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

Sources say

[Anonymous Coward]

Sources say the news has been doing this for years. Eleven anonymous people all say they helped fake news at CNN, Fox and the Washington Post for years without anyone realizing it simply by using the citogenesis process to create stories out of thin air.

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

[Mashiki]

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?

You mean the one with the sources of "anonymous" "anonymous" "anonymous" "anonymous source" and so on? Oh yeah. Very solid sources there, just like the one about Russia hacking that electrical grid that WAPO published right.

I heard through an anonymous source that your waifu is shit. That's 100% true right?

Just because your panties are in a twist, I'll even add something that doesn't relate to it. Where Kotaku and Destructiod Turns around and lies about a mentally ill person filing multiple false DMCA's to get games taken down, and issuing death threats against those people. But Kotaku ignores the death threats that the person filing the DMCA's is sending.

But just jumping back to Trump, the only dog I've got in this race is that he's doing more for Canada then Trudeau is. But nice job on showing how much of a bubble you're really in. I'd hate to see what your comments on Andrew Jackson back in the day would have been like.