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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"
Call me when they can get the A.I. to reliably produce real news broadcasts.
slide guitar
But when I watched the video, I kept seeing places where the lip/mouth movements did not jibe with what was being said. As is, it's not going to convince anyone who's paying attention.
Of course, nowadays almost everyone is staring at their cell phone most of the time... so perhaps the bar is lower than I expect.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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I remember when something similar happened a few years ago when it came to changing the video/voice on pre-recorded media. What I fear, is a 1984 situation where people in power change what context to suit their agenda. What happened, won't necessarily be what happened.
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.
Larry Bud Melman?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Great, now we can make a video of our current president saying some crazy shit ... oh wait.
It looks like dog shit. Superdelux on YouTube does a better job.
Pretty soon somebody's gonna get framed and end up on a deadly game show, and not that rip-off version with the whiney kids.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Just a more polished version.
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Oh yeah, Obama is definitely the one I'd be using the software on first. Definitely not the "grab her by the pussy" speech, no way.
I think they'd need more footage than they have of him actually talking about "adoption"... and to train it on Russian.
Though they do have plenty of footage of him talking about golf and grandchildren...
Someone had to do it.
I'm deaf and have been lipreading for more than 40 years. I can confirm these videos are not lip-readable - many words are only half formed (one syllable where there should be two) and the mouth transitions are too jerky. It's a good attempt and I'm positive the tech will just keep getting better, but right now, it's not there yet.
He already plays Trump...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've seen recent news broadcasts and the only thing that would mimic them successfully would be Artificial Stupidity.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
A long time ago, news was spoken, and you decided to believe, or not to believe, the person telling the tale.
A while ago, news was written, and you decided to believe, or not to believe, the author writing it.
Somewhere along the way, more and more people began to presume that everything is true -- maybe because most of it was, or maybe because they were just that stupid.
Congrats! Those times are over.
Now, once again, you get to spend more time evaluating the source than the content. Enjoy!
Instead of investing time on this, just go to reddit / 4chan and wait a few minutes. This whole "fake news" debacle is really just the same old trolls with new outfits.
--WooooHoooo--
They can easily fool 33% of the nation with flat out lying why do they need to fake anything. Trump Jr can admit a meeting happened, release evidence and still have 1/3 believe it never happened! Trump really could shoot somebody out in the street on TV and not do any worse in the polls.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
out of context.
with a rendered bobblehead? why the fuck would you need that.
just take them out of context and boom, there you have it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
When using software and mainly when being in internet, convincingly faking anything is very difficult or even impossible. Simply because there are usually many ways to reliably confirm any issue. The most curious bit is that the most afraid-to-be-tricked (= the most ignorant individuals) are the ones making the smallest effort to avoid such an outcome. People falling for fake anything in internet are usually the ones blindly trusting in the first thing appearing in front of their faces; behaviours which seem to support ideas like these people really deserving to be lied.
DISCLAIMER: I never lie or try to trick anyone into anything. In fact and as explained in one of my last posts, I am having lately an extremely honest and direct attitude in each single aspect of my (software development) activity, what seems to have provoked the curious consequence of the unmotivated fears of some people to unmotivatedly grow even stronger (not precisely concerned; I am actually kind of enjoying so much stupidity).
DISCLAIMER 2: I don't defend criminal/dishonest activity of any kind. I don't feel much sorry for people suffering the consequences of their negligence or even dishonesty (the scenario of the sucker seriously thinking that is tricking the trickster seems quite common) either.
DISCLAIMER 3: even by forgetting about all what I am writing above and other relevant issues like training/validating the algorithm, the linked video seems quite fake to me.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Being on the autism spectrum, I have a tendency to focus on peoples' mouths when they speak. I would characterize the quality of the generated content as abysmal.
One of the major giveaways is that phonemes which involve the lips interacting with teeth are way off. Just not even close. The word "visited" looks for all the world like what's being said is "dizited". How can they generate a 'd' motion for a 'v' sound and still have the balls to publish their paper, let alone make any sort of claims that it's believable? It's absolutely galling, precisely because it's only accurate enough to fool people who want to be fooled, leaving those of us who know better shouting weakly from the proverbial back of the room.
I grew up in a country where most foreign shows and movies are shown dubbed on TV. The result videos look exactly like a dubbed movie to me. My brain automatically says "this is not the original audio from this footage" when watching this.
So say we all
https://qz.com/654669/nothing-...
A research team has created software that allows them to control the face of anyone in any video. Using advanced facial recognition, it looks at about 15 seconds of any face in a video and creates a 3D model of that face in real time.
Harald
The predictions are here!
Full-parliament renders from Generation P coming to countries of your choice soon
Sci-fi author Ian Banks had this problem in his futuristic The Culture novels. His solution: have repositories of record scattered everywhere that any recording device would upload to in real time. The repository would cryptographically sign the recording then download it back to the recording device. That provided both the sequence ordering and verifiability for the recordings at any future date. Banks wrote that before the arrival of block chain tech. The crowdsourced signing ability of the block chain is being used for things far beyond digital currency already. Seems like we need recording devices that can add hashes of their recordings to the block chain so that there is a record of where and when a given video was shot that cannot be falsified or denied. If we get to the point where most commercial recorders are using that service, we could once again have verifiable news. Seem viable?
How can we have free will when our world is artificially shaped to manipulate us?
There is something to be said for the time when we had to dwell in caves.
you've already stopped thinking critically...
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one of the researchers was a native English speaker.