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Researchers Have Figured Out How To Fake News Video With AI (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A team of computer scientists at the University of Washington have used artificial intelligence to render visually convincing videos of Barack Obama saying things he's said before, but in a totally new context. In a paper published this month, the researchers explained their methodology: Using a neural network trained on 17 hours of footage of the former U.S. president's weekly addresses, they were able to generate mouth shapes from arbitrary audio clips of Obama's voice. The shapes were then textured to photorealistic quality and overlaid onto Obama's face in a different "target" video. Finally, the researchers retimed the target video to move Obama's body naturally to the rhythm of the new audio track. In their paper, the researchers pointed to several practical applications of being able to generate high quality video from audio, including helping hearing-impaired people lip-read audio during a phone call or creating realistic digital characters in the film and gaming industries. But the more disturbing consequence of such a technology is its potential to proliferate video-based fake news. Though the researchers used only real audio for the study, they were able to skip and reorder Obama's sentences seamlessly and even use audio from an Obama impersonator to achieve near-perfect results. The rapid advancement of voice-synthesis software also provides easy, off-the-shelf solutions for compelling, falsified audio. You can view the demo here: "Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lib Sync from Audio"
>Or you can take a look at the "Trump-Russia-Collusion" story. Which has evolved from "Russia colluded with Trump" to "his son talked with a lawyer who's visa expired that the Obama administration specifically let back in at the behest of Susan Rice" along with "Putin talked with Trump during dinner." But the entire thing has fallen apart to the point where pundits outside of the main of the party are saying "shut-up, this is hurting us more then helping." If the media has one narrative, it's very easy to see from the outside. But it sure is self-reinforcing if you're in that rabbit hole.
Really? That's the example you're going with? The one where the whole last week has been detail after detail coming to light showing collusion is incredibly likely to any reasonable person?
Trump isn't a republican. He's a Trump. Republicans are just willing to stand behind him despite the fact that he's unprofessional, erratic, self-defeating, and, well, an international buffoon, because it got them power and they don't want to let go. American politics - things like the actual country don't matter so long as your team is winning.
If that weren't true you wouldn't feel that compulsion to astroturf for Trump in your post. I mean, the guy's rich off Russian money, has uncountable Russian contacts, fired a guy for not dropping an investigation into his Russian ties, had three high level members of his campaign meet with Russians on the promise of Russian government-backed dirt on his opponent, and then - when all this 'fake news' was dogging him, decided to have an extended private meeting with Putin without anyone there you could trust to corroborate the content of their discussions. And all that (believe it or not) just pales compared to the horrorshow that was his first week in office constantly bitching at the most inappropriate times that his inauguration crowd was bigger than his predecessors despite photographic proof to the contrary.