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"

Comments

It'll convince people who want to be convinced

[rsilvergun]

and that's the point. There's millions of folks out there itching for an excuse to do what they already want to do. Fake news doesn't work on people thinking critically, but you're not after those.

Re:It'll convince people who want to be convinced

[sound vision]

It's likely this kind of video manipulation can be done better. When someone does do it better, we might not hear about it from "researchers" but see the videos begin to appear in the wild.

Re:It'll convince people who want to be convinced

[Mashiki]

Fake news doesn't work on people thinking critically, but you're not after those.

Not true in the least. Remember when Dateline used model rocket boosters to blow up the gas tanks on pickup trucks? You know their target audience for that show at the time was 30-45 college educated or higher. Fake news works well on anyone who's ideologically deep in a rabbit hole and wants to engage in confirmation bias.

Let's look at two cases over the last 3 years: Gamergate, where the FBI could find no incidences of harassment from anyone tied to it. Demographics educated at college level or higher, married, has family, has high disposable income, roughly 15% are female, has a significant minority quotient from all over the world to boot and aligns politically left. But the media continues on with the lie that they're harassers who pump out death threats, are worse then isis, and then scrub away those women and minorities because they don't fit the narrative(that is if the anti-gg people simply don't call them house n*iggers, or uncle toms). The media view of the people in Gamergate are: single, white, males who live in their parents basement or are virgins living alone. Nice fabrications huh?

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.

Re:It'll convince people who want to be convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, have they started coming out with details now? I've stopped reading any stories on it because I got sick of "according to an anonymous source I got from my brothers girlfriends roommates uncles third cousin".

Care to cite these details in stories that don't include "according to an anonymous source" that are actually crimes?

Progress, but not yet out of the Uncanny Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of progress I see, but watching the video, the artificial bit still looks a bit creepy and weird. We're not out of the uncanny valley for this sort of thing yet.

Re:Oh yeah.

[Mal-2]

They probably started this research while Obama still was president, and besides, they probably liked him. If there's anyone who can use the "fake video" defense now, it's him -- even if it's someone else's work. In that way, they've done him a favor.

Re:Lipreader says no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Chances are it's more than good enough to feed the typical viewer, who will be very quick to "inform" you that not only is lip-reading inaccurate but that you're just a crackpot trying to make shit up to feel better about being crippled.

Then they'll remind you that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and that you'd know this if you could understand news.