[HN Gopher] Lucasfilm hires YouTuber who specializes in deepfaki...
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Lucasfilm hires YouTuber who specializes in deepfaking big-budget
movies
Author : thunderbong
Score : 292 points
Date : 2021-07-27 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| To the people complaining that what you see is no longer
| believable: there is a way out: signatures. It is time to start
| pressuring public people to digitally sign whatever they say.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| How would this work?
|
| Plenty of videos are candid or shot and released by a 3rd
| party.
|
| This could work for press releases and such, but not for videos
| with headlines like "CEO CAUGHT KICKING A BABY IN THE FACE" or
| "UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION: PRESIDENT ADMITS ALIENS ARE REAL".
| jcrei wrote:
| Hopefully this gains traction, but it can't be with a "dousign"
| type signature that has no legal validity. We should champion
| Qualified Electronic Signatures
| Tepix wrote:
| Judging by the european vaccination certificates, noone ever
| verifies a signature.
|
| I know there are cameras that digitally sign the data. However,
| you hardly ever get to see raw footage. It is always edited.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > To the people complaining that what you see is no longer
| believable
|
| I don't understand the complain. It's a movie: what you saw
| never was believable.
|
| It's trickery by design. Everything you see as been spliced
| together from multiple takes, purposefully framed, lighted and
| colorized. It's all fake but in a way so culturally ingrained
| that people don't even notice the deceit anymore. You think
| this continuous action you are watching?
| sillyquiet wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I think OP was speaking more about
| filmed things that purport to be real-life events (i.e.,
| evidence), rather than cinema.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| During then 2004 election, doctored photos of John Kerry at
| an anti-vietnam-war protest circulated widely. They were a
| simple cut-and-paste job. The world of "people will make
| fraudulent media to sell a narrative" has already been here
| for decades.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| But it's the same. I think that the fact that people are so
| scared of deep fakes show they are not critical enough of
| what they are already shown. Images lie all the time.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Eh, maybe. People watching cinema "know" it's not real,
| even though propaganda is a thing I guess. Deepfakes
| won't alter anything with regard to that though, whether
| it's a deep-faked actor, a CGI monstrosity, or just a
| look-alike actor in makeup.
|
| although you are right about video 'evidence', editing,
| cuts, and carefully muted dialog can alter things to the
| point of being the opposite of what was being filmed - an
| unprovoked attack can become self-defense or vice-versa,
| etc. Again, deep-fakery is just another tool in that
| unsavory toolbox, not anything paradigm shifting.
| Kosirich wrote:
| What about signing normal photos for the purpose of stopping
| misuse.. the approach of "if a photo is not digitally signed by
| each person on the photo for this specific case, it is assumed
| that the photo use is not fair"?
| jcims wrote:
| I think it would have to work through the camera industry to be
| effective, so the sensor actually includes signatures with the
| image data. Otherwise all of the 'hot mic' moments are going to
| be left unaddressed.
|
| Image formats could be updated with an 'original' layer so that
| if the news site wanted to crop or edit the content, the
| original would still be avaliable for comparison.
|
| Given all of the hardware design going into high speed hashing
| on asic, shouldn't be that hard to find a component to do the
| work.
| jordanab wrote:
| Give it another decade or so, and I can see Lucasfilm/Disney
| making full feature films starring only deepfake 'clones' of the
| original trilogy characters in their younger/O.T. forms.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| The implications for the entertainment industry are massive.
|
| When I was working in indie game development, I wondered if you
| could use deepfakes as a voice actor. Basically get someone
| famous/good voice with infinite voice lines, without having to
| pay for studio time. Obviously, you would need them to sign-off
| on using their voice for commercial purposes.
| wishinghand wrote:
| There's a post on Hacker News for this, by a company called
| Sonantic.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| Already happening. Recently was used to recreate Anthony
| Bourdain's voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner:_A
| _Film_About_Antho...
| chronogram wrote:
| How would you get the acting part of the voice acting right?
| I can't imagine you wouldn't still need a skilled voice actor
| for that.
| post-it wrote:
| A markup language for voice that tells the generator how to
| inflect everything. It's not on the horizon yet, but
| anything that our voice can do, a computer will do someday.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Yup exactly. Anything you would tell a voice actor to do
| you have in the markup. Obviously, the voice actor can
| still produce higher quality, probably for a long time to
| come.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-
| services/sp...
|
| https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/ssml.html
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Then the person doing the markup becomes the talent you
| have to pay to make things good.
| account42 wrote:
| That percon can be replacable. Or it can be team. And you
| don't need to worry about the AI tiring or damaging their
| vocal cords after trying out different intonations all
| day. And eventually the there will be good enough
| automation to generate the intonattions too - either
| entirely or with minimal input from a voice director.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's a lot easier to write "cries like a baby" or
| "screams in terror" than it is to actually do it on
| command, over and over again, for take after take.
|
| And one can even imagine a program with emotional slider
| bars that lets a person listen to how a line sounds with
| different levels of inflection and then automatically
| inserts the appropriate markup for the settings the user
| selects.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I believe that's already out there, since services like
| Alexa will do certain inflections depending on the
| context of what they're saying. I think.
| M277 wrote:
| Yeah, the acting part is a valid concern. A mod for The
| Witcher 3 does this to give the main character voiced
| dialogue[1], but it doesn't really sound.... right. I mean,
| it is voiced and some lines feel authentic, but some lines
| also just feel odd.
|
| [1]: https://www.gamesradar.com/witcher-3-mod-uses-ai-to-
| create-n...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Not if you're going to voice the Elcor from Mass Effect.
|
| "With barely contained terror. You drive a hard bargain."
| echelon wrote:
| I'm working on https://vo.codes
|
| The new version is almost ready to launch.
|
| I've also got voice to voice conversion working, and I'm
| trying to make it real time. It's pretty close.
| stevesearer wrote:
| I met someone a few years back who apparently worked in the
| field of 'digital persona management' which is basically an
| agent for actors' likeness after they die. It sounded like
| families and estates were very interested in the concept as
| long dead actors could potentially become movie stars again in
| theory.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| That sounds like a fairly big ethical dilemma that Disney
| will happily ignore if making a puppet show out of people's
| corpses earns them a few extra bucks
| MrPatan wrote:
| This will only be a thing for a while. Why pay somebody's
| grandchildren when you can create a new face that's yours?
| kickscondor wrote:
| See the Harrison Ford vid linked at the end of the original
| article. Billy Dee Williams also gets inserted. There's no
| doubt that this technique will defeat CGI Youngface.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I suspect it will also lead to essentially "real" fantasy
| characters that totally replace real human actors. We already
| have many comic/drawn characters that people associate and
| identify with in a similar way they associate and identify with
| human actors; there is no reason why you would not be presented
| with "actors that don't actually exist in person. I cannot
| recall what it was called, but the industry has already
| produced a fully CGI movie that tried to push this very thing
| by essentially making a real like manga movie.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| https://collider.com/james-dean-digital-cgi-performance-in-n...
| (2019)
|
| > James Dean, an iconic movie star who died in 1955 at the age
| of 24, has been cast in a new Vietnam-era action film called
| Finding Jack.
| svieira wrote:
| This is the plot of _The Congress_:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
| echelon wrote:
| Other way around. Real actors' likenesses won't be used as
| often.
|
| That's a good thing. More actors can now work.
| baby wrote:
| And I just got spoiled on the mandolarian :(
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| ILM isn't dumb - this is a talenthire for sure. Amazing work from
| this guy and dedication to the niche (and they likely have some
| ideas kicking around in Marvel/Lucas writing rooms that are about
| bringing alllll the olds back to life)
| bordercases wrote:
| Security footage tamper contracting is one obvious black market
| extension of this.
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| Lucasfilm's subsidiary Industrial Lights and Magic is known for
| leading visual effects on actors's appearances to help make films
| that cannot be realized without such technology. For instance,
| Martin Scorsese entrusted them to "youthen" the leading actors in
| "The Irishman" so that Robert Deniro et al can play their
| characters at a younger age without wearing a red-ball "clown-
| nose" tracker. "Star Wars: Rouge One" practically reanimates
| Peter Cushing to continue and expand the involvement of Grand
| Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars saga. These processes are
| painstaking, and artists sweat over details on a frame-by-frame
| basis to negate the "uncanny valley" of artificial human
| likenesses.
|
| Obviously, the labor-intensive nature of today's CGI techniques
| drive up production costs. Meanwhile, the deepfakes on YouTube
| provide a convincing enough rendition of likenesses without
| actual actors, all produced on consumer-level GPUs. This presents
| a huge potential to save costs and the benefits are clearly
| enticing to film productions.
|
| As Hollywood gravitates towards blockbuster franchises,
| productions will want to bring the same ensemble of actors (or at
| least their likenesses) as long as possible. While moviegoers may
| be unsettled by seeing "reanimated" dead actors like in Rouge
| One, they still may hope to see franchise actors to look
| consistently youthful or attractive on screen. Deepfakes may be
| more relied upon to provide that effect.
| shadowtree wrote:
| The Irishman is the perfect example of where the Deepfake is
| MILES BETTER than then classic CGI de-aging:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHSTWepkp_M
|
| Just look at it, the CGI DeNiro looks like from the Polar
| Express.
| tjoff wrote:
| It is? The deepfake just looks out of focus to me, just
| something blurry that as a side-effect removes some wrinkles
| but also takes away lightning and everything else.
|
| Not to say the deepfake isn't seriously impressive. But I
| very much prefer the netflix version.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Wow the deep fake version is WAY better.
| dualboot wrote:
| This is deceptive, though. The "deep fake" is essentially
| building on the CGI de-aged product. If they'd started with
| deepfake it likely wouldn't have yielded this level of
| result.
| burnte wrote:
| I disagree, deepfaking completely replaces the face. It
| doesn't ahve to be close to start with. Check this one out:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=861gfPVmgdc
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be close but it helps a lot both the
| quality of the results and the convergence speed if both
| faces are similar.
|
| In movies you don't usually have the luxury of choosing
| the original face you want to replace, but for people who
| make memes (or porn), you commonly choose a source video
| featuring someone that resembles the person you want to
| put in.
| seph-reed wrote:
| > In movies you don't usually have the luxury of choosing
| the original face you want to replace
|
| Hiring an actor that roughly resembles the person you're
| trying to deep fake seems doable.
| planb wrote:
| Well, Robert DeNero's face still has the same proportions
| and bone structure, so taking the original video as a
| starting point would probably yield the same results.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Uuuh, why? I can't imagine a reason why the deaged video
| would've improved the deep fake version. If anything, it
| should've reduced it's quality by adding incorrect data
| which could confuse the model.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| The default model for deepfakes is an autoencoder. The
| encoder and decoder will converge faster and to simpler
| solutions if the distributions of original faces and fake
| faces are closer.
|
| It's an intuitive result even ignoring the specific
| model. It takes less information to go to and from
| similar faces than it does two completely dissimilar
| ones.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| That would still be an effective technique for big-budget
| films if the net result is an improvement on the state of
| the art. (Which I think it does seem to be).
| vernie wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree and I'd be interested to see this
| process applied to some of the raw footage featured in the
| the award season campaign. It's also worth noting that in
| addition to de-aging they also changed De Niro's eye color.
| pen2l wrote:
| Wait what, Deepfake is better? To me, not at all, deepfake
| seems blurry. It looks like, well, a deepfake, there is
| something distinct about deepfakes which just stands out, I
| think it's the soft blur around individual parts. It's taking
| the easy route by blurring and darkening a lot of things,
| look at the eyelids for example in modeled example, there is
| incredible detail there.
|
| Deepfake definitely has a place in this space, in that it can
| do things with 1/100th the effort in a scalable way, but it
| has a lot more to catch up on with traditional modeling than
| what some folks appear to be thinking. rendering with goodies
| likes SSS, AO, etc. gives magical results which are hard to
| achieve any other way. And as soon as you get a little bit
| complicated in what you're trying to create, at least the
| currently existing neural network models fall apart are are
| just not applicable. Take this video for example, which was
| very manually modeled:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC2dRkm8ATU Deepfake is a
| long, long way to taking a stab at things like this.
| jjeaff wrote:
| On mobile, I don't see the blur on the deep fake. It looks
| really good. I suspect it would be more obvious on a large
| screen.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >Wait what, Deepfake is better? To me, not at all, deepfake
| seems blurry. It looks like, well, a deepfake, there is
| something distinct about deepfakes which just stands out, I
| think it's the soft blur around individual parts. It's
| taking the easy route by blurring and darkening a lot of
| things, look at the eyelids for example in modeled example,
| there is incredible detail there.
|
| I agree with your complaints about DeepFake but imo it did
| a far better job de-aging DeNiro. To me, the release
| version had a lot of "old man" cues that the DeepFake one
| didn't, such as the jowls and heavy wrinkles.
| ksec wrote:
| My question is, how would the cost structure works. Can I now
| hire an actor that looks 90% like someone I have in mind, and
| then Deepfake it to look 99.9%, and save on actor's cost?
|
| It works when you are trying to do that on actor that are no
| longer with us, but what about actors that are still alive?
| seanicus wrote:
| Not a lawyer but you need likeness rights to reproduce an
| actor's face. I.e. Peter Cushing's estate gave permission for
| him to "appear" in Rogue One.
|
| But maybe it doesn't apply to parody(?)
|
| https://youtu.be/9WfZuNceFDM
| jcims wrote:
| The worst thing a lot of these deepfake folks do with movie clips
| is hire impersonators to try to make it more realistic. The
| problem is that a) the impersonator is usually off a bit in
| timing or character and b) the soundstage is nothing like the
| rest of the movie, it just sounds like cuts to a podcast. The
| result just doesn't work.
|
| https://youtu.be/A8TmqvTVQFQ?t=52
|
| That said, one way it *does* work is with novel scenes filmed
| with a good impersonator, the outcome can be pretty remarkable:
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/6957456115315657...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krAU3C9jhj8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybasoc6LxIU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrhRBb-1Ig
| mindvirus wrote:
| I wonder where this leads in the long term.
|
| Do we have different actors deepfaked in for different markets?
|
| Do actors even act anymore? Do companies just pay actors for
| their likeness and do the rest?
|
| Do we get to a point where you can choose who is acting in a film
| you're watching?
|
| How are deepfaked voices? Can we substitute audio as well?
|
| I understand that deepfakes are still a bit of a manual process,
| but presumably that will change.
| vollmond wrote:
| > Do actors even act anymore? Do companies just pay actors for
| their likeness and do the rest?
|
| I assume that would eventually get to generating a totally new
| person, rather than modeling after a specific actor who costs
| money.
| tk75x wrote:
| That's already happening. Look into "digital influencers".
| mindvirus wrote:
| Even better! Imagine - every showing at every theatre in the
| world has slightly different actors A/B tested for the
| moviegoers.
| Andrex wrote:
| Pixar and the like can theoretically do this already, but
| don't, maybe due to cost reasons.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Well, why are good actors so sought-after? What makes someone
| an actor whose likeness people seek and what makes a B-tier
| actor?
|
| Part of it is inertia and random celebrity status, having an
| attractive or interesting face etc., but part of it is also the
| raw knowledge of _when_ to apply certain microexpressions, how
| to gesture etc. i.e. how to do the acting itself. To be a
| convincing, charismatic etc. actor it 's not enough to wear a
| digital mask of a celebrity, the underlying actor still needs
| to act well. That may not be so important for certain types of
| shallow movies, but it certainly is for deeper drama films etc.
|
| It's similar to today's text generation where you may be able
| to generate sports game reports, user's manuals or travel
| brochures etc. but not really those where you need high level
| decisions, like applying the appropriate expressions to a real-
| world event, taking into account all the context, like writing
| a poem about your feelings reflecting on some recent real-world
| event.
|
| I'm not saying humans have a magical power that can't be
| implemented in silicon.
|
| What I'm saying is that deepfakes as they are today are not
| sufficient to replace actors. You'd need a higher level
| puppeteering AI that would take the whole storyline and script
| into account to come up with the right ways to express the
| appropriate emotions at that moment in the film and could take
| the director's instructions regarding his vision of how the
| drama should unfold etc.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think all the stuff you describe about charisma is
| absolutely true in the _creative_ mode of generating value,
| but there is also an _extractive_ mode of generating value
| for which I absolutely think deepfakes could be very
| effective. Once an actor establishes an audience (generally
| through the creative mode you describe), there is still an
| opportunity to extract as much value as possible from the
| remaining good will of the fan base. This already happens
| with famous actors producing cheap and unpopular movies that
| seem to only exist to put that actor's name and face on the
| poster.
| ant6n wrote:
| One example where it shows that the actor doesn't just
| provide a face, but, well,the acting, is back to the Future.
| Originally they had wanted to cast Michael J Fox, but he
| wasn't available. So they picked a different actor. And that
| actor didn't get that the movie was supposed to be fun. They
| shot several weeks with this actor who was turning the movie
| into something very serious, being terrified by being
| transplanted into the past, and finding it tragic to come
| back to a present where everything is different.
|
| Theres a good documentary about this [1], that talks about
| replacing that actor, and when Fox comes on set and delivers
| the first line filmed ("You put a time machine... In a
| DeLorean?!"), it's hilarious, night and day difference.
|
| [1] season 2, episode 1 of movies that made us
| www.netflix.com/us/title/80990849
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| There is a company doing this for video game voices. The voice
| actors who provide training data get royalties. I hope that
| becomes a standard for deep fakes and the ML in general, as
| opposed to how copilot (and the rest of the industry) generally
| just takes whatever they get their hands on as free train
| training data.
| gedy wrote:
| I doubt Hollywood would want this, but I'd love to be
| entertained by choosing some base story, then be able to pick
| the lead actors and perhaps setting and mood. Deep fakes get a
| ways toward this. This is basically what remakes are.
| Amin699 wrote:
| I'm not sure Shamook's results are always better than the
| originals; many still have that uncanny, mask-like quality that's
| still common to a lot of deepfakes today, and they don't have the
| benefit of all the additional CG lighting work that clearly went
| into Disney's modern films and shows. But perhaps by combining
| ideas, they can reach new heights.
| mdrzn wrote:
| That's awesome news, instead of the usual cease & desist
| YouTubers usually get.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It is so promising that this technology is reaching the masses
| and letting random youtubers compete with the best. Hopefully
| this type of tech further decentralizes the content creation from
| Hollywood to other parts of the world.
|
| It reminds me of the 'what's in the box' 2009 short made with
| available cgi assets https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_reTt7Hj4
| lmilcin wrote:
| It is also so devastating that you can no longer believe
| anything published online, even if it looks legit.
|
| This is going to be one more dimension to misinformation on the
| net.
|
| Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and
| even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a
| fake.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Does anyone actually determine what to believe this way? Like
| if you read a quote from a politician in a large newspaper,
| you don't believe it's real, but if you see a cell phone
| video of the politician saying something at a rally, you do
| believe it's real? Personally my confidence in the veracity
| would be the opposite. There's nothing special about video
| that makes it fundamentally harder than text to distort,
| edit, or even outright fabricate.
| xfitm3 wrote:
| What would a detective or a jury believe? Video or
| testimony?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Presumably they would believe (or at least be instructed
| to believe) neither implicitly.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| As long as everyone wants their information for free, this
| will be just another layer of icing on the cake of
| misinformation.
|
| Good, clean, and reliable information is expensive and needs
| a fair bit of work. I can see why most people have forgotten
| that but it might come back them and then this will be way
| less of a problem.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > you can no longer believe anything published online
|
| When has this not been the case?
| NateEag wrote:
| Fifteen years ago it was not feasible for a random person
| with an axe to grind to publish a convincing video of a
| specific person doing something they did not actually do.
|
| It's about to become pretty low-effort for a random person
| with an axe to grind to do that.
|
| It's not that you can no longer believe anything published
| online - it's that video evidence without provenance was
| relatively reasonable to trust for a few years, and it's
| about to stop being so.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-
| photo-...
|
| Nothing new under the sun
| nIHOPp6MQw0f5ut wrote:
| This has been a possibility for decades but only for those
| with large budgets. Now that it is more widely accessible
| more people actually know it can be done.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > This has been a possibility for decades but only for
| those with large budgets.
|
| Yep. You don't need CGI if you can search a large
| population for someone who looks like insert-public-figure-
| here and make up the difference with makeup.
| gorwell wrote:
| "Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and
| even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or
| a fake."
|
| This is actually already the case with Biden and Trump video
| clips even without being deepfaked. Often they are presented
| out of context to the point of completely reversing reality.
| It's helpful to assume any clip is fake by default,
| especially if it's a viral one that makes one side look bad.
|
| By the time deepfakes are common, it'll be best practice to
| assume fake by default.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Doesn't even need an actual quote taken out of context,
| just a headline (or a thousand) will already have an effect
| because people scan and can't be bothered to read the
| contents, until it becomes a background idea stuck in
| someone's head. People also forget where they read
| something, people forget details, and they simplify things
| over time.
| liotier wrote:
| > Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and
| even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or
| a fake
|
| Back to text and the good'ol credibility of the messenger.
| Digital commodified journalists and now the need for
| credibility will let them get out of anonymity again.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| To be fair, this tech has been around for years and I've yet
| to see it be used successfully in social media
| misinformation. The stuff I see on my in-law's facebook is
| usually some clunky meme photo with shocking text.
|
| A video needs to actually be watched, that takes more effort,
| and then it would be widely debunked as fake. The "fake news"
| memes are usually at least partially true which helps
| convince people that the misinformation is legit.
| wussboy wrote:
| "I've yet to see it used successfully..."
|
| As far as you know. By definition, wouldn't its successful
| use mean you didn't know it was successfully used?
| Geee wrote:
| The problem is actually opposite. People won't believe
| anything because they assume that what they are seeing is a
| deep fake. It's happening already. If you see videos online
| of Trump / Biden / someone notable there's always someone
| claiming that it's a deep fake if they don't like what they
| see.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Isn't it exactly the same problem rather than opposite of
| it?
| Geee wrote:
| Yes, it is.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| I think we'll eventually see hardware that cryptographically
| signs the content as soon as it is produced with timestamp,
| but then that could be fooled by someone creating a deepfake,
| projecting it on a high resolution screen and then
| photographing with another camera. Or we wouldn't believe
| things unless they are captured by multiple cameras at
| different angles and maybe future GANs will be able to cover
| that. We are seeing the beginning of an arms race!
| anoraca wrote:
| It's probably safer if people stick to primary sources with
| good reputations anyway, right?
| derptron wrote:
| Are there any news outlets left with any credibility?
| planb wrote:
| I say it every time this comes up: People don't care if
| something looks legit. They care if it supports their views.
| Nothing will get worse just because the fakes get better. It
| might even help when it's common knowledge that everything
| can be faked by a 14 year old on their PC.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Not to mention the politicians who are recorded doing
| something genuinely shady and will wave it away as fake news
| - this is happening already even without deep fakes.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| Idk seems like an overstated problem.
|
| People will be less likely to believe leaks or supposed hot
| mic recordings, but the majority of what politicians and
| other public figures say happens in public view which makes
| it difficult to fake.
|
| You already don't really know if a video you see on Facebook
| has been carefully re-cut to change the meaning or tone of
| what the speaker was saying, so I think the fact that we can
| more easily wholesale create videos doesn't really change
| much. If you want to know if something is real the best
| option is still to cross reference multiple sources and if
| possible multiple recordings.
| tarsinge wrote:
| How do you already believe something written is legit? Does
| it not just put video on par with text?
| lmilcin wrote:
| Normally you try to think and reconcile it with knowledge
| and experience you already have.
|
| The problem is when everything you have ever learned is
| suspect.
| DougN7 wrote:
| I agree - this is going to make finding the truth so much
| harder once it's weaponized as it surely will be. How can
| representative democracy flourish when you can no longer tell
| who you want to represent you?
| krastanov wrote:
| This feels like it has been true since forever, just with
| other media. A picture with a made up quote seems exactly as
| damaging. Good journalists will continue vetting sources and
| unscrupulous TV personalities will continue showing whatever
| fits their narrative without vetting.
| psychomugs wrote:
| Since the inception of photography, all photographs have
| been lies [1,2]. The only remedy is critical thinking and
| awareness and skepticism on the part of the recipients,
| which is being outpaced by the technology.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard#Self_Por
| trait...
|
| [2] https://i.redd.it/nh45pwigrhc21.jpg
| lmilcin wrote:
| It has been true only to a certain level. Photos can be
| faked and videos can be mislabeled, but as long as it
| happens it small enough number it is possible to have
| people point it out and make a fuss about it.
|
| This changes when individual people with no resources at
| all can make convincing fakes and wield it as a weapon to
| sow disinformation, to have it then picked up by "major"
| media, all information on the net becomes pretty useless.
| riffraff wrote:
| Again, this was always true, we relied on news agencies
| and such to be gatekeepers of what is true.
|
| Sometimes a random video pops up and people believe it
| shows X and then it propagates but it's something
| completely different (e.g. people beating up immigrants
| on the streets in northern Italy -> traditional krampus
| celebrations; Junker drunk at some event -> Junker
| suffers from lombalgia; Berlusconi mimicing a sexual act
| on some woman -> it was a comedian skit; Britney Spears
| sex tape -> it's a random pornstar ...)
|
| People will learn to be doubtful of random internet
| videos just as they have learned to be doubtful of random
| internet articles.
|
| Or not, since they haven't yet, but it's not a
| qualitative change.
| Fricken wrote:
| The majority of Covid disinformation was spread by 12
| people with limited resources. They didn't need
| deepfakes. Deepfakes add nothing of substance to the
| liar's toolkit.
|
| It's easy to lie to people so long as you're saying
| things that validate their shitty emotions. Conversely,
| it's extremely hard to tell people the truth when it goes
| against their shitty emotions.
| lupire wrote:
| > The majority of Covid disinformation was spread by 12
| people with limited resources.
|
| created by 12 people. spread by many thousands.
| NateEag wrote:
| Tangent, but:
|
| Emotions can't be shitty.
|
| You can miscalibrate your emotional responses to
| situations, much as you can sear your conscience.
|
| But the emotions themselves - the full range are valid
| human feelings, from fury to transcendent joy.
| jfengel wrote:
| The effect that emotions have on their behaviors can be
| shitty. Worse, they can be self-reinforcing, such that
| their emotions cause them to seek out ways to deepen that
| emotional state, resulting in an increase in shitty
| behavior.
|
| Those feelings are valid, but the effect they have on
| other people is not. Dealing with valid emotions in a way
| that doesn't harm other people can be incredibly
| difficult, especially when those emotions put harm front
| and center.
|
| Our emotions are valid, but our behaviors are not. It
| behooves us to mind our emotional states when they cause
| problems for other people. Often, that will
| coincidentally bring about an emotional state we prefer
| as well, but often with unpleasant transitions.
| NateEag wrote:
| Yup, I agree with all of that.
|
| I didn't say anything about behaviors, because it was
| emotions that were labeled as shitty.
|
| I didn't bother to go into the distinction between
| emotions and the bad behavior they often give rise to, so
| thanks for explaining that.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| "valid" seems sort of weasel-wordy here.
| NateEag wrote:
| Okay, I'll phrase it more strongly:
|
| Emotions as such are good, from sorrow to rage to joy.
|
| Each one is a good response to some situations, as far as
| I can tell.
|
| Your emotional response can be misplaced, so that you
| experience an inappropriate emotional in some situations.
|
| As noted elsewhere in the thread, you can also be
| inspired by your emotions to inappropriate (and just
| terrible) behavior.
|
| The emotions themselves, though, are not shitty.
| Recognizing them and understanding where they're coming
| from can be tremendously helpful in aligning your actions
| with reality and your own values, and even in discovering
| what your own values are.
|
| I share this perspective not out of a sense of
| superiority but in the hope that it helps someone else
| avoid my mistakes.
| dahart wrote:
| > It has been true only to a certain level. [...] as long
| as it happens it small enough number it is possible to
| have people point it out and make a fuss about it.
|
| I think the opposite is true. This isn't a historical
| perspective, you're using logic to speculate.
| Historically speaking, there have been fakes that reached
| huge numbers of people, and they were more damaging then
| than they are today because they were more believable;
| the public had not yet conceived that photos could be
| faked, and it was not possible to see evidence of fakery.
| Today, everyone knows photos and videos can be faked.
|
| I don't know of any deep fake videos yet that have
| tricked a large number of people or been used for
| political purposes. Maybe it has happened, I don't know,
| do you know? But there have been lots of influential
| faked photos. Just Google a little to find hundreds of
| historical examples of famous and misleading doctored
| photos. (Lots of overlap in these lists, because some of
| the photos are famous).
|
| https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/history.pdf
|
| https://delmarwatsonphotos.com/photographs/famous-
| photograph...
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-historical-photos-are-highly-
| misl...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-photos-
| history-2011-8
|
| https://www.ranker.com/list/historic-images-that-were-
| retouc...
|
| https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=29607
|
| https://www.pinterest.com/yosomono/faked-images-everyone-
| thi...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Maybe it could mean journalism will be professionalized
| again, when trust isn't as simple as taking a video on your
| phone or writing a blog post... if we're lucky.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| I remember watching "The Running Man" when I was a kid and
| thinking that the scene were Arnold loses the fight to the
| Jesse Ventura guy, that in the movie was a "Deep Fake", was
| so unrealistic... man, we are already there. Nothing can be
| believed anymore.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| >It is also so devastating that you can no longer believe
| anything published online, even if it looks legit.
|
| I don't buy these sky is falling arguments.
|
| Deep fake video will have about as much impact as photoshop
| has had.
| [deleted]
| tvirosi wrote:
| This has been true since forever though. (It's such a weird
| point.) Very believable photoshops have been possible since
| forever, but you generally only believe images that are
| verified by a trusted source. Even ridiculously fakable
| things like "someone telling you a thing is true" (without
| having photographic evidence of it) has somehow not been
| completely eroded as a communication channel by deceptive
| agents because of reputation and trust holding it all up.
| another-dave wrote:
| Would be good if content publishers did something like
| digitally signing their content along with embedded metadata
| so if e.g. you see a video circulating you can see that the
| BBC attested that it was released by them & its original air
| date was such & such.
|
| Or if you see a quote claiming to be from Emmanuel Macron or
| Boris Johnson, you can see it was released with a digital
| signature from a Guardian journalist & they add whatever
| date/time/location details they want to validate the
| information.
|
| If instead I release something (on Twitter or wherever) that
| I say is a screen-capture of my TV, _I_ add the metadata
| (originally seen on BBC on 27 Jul, 1:55pm) and sign and then
| you know that you only trust it as much as you trust _my_
| reputation rather than the BBC.
|
| Wouldn't solve the problem entirely but it might create a bit
| of an audit trail for stuff and encourage people not to trust
| unvetted material.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| I wonder if there's a startup opportunity there. In the
| coming years, this problem of deepfakes and lack of trust
| in media is only going to get worse. Crypto could mitigate
| this. Maybe a hardware company who sells very high end
| cameras for media outlets, that digitally signs and adds to
| a blockchain, all recorded media?
| pintxo wrote:
| Already done for (high-end) photo cameras.
|
| But why store the signature in a blockchain? If you do
| not trust the certificates in the first place, the
| storage location won't make any difference. And if you
| trust the certificates, the storage location is
| completely irrelevant. Because the certificates alone
| provide the trust.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Well, my thinking was that you would want to store the
| data cryptographically signed, on a block chain, for the
| same reasons (more or less) that NFTs exist on a
| blockchain. Predominately, the public ledger of ownership
| seems like an important aspect of digital content. Is it
| necessary for trust? Not at all, but it certainly doesn't
| hurt it?
|
| Disclaimer: I am an armchair crypto fan. Not an
| authority.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > But why store the signature in a blockchain?
|
| For the same reason as certificate transparency logs; you
| want to avoid trusting something that has a history of
| certifying false statements. You also need to handle
| throwaways, so it's definitely not _sufficient_ (and
| might turn out to not be necessary once a complete
| solution is found), but it does seem useful.
| Goz3rr wrote:
| Metadata that would swiftly be destroyed by the first
| twitter/facebook user reposting a
| screenshot/screenrecording from their phone
| another-dave wrote:
| Exactly, so if I upload something and say "Look what I
| just recorded off the BBC!" you _shouldn't_ believe me if
| creating a deep-fake becomes as easy as recording the
| real thing.
|
| In that scenario, you'd want people to say "but wait,
| there's no signature on this, it could be fake" and then
| only trust the video as much as you trust the source (not
| the claimed source).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Lack of the right kind of metadata would be the first
| tell.
| db_admin wrote:
| While still maintaining a verifiable origin
| barrkel wrote:
| Then, when someone videos an atrocity, they need to choose
| between publishing publicly (risking retribution) or
| publishing anonymously (if they even know how) and risk
| being disbelieved.
| another-dave wrote:
| Well, they could contact a news outlet on the condition
| of anonymity & the news outlet satisfies themselves as to
| the validity of the footage.
|
| Similar to how anonymous 'tip-off' stories with protected
| sources work in general at the moment -- the media outlet
| put their own reputation on the line on the basis of the
| source & we trust (to a certain degree) reputable news
| outlets to validate & vet their sources correctly. This
| is true for stuff that's easily forgable at the moment,
| e.g. a whistle-blower releasing documents.
| SilasX wrote:
| They could use ring signatures (like what Monero and
| other do), where the signature only validated that it
| came from one of several possible private keys.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| The problem is how to do you make that signature or digital
| artifact accessible by the general public.
|
| Any visual artifact can be mocked, so we end up with the
| same problem as clickbait titles, where the conclusion one
| arrives at from just a title can be disproved, but it
| doesn't prevent the false information from going viral.
|
| What good is it to say "that video you saw was fake!" after
| the video has spread around and done the damage already?
|
| It's hard to come up with a solution to this problem just
| because the solution has to preempt the problem. A
| cryptographic visual artifact _could_ work, but it's still
| likely that misinformation via deep-fakes will cause
| problems for society at large.
| another-dave wrote:
| Yeah agreed -- making security & authenticity
| understandable to a layperson is always going to be
| tricky.
|
| Websites like Twitter adopting a "blue tick" for a
| validated profile on their platform though is a model
| people seem to get. If we had some equivalent of a "blue
| tick" at a user-agent level, e.g. a for your browser to
| take a signature and display it in a standardised, human
| way to say "this video is signed by bbc.co.uk" it could
| work. (With a similar model for user-agents elsewhere
| e.g. you'd probably need adoption in apps like WhatsApp
| to get traction.)
|
| The other side of it (like privacy discussions) is how
| much the average person will care -- tabloid journalism
| often skirt the borders of what they can get away with at
| the moment & they nominally have a duty currently to only
| write factual information. If Fox News or the Daily Mail
| release videos and put their own signature to it, then
| you arguably lend them legitimacy ("it's on the news so
| it must be true. It's signed by them and all!").
| pope_meat wrote:
| Blue check twitter people are sus, don't trust them.
|
| That's the mood in the algorithm hole twitter put me in
| to.
|
| So, make what you will of that.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| As most of the viewing is done in digital screens, the
| player itself could show when media is signed, much like
| the lock icon in web browsers.
| [deleted]
| MR4D wrote:
| > Would be good if content publishers did something like
| digitally signing their content along with embedded
| metadata
|
| NFT for news!!
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Hollywood hasn't had centralization in content creation for a
| long time. To the contrary, this past decade has been all about
| streaming service studios and indie content creators, while
| Hollywood continues remaking the same handful of scripts and
| plots over, and creating sequels and modernizations of old
| films.
|
| as Ricky Gervais said in his infamous Golden Globes speech,
| "This show should just be me coming out going "Well Done,
| Netflix, you win everything. Well done."
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Also "Hollywood" is not done there anymore for tax reasons.
| Most stuff is done in Vancouver, New Zealand, Atlanta, etc.
| croes wrote:
| Wouldn't be the developer of the used software the better choice?
| sumedh wrote:
| Is it just one developer or a team (collaborators) of people?
| croes wrote:
| It's open source, so multiple developers are possible
|
| https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab
| kaetemi wrote:
| Not really. It's still an art form. The output of a tool is
| only as good as its operator. Would you hire the developers of
| Photoshop to draw your paintings?
| defectiveboss wrote:
| I'd hire both of them. Artists in the VFX field are
| frequently constrained by the capabilities of their tools.
| croes wrote:
| It depends, how much did the software, and how the artist and
| is it an established software field or a new type. If it is
| in the early days of the new software field, I would favor
| the developers. So as photo manipulation was a new feature I
| would hire the developers.
| coldcode wrote:
| While even the new ones are not perfect, they are way better than
| what's in the movies/shows. Good they decided to hire the artist
| instead of just beating him with lawyers.
| andyp-kw wrote:
| Lucus has always been good with things like this. Star Wars
| games pre-disney were generally easy to mod, and fan fiction
| writers didn't have to be too careful about getting sued.
|
| As long as the creator wasn't making money from it.
|
| It's one of the reasons why the franchise survived for so many
| years without new movies.
| riffraff wrote:
| But this is Disney now, they have not gone easy on people
| touching their property.
| tvirosi wrote:
| This guy has been making money off of this though (through
| ads and his patreon).
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Whenever DeepFakes are brought up I am reminded of this:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's mentioned / shown in The Matrix as well, where everyone
| lives in a realistic simulation.
| tvirosi wrote:
| Could you describe your understanding of what that term means
| to you? I always hear it referenced but it haven't really
| clicked to me what people mean by mentioning it (reading the
| articles barely help for me).
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I just find it interesting, notably the stages part.
| Authenticity of information is a problem in today's society,
| but really it's false trust in information. How many people
| get their "news" from Facebook? What lies beyond trust,
| authenticity, and information itself is an interesting thing
| to think about. Is there a post-trust society that isn't
| disorderly and chaotic?
| nanna wrote:
| Lucasfilms should have stopped making Star Wars after The Return
| of the Jedi. Everything since has been abysmal. That's just a
| fact no amount of deepfaking will change.
| matsemann wrote:
| I don't understand. What's the original vs deepfake comparison
| about? I know nothing of Star Wars (sorry), is there a third
| video it's based on or something?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| They are both deepfakes. But one was made by hollywood, and a
| better one was made by a youtuber.
| naz wrote:
| Though the Youtuber's deepfake is a deepfake overlaid on
| Hollywood's attempt, so all of the lighting and motion
| capture acting is already done.
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| A key difference is that in at least the case of the movie
| "original" they were digital 3D heads, complete CGI. The
| youtuber's deepfakes are old footage that an AI overlays onto
| the face.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Both original and new one tries to depict how a specific actor
| looked in the 70s.
|
| There's no ground truth to compare with other than the Luke
| skywalker character in the original Star Wars movies and which
| one looks most realistic
| matsemann wrote:
| So there is a stand in acting, and both have replaced his
| face? Or is the deepfake done on top of the original that
| already looks like the actor?
| esrauch wrote:
| There was a stand-in and the tv show computer generated the
| character replacing the stand-in. And then a YouTuber took
| _that_ footage and made it look even more realistic.
| unlikelymordant wrote:
| The deepfake will have been done by a youtuber over the top
| of the tv show version (the one on the left is from the
| show)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| One thing to note is that the 'original' (CGI actor) was
| already a bit awkward because things like the lip sync were
| off compared to a real actor.
|
| That said, the facial animations for Leia in another video
| he made (they did a digital version of Leia for Rogue One,
| he deepfaked on top of that) actually improved with the
| deepfake version.
| [deleted]
| tvirosi wrote:
| I know the narrative is to be scared of this tech (maybe even
| push towards legislation of it). But me personally I just find
| these things amazingly awesome and super cool.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Scared if it's used to impersonate influential people and
| spread misinformation, but cool when used in media. It's a
| difficult one.
|
| Mind you, impersonating influential people in a convincing
| fashion is / has been a thing for a while now. I'm thinking of
| Forrest Gump hanging out with the president and the like.
| Andrex wrote:
| If Photoshop could be likened to giving a humanity a loaded
| revolver, I feel like deepfakes are like handing an AK-47. I'm
| hopeful but I'm also cautiously seeing how the world embraces
| this tech.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| So deep fakes are a great start toward a defense against an
| increasingly coercive government? I'm even more confused now.
| Andrex wrote:
| Poe's law is real...
| diegoperini wrote:
| Better deepfakes also mean less make-up related skin harm on
| artists which is a huge leap for the industry.
| squarefoot wrote:
| The deepfakes look much better than the original, especially
| Leia, whose CGI recreation in Rogue One looked odd from the
| beginning. Tarkin is ok just like Luke, especially their eyes
| which now seem to be looking to whom they're talking to, thanks
| to better reflections. Luke's mouth however is still unrealistic
| when matching the speech; for example at 0:32 when Luke says "He
| wants your permission", the lips don't even touch to create the
| "P" sound.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I'm not really into the tech behind Deep Fake, but doesn't the
| whole credit go to the tool? Or is it that one needs to adjust
| the tool somehow to produce decent fakes?
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Adjusting the tool for sure, and moreover, adjusting your data
| collection strategy to the scene, and applying manual fixes to
| the data or the output. Definitely an art as much as it is a
| science, much like Machine Learning in general. I'm not sure if
| the tool will even improve much with time, as I understand,
| most of the work is in the data collection, and quantity is
| definitely not better than quality.
| fsloth wrote:
| Deep fake tools are like ... well, any other digital content
| creation tool. The artist needs to do most of the
| parametrization, even though the algorithms come boxed in.
|
| Deepfacelab has some tutorials to explain what is actually
| done: https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab
|
| e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1smpMsfC3ls
| cainxinth wrote:
| Do you really think they didn't try doing this without this guy
| before deciding it would be easier just to hire him?
| jtbayly wrote:
| Obviously they did. That's what the new guy is competing
| with.
| cainxinth wrote:
| No, I mean afterwards. They saw his vid, and must have
| thought, let's try and fix our previous work using a
| similar method... and discovered even that isn't so easy.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| If it is so easy, he wouldn't be the only one getting all those
| views. His results are far better than anyone else has been
| able to get, so that says there is a lot more than just running
| the tool.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| Suppose it's like saying a painting should really be credited
| to the paint and brushes since they did all the work of
| creating the piece.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It's not just about the tool, it's about how to set up and use
| the tool, and I'm sure there's a lot of tweaking, too. It's
| cheaper to hire this person to set it up and run it for them
| than to try to get someone up to speed that's already on-staff,
| I'd bet.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| "Point this device at the thing you are looking at and press a
| button." is sufficient creative effort to generate copyright
| for photographs, I am not going to be hard on digital artists
| doing significantly more work.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Generate copyright, sure, but generate value that justifies
| hiring? You can't take the camera away from the photographer
| and have it autonomously recreate the photographer's taste
| and tuning. OP is asking whether that's also the case with
| the tool shown here (the answer to which I don't know, but I
| suspect it does require a fair bit of artistic tuning).
| cinntaile wrote:
| Well the person currently working at Lucasarts got paid to
| create a deepfake, now someone made a better version so why
| not pay them for doing a better job?
| ethanbond wrote:
| The reason not to do that is if you can get the same
| results for free or for a one-time cost. That's the
| question GP is asking.
| cinntaile wrote:
| A lot of software consists of ready built models, but
| without the right parameters and constraints you'll just
| end up with garbage. I don't see a reason why this
| wouldn't be the case for deep learning models? The fact
| that they hired him suggests to me that it's not possible
| at this point point in time anyway.
| tshaddox wrote:
| For hiring it obviously just depends on how many people can
| do the job and what compensation terms they will expect, as
| well as how much compensation employers will offer.
| remir wrote:
| I've seen some deep fakes that are very convincing, especially if
| you show them to someone not knowing about them. One example
| would be this one in which Sean Connery's face was replaced by
| Burt Reynold's in James Bond:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foqeQM-7PSg
|
| Truly amazing what can be done with consumer grade stuff
| nowadays.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The same youtuber put Jim Carrey's face onto James Bond as
| well. And face-swapped Jim Carrey and Hugh Jackman.
| GiveOver wrote:
| It's Shamook, the person mentioned in the article.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| "Shamook is the one who "fixed" Luke Skywalker's cameo in The
| Mandalorian to the tune of 1.9 million _videos_... "
|
| I understand this is a mistake, we all make them, but where are
| the editors at The Verge? If a reader can find this with a
| cursory look-over, shouldn't they find it also? I couldn't have
| handed this in as a high school essay, so I'd imagine it wouldn't
| get past an editor at a large magazine. Maybe it's just me but at
| least from what I see personally there's loads of errors small
| and larger in the news these days. It's weird.
| kungito wrote:
| From what I have heard, there is less and less money per
| article in the market. They hire college temps to write (copy
| paste from other websites) and no one checks the articles. They
| have to make sure that whatever has an article on the internet,
| they have a copy as well.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's the gig economy, moved to the internet. It's a race to
| the bottom as I said in another comment.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Speed is king in the content/clicks game. It's easy to go back
| and edit afterwards. Hitting publish as fast as possible is the
| only way. Some "articles" are published as just headlines and
| fleshed out afterwards. Really interesting to watch on a
| Bloomberg terminal for example.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| I wonder if journalists say the same thing about how often
| developers release software with bugs.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| They should! Though there are more people that can read
| English than those that can read code, not including when
| bugs exist outside of it.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Maybe it's just me but at least from what I see personally
| there's loads of errors small and larger in the news these
| days. It's weird.
|
| From what little I know about journalism (very little), editors
| at traditional media had a very opinionated stance about
| language and punctuation. It is to the degree that they're not
| merely finding errors like these, they're also suggesting
| rewrites for clarity, etc.
|
| I, too, notice many simple errors like these that make me think
| that editor must not be as valuable a role as it was in the
| past. As the cost of communication dropped toward zero, an
| editor role becomes a more significant cost, maybe. Would the
| cumulative effect of errors like this one be enough to impact
| the readership of The Verge?
| easterncalculus wrote:
| I definitely think the position has to have dropped in value,
| we're publishing more articles per day than before and most
| often online, in the land of instant corrections - there's no
| printing press to worry about. Though I would certainly
| appreciate if someone read them - there are plenty of
| independents, bloggers, etc that would catch this stuff in
| their own writing.
| yreg wrote:
| I imagine you read plenty of "look-overs" without noticing
| them. I also imagine that the editors at (say) The Verge do
| find and fix plenty of mistakes that you wouldn't notice
| anyway. In this case there's a combination where they didn't
| notice and you did.
|
| Proofreading is difficult because your mind subsconsciously
| fixes the text you are processing. Editors need to focus hard,
| but as we all know it's tough to maintain focus while doing
| monotonous tasks.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Proofreading is definitely hard, I've made tons of mistakes
| just on this site. The reason I bring it up is because it is
| more than a technicality and in the first bit of the article.
| I would also imagine that editors miss things all the time,
| but I really think that if one read this it would have been
| caught.
|
| It's not a big problem, the meaning is still there, but it
| seems like a trend to me with online journalism at least, and
| I was wondering if others felt similarly or if I'm just being
| unfair.
| yreg wrote:
| I see. Some professional editor would have to chime in and
| tell us. :)
|
| I as an amateur have proofread texts for my friends many
| times and I often missed very visible mistakes. But it's
| not my job of course, maybe specialists have some methods
| beyond reading carefully.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's a lot of really low-effort articles written nowadays -
| maybe not so much for The Verge, but definitely for other
| platforms. They offer payment per word, and they can hire
| editors that also get paid per word of the article. But it's a
| race to the bottom, where people push to churn out as many
| articles as they can per day just to optimize income (or worse,
| to try and make ends meet).
| me_me_me wrote:
| This reminds me of Bojack Horseman plot-line where they scanned
| every actor on set in case they die so they can recreate them in
| virtual for the movie.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Some years ago they didn't even need to scan them, they just
| used old footage to create 'virtual reality' / 'hologram'
| concerts for Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Tupac.
| amitport wrote:
| And "The Congress" movie
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
|
| (It's inspired by a book that I haven't read, so I'm not sure
| if the same idea we're discussing is also in the book... But
| it's definitely in the movie.)
| phaedrus wrote:
| Before clicking the link, I thought this was going to be a
| completely different science fiction story about (U.S.)
| congressmen who leave the business of legislative voting to
| AI copies (brain scans) of themselves while the original
| travels full-time to raise funds and votes. After a secret
| congressional hearing is held on a matter of national
| security, the scanned copies begin voting in ways counter-to
| or that don't make sense to the original versions, but the
| copes are not allowed to reveal what was in the content of
| that hearing that changed their minds.
|
| I don't remember where I read that plot synopsis, so I might
| have some details wrong. (If it's a book I haven't read it,
| or it could have been someone's description of a story idea.)
| mmkos wrote:
| Is it just me who thinks the title is sensationalised? I can
| barely see any difference between the two, and the one made by
| the YouTube builds on top of the original one.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I agree with that, and, while I can't put my finger on why, the
| new deepfake actually seems a little less real to me.
| nocturnial wrote:
| It's not just you. I can't tell the difference either.
|
| Maybe it's just something someone has to explain to us what to
| look for. It could be a curse to know why some people think the
| deepfake is better. I once talked to a graphics artist about
| why they thought some effect looked bad because I didn't see
| it. They explained it in detail. Now I can't unsee what they
| were talking about and can easily spot that mistake.
|
| I don't know. Maybe it's better not knowing and enjoying the
| results or knowing and each time you see it thinking: "Hey,
| they made that mistake"
| aazaa wrote:
| If you hid the cation, there's no way I could tell, either.
| yourenotsmart wrote:
| Building "on top of the original one" is not an asset in the
| deepfake process, it's a hindrance, because then the deepfake
| inherits the unnatural 3D facial animation, which is most of
| the reason why traditional VFX 3D facial replacement works so
| poorly.
| jcims wrote:
| 100% this is why the example looks so bad.
|
| Here's another example from the same channel with a live
| actor (Robert Pattison as Batman):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmuYz0aZGgU
|
| A careful examination will find all sorts of artifacts but an
| unprimed general populace wouldn't have any clue.
| dang wrote:
| Ok we've replaced that with a more neutral description from the
| article body. Thanks!
| MajorBee wrote:
| I think the key difference is how the eyes are "reanimated" in
| the deepfakes. Rendering realistic eyes (with that trademark
| "spark of life") has always been a challenge in real life
| emulating CGI, but now these new clips kind of capture the
| spark in the actors eyes much better. Luke Skywalker's eyes in
| the original clip kind of look dead plastic, the kind you'd
| find in real-time gameplay (not to mention this nose also looks
| like the product of bad rhinoplasty). The deepfake does this
| much better, in my opinion.
|
| Elsewhere in this thread, someone posted a similar comparison
| clip about The Irishman and the difference is even more
| pronounced there. De Niro's eyes actually look the age they're
| supposed to be in that scene. The original scene had two key
| problems, in my option; one, they decided not to touch the eye
| and focused on smoothening the skin (I assume this is because
| of the technical limitations of doing the deaging in
| painstaking CGI); two, and this is a little more of a mystery,
| is that they thought they could get away with using De Niro's
| current 80 year old voice on a character that is supposed to be
| 35 (ages are ballpark numbers). The raspy voice of an old man
| is just not something you expect out of a supposedly much
| younger and healthier man. They should have just gotten a voice
| actor who could do a convincing impression of De Niro in the
| 70s and dubbbed him in.
| Multicomp wrote:
| > (with that trademark "spark of life") h
|
| This was the big winner for me. The deepfake had "Tarkin" and
| "Leia" on screen. The originals had 3D GCI (very good CGI,
| but CGI) with dead eyes.
|
| To further my anecdoe, I totally missed Leia's sequence the
| first watch through because I was watching the content and
| zoned out, forgetting to evaluate her face for deepfake
| pixels because it looked real enough for me to suspend
| disbelief.
|
| I have never been able to look at Leia's face in the original
| Rogue One scene without forcing myself to say "they did their
| best, they'll redo it someday for the 8K release, until then
| grin and bear the dead eyes".
| knuthsat wrote:
| The deep fake one looks very weird to me. The mouth is
| sometimes not closed and there is minimal movement on the upper
| lip on words that would need more.
| bluebubble56 wrote:
| Not just you - I can't really see the difference either, both
| look pretty uncanny to me, tbh.
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