifacted dead AI horse instead. (Somewhere at a BS AI company, a CEO screams "ka-ching!")
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday April 30 2023, @03:50AM
no, this is entirely new.
we were always able to tell a fake from a real, if you were even just medium-level careful.
now, you need expert tools to know.
that makes all the diff.
people are simply going to believe what they see and hear and its going to take another generation before it re-balances. if ever. I say, it wont ever. once its out of the bag, its never going back in. I warned you humans about this.
(oops. too much info.)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday April 29 2023, @03:34PM (1 child)
1. Get out of your house and go see the candidates in the flesh with your own eyes and ears. That will tell you a lot about who they are, who their supporters are, how their campaign organization operates, and what they have to say. Having been to plenty of these over the years, I can say with confidence that most of what you'll encounter at one of these never makes it onto the TV news.
2. Look through official records of what they've done. Bills they've signed or voted for or against. Regulations their administration has put forward. That sort of thing. You don't even have to leave your house to do this. This will tell you a lot more about what they actually care about than anything they say publicly.
3. Check out who is funding them (OpenSecrets is great for this for federal elections at least). Money is really the lifeblood of politics, and who is donating to a candidate can often tell you what they'll do in office differently than they've done in the past.
These are all good moves regardless of your party affiliation or choice of candidate. And be at least as in-depth about your current chosen candidate than everyone else.
TV talking heads, random social media memes, and political ads will all reduce the actual information you have to work with when making your decision.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Saturday April 29 2023, @05:47PM
That all nice to say but virtually nobody is going to do that. To do those things you:
1. have to know that those options are even available
2. know how to execute on those options
3. have the time to execute those options.
For a very sizeable portion of the population, the above hurdles are insurmountable even if they really want to.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ilsa on Saturday April 29 2023, @05:37PM (3 children)
I hope all you Pro-AI people are paying very close attention to what's going on right now. "Ooooh the Anti-AI crowd are overreacting." "You're just fear-mongering."
I said it before and I'll say it again: AI will, (and has already started,) DDOSing the concept of truth itself.
This tech will result in another "Industrial Revolution", except at scale so massive there is no way to absorb the sheer number of people who will be affected. Everything from all forms of art, to software development, medicine, law... which is going to produce a massive pool of people who are frustrated and desperate, on top of the staggering number of frustrated, desperate people that COVID produced.
It will dramatically accelerate USA's march to theocratic fascism, as people grow increasingly desperate for "truths" that they can cling to when they can no longer trust what they see with their own eyes. They are already looking for scapegoats to direct their anger, and exactly like pre-Nazi Germany, their sights are laser-focused on Trans people.
We are looking down the barrel of massive social upheaval, complete loss of trust in basic reality, and ultimately, war. I can't predict how things will shape, but it's a no brainer that things are going to get more bad than anyone can even imagine. Maybe WW3. Maybe some Robocop/Cyberpunk dystopia. Maybe some variation on The Expanse.
We are fucked.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @12:21AM
That sounds fantastic. I want to see more AI causing literal fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Get fucked.
Some corrections. Most People of Gender are mentally ill transtrender idiots and perverts. Denying them the so-called gender-affirming health care does not actually harm them. Denying them access to the bathroom corresponding to their perversion is not genocide. They are being amplified by the media for fun and profit. There just are not enough Trans to fuel your Naaaaaaazi fantasy. Dreams of theocratic fascism peaked in the 2000's. Americans are less religious now than ever. You will get to live in a cool fascist cyberpunk dystopia if you are lucky.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2023, @01:51AM (1 child)
I have to say I genuinely don't understand the concept of "identifying as (fe)male". I don't "identify" as a gender. I am me, and if I want to pick up an axe and go lumberjacking I will. Likewise if I feel like wearing a skirt and joining a knitting club.
I work in both wood and metal, I own two welders, at least five circular saws. two chainsaws, numerous other tools, many cooking implements, a sewing machine, an overlocker, and a full set of crochet hooks.
I am Me and I will do whatever the hell I want regardless of your gender-enforcing stereotypes.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 01 2023, @03:44PM
I don't get it either, but apparently it's something you don't have to think about being cisgender? So it may be less "identifying as" and more "realizing there is a discrepancy between how you are innately and what the world expects of you based on your body." It sounds nightmarish, doubly so with all the horrifying stuff coming out of the Deep South recently...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...