Future of Fake News [video]
First this is incredibly cool and a fantastic technical achievement -- seriously that's amazing.
This might be the future of state level propaganda but it probably isn't the future of fake news. Fake news sites right now are poorly written, poorly edited, cite no sources, and provide no verifiable evidence to their claims and yet they still spread like wildfire on social media. Not only is this level of sophistication not needed but it the low quality works in favor of these sites to cultivate a rabid audience because they select for precisely the people who would believe them. If they were higher quality they might actually be less effective.
It's an interesting demo, but I think it's still a bit complex for the future of 'fake news'. Remember, most people's standards for proof are not 'video required or get out'. They're quite willing to believe simple text and image based stories if it backs their preconceptions and the source looks semi plausible.
Those who are prone to believing fake news (an audience which likely consists of about 80% of the population, many intelligent people and journalists included) will believe it without fancy video evidence.
Those who aren't prone to believing it will likely realise it's on a website with questionable credibility and not give it the time of day based on that.
A government may use this for propaganda, but it seems too expensive and too complicated for your typical fake news site to use.
What makes this so terrifying is that even if you debunk a doctored video it still affects us. You can't roll back first impressions [1].
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-...
The mouth looks like a slightly more sophisticated version of the Annoying Orange. I remember an academic fake talking head demo a while ago that was much more impressive.
Here is the original SIGGRAPH paper and demo video:
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/AudioToObama/siggrap...
The mouth movements are deep down in the uncanny valley to me, but the audio is frighteningly convincing.
When I see technology like this and imagine the implications of AI being able to leverage it, it only makes me more pessimistic for the future of our species.
It's obviously fake right now, but I could see in the near future it becoming very realistic. This will definitely be a problem.
Radiolab has an episode of the potential implications of tech like this: http://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking-news/
Here's a direct link to the embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1fxu5RrM4w
They may have gotten the voice right, but they could have worked on the video better, maybe use snapchat filters that take your facial expressions and impose them on Obama's face.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14786863
the technical breakdown: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/thies2016face.htm...
An Obama sock puppet doing Christian Bale's Batman voice would have been more convincing.
Chilling.
What definitions of Fake News ya'll use?
I've encountered basically two, "small right-wing outlets that produce dishonest, badly sourced yellow journalism", and "large left-wing outlets that produce dishonest, badly sourced yellow journalism".
It sounds a bit like, the libcuck vs. the cis-white Islamophobic sexist racist conservative shitlord perspective.
The kind most people seem to be discussing is the first, while the Fake News concept Trump uses is the second. Wasn't he the one who popularized the term?
If so, when was the term hijacked? If not, when did he hijack the term?
And then, which definition has more truth to it?
(As an aside, if you consider this inappropriate content for HN, please send me to a better place because it's been very hard to find places where both sides actually have discussions with eachother...)