[HN Gopher] Two recent studies on judging authentic vs. deepfake...
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Two recent studies on judging authentic vs. deepfake images
Author : dnetesn
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-03-10 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| thomasahle wrote:
| > overall average accuracy was near chance at 48 percent,
| although individuals' accuracy varied considerably, from a low of
| around 25 percent to a high of around 80 percent.
|
| People with a 25% score are basically as good as recognizing
| fakes as people with an 80% score. The former group just prefer
| the fakes to the real..
| scarmig wrote:
| Reminds me of how great I am at picking and choosing stocks.
| monadmoproblems wrote:
| I don't know how I'd feel if I was the guy who 96% of people
| thought wasn't real.
| tharne wrote:
| This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think deepfakes could be
| a very good thing for society. Imagine if we got to the point
| where it was completely impossible to distinguish fake images and
| videos from real ones. It would be a huge blow against
| surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state.
|
| If every video out there is suddenly a potential forgery, people
| will grow to become more skeptical of things they see unless they
| see those things in person in the meatspace.
|
| It's almost as if we're going to go back to the time before
| cameras and audio recordings. What makes things like deepfakes so
| scary right now is that people overwhelming _trust_ images and
| videos by default. Once we shift from automatically trusting
| images and videos to automatically distrusting them, things like
| revenge porn and viral videos of people saying or doing
| embarrassing things will lose most of their power.
| Joeri wrote:
| There are huge opportunities here for hashing and watermarking
| that guarantees videos are unaltered from the original recording
| taken by a physical device. An iphone already has all the
| hardware it needs to ensure it cannot be fooled by a flat image
| and to calculate and insert a cryptographic hash while recording.
|
| We will lose the battle against deepfakes, but we can create a
| subcategory of video proven as non-fake and win the war.
| adenozine wrote:
| Once this is more accessible for smaller studios, with smaller
| budgets, then actors will be obsolete.
|
| 10y from now, we will be able to simulate any human action or
| sound or gesture on screen with commodity hardware. I can have a
| 75m USD cast for my film, for the price of a couple GPUs spun for
| a few days. Crazy.
| lancesells wrote:
| Very doubtful. That 75m USD cast has more acting talent than
| your GPUs and gets people in theaters.
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| Thank you for a perspective which isn't rooted in fear. What
| impact can we expect this to have on the quality of movies?
| fullshark wrote:
| Regurgitated leftovers from popular franchises/actors in an
| uncanny valley forever.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I can have a 75m USD cast for my film_
|
| Only if you want the people you've copied to sue you for
| breaching their personality rights (image rights in other
| countries).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...
| goto11 wrote:
| Fully animated actors can play just as effective and convincing
| as flesh-and-blood actors, as shown by Disney or Pixar. But is
| also requires immense amounts ow works and talent - neither
| which is cheap.
|
| Star Wars certainly didn't use deepfakes because they though it
| was cheaper or easier.
| krapp wrote:
| They aren't cheap now, but that's only because the automation
| and AI pipelines aren't ready yet.
| goto11 wrote:
| You still need someone to - you know - act.
|
| Saying deepfakes makes actors superfluous is like saying
| synthesizers makes musicians superfluous.
| ivarv wrote:
| there's the deepfake visual representation that we're
| discussing, but what's to say there isn't work being done
| on the acting side of things? I think there are broad
| horizons to what can be automated - especially in the
| world of pure media.
| goto11 wrote:
| You mean some kind of AI which can read and understand a
| script and then develop a persona with physical
| appearance, voice, mannerisms, interpretation of
| emotional state and interactions with other characters
| etc.?
|
| I guess such an AI would also be able to write and direct
| the movie.
| krapp wrote:
| Realistically there would be a pipeline with various
| companies and AIs involved, each specializing in a
| specific aspect of virtualizion (the way effects houses
| work today,) not a single AI doing everything.
|
| But yes, everything you mention up to and including
| writing and directing can and will be automated to the
| fullest degree possible in time.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this doesn't address the talent behind the images, both
| cast and crew. Why would optimizing the production workflow
| make either of those cheaper? In more general software
| development payroll costs are higher than the rest of costs
| combined, seems the same scenario in more animation as
| well.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Deepfake tech isn't going to get you AI actors. It's just
| not the same thing at all.
| krapp wrote:
| It's a piece of the puzzle that will.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And even now Pixar and Disney are really just melding real
| life and animation - they are working off real performances
| and choreography to generate those images. Still need to have
| people in the pipeline somewhere to have things look right.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You still need people who can act. Someone has to make the
| characters act, and you don't want it to suck, so somebody
| needs to be skilled at acting, even if they don't end up doing
| the physical acting.
|
| But more to the point, there is no _need_ for constant
| deepfakes. You can just get regular people to act in your
| movie. Some movies might need deepfakes for the same reason
| that animes are really popular. But there 's plenty of movies
| that would not benefit from deepfakes at all.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Similarly we still have accountants even though Excel and
| TurboTax can do all the calculations.
|
| I can't help but think this effects the demand for models
| more than actors. Why spend money on hiring a model who has
| spent enormous amounts of time looking good shirtless or in a
| bikini when an average looking person can have a filter
| applied?
| oneoff786 wrote:
| We have a lot fewer accountants than we did before however
| (per company)
| ivarv wrote:
| I suspect that acting itself will be reduced to algorithms.
| Expression of different emotions could be digitized. This
| could open further avenues of automation - authors could
| configure various different permutations (e.g.
| sincerity/sarcasm, surprise), the combination of expressions
| could be derived from context / sentiment analysis for the
| character, or perhaps each character could have a preset pack
| of opinions/values that informs their response. Given the
| constantly expanding capabilities of synthesis, these seem
| like natural areas that people will explore.
|
| I agree that there is no need for any of this, but that's
| never stopped technological / artistic progress.
| [deleted]
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That seems to largely be taking the character out of
| characters. I think this maybe another case of "computer
| geeks think that {industry name} is easy and can be solved
| with computers".
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| Yes it feels a bit reductionist... "Love is merely a
| series of chemical reactions, therefore I should be able
| to compute text that elicits these reactions in a person
| and makes them fall in love with me."
| jayd16 wrote:
| It really won't. That would just be a cartoon with a realistic
| art style. You still need almost every other part of a film.
| You still need an original performance to deep fake. This isn't
| an AI actor or a simulation, it's a post effect.
| sdoering wrote:
| One one hand - I would say that everything that can be abused
| will be abused. On the other hand I would say, people (after a
| time of adaption) will learn to not trust any moving image
| anymore.
|
| Or any still image for that. But on the other hand - we are
| already theoretically and practically able to generate very
| convincing fake images, if we would want to. We could generate
| fake stills from a surveillance video (or a smartphone video) of
| a fake politician doing cocaine. Or interacting in a compromising
| way with a prostitute. Why do we not see much more of things like
| that?
|
| Probably because it just might be more difficult to create a
| believable story around such a fake that does not break down when
| looking at the story more than 10 seconds.
|
| So maybe the problem will not be as big? I don't know. I have no
| idea how easy it will become to create truly believable fakes.
|
| Not sure how people will adapt and if trust in anything might
| break down in the process. But what I do not believe is that tech
| industry creating rules for itself will be a deterrent against
| abuse of any technology.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| How many people are convicted on 480p or less janky security
| footage? Making believable bad fakes is trivial when high
| resolution fakes are only moderately difficult.
|
| If it hasn't happened yet, it will soon - people will be
| submitting modified doorbell camera and home security footage
| to police. Or someone's compromised home network will record a
| deep fake overlay of otherwise legitimate footage, and the
| owner won't be complicit. In a situation with, say, a $5,000 or
| more item, or a schedule 1 or 2 substance stolen, a person
| could be subjected to damning evidence of them committing a
| serious felony, for potentially less difficulty and risk than
| swatting.
| stavros wrote:
| I see many people here worried about the disinformation potential
| of deepfakes. I think that that worry fundamentally ignores the
| fact that we'll just stop considering videos evidence.
|
| A century ago, you could trust photos. Then, Photoshop came out,
| and the world didn't end, we just learned that we can no longer
| trust photos. Now we just won't trust anything, and it'll be one
| party's word against the other's.
|
| Sure, this isn't as good as living in a world with objective
| proof, but I think we'll grow out of the short-term issues and
| find different ways of verifying truth.
| kevincox wrote:
| Maybe we will finally see the importance of photographically
| important messages such as government announcements.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Am I alone in having thought that the term 'deepfake' only
| applied to NN/deep learning-generated imagery, rather than just
| plain CG, as implied in this article?
| dandellion wrote:
| That's the context where it originated, but that distinction is
| probably lost to most people outside the ai/tech scene.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| They've been trying to scare us with deepfakes for so long now.
| It's such a yawn. They create such a narrow image type (face on
| blurry background) and say "look how real they look!"
|
| Same with deepfake videos, which could always be faked with good
| FX and one of the reasons why videos with no chain of custody
| don't become evidence in court _already_!
| vincentriemer wrote:
| The community of people making deepfakes even approaching this
| quality is astonishingly small (think 3-4 people), requires
| absurd hardware (either A100s or A6000s), and the Luke one is
| even more of a outlier as this deepfaker has the support of ILM,
| one of the best VFX studios in the industry. All this is to say
| I'm not especially scared -- especially when these "best of the
| best" deepfakes still have obvious tells.
| pradn wrote:
| If Disney can't make Luke Skywalker, one of their most iconic
| characters, look good in a show with a budget the size of the
| Mandalorian, I can't say I'm too worried for this technology
| yet.
|
| Everyday misinformation techniques are far more pernicious -
| out-of-context sound bites, selective coverage, framing in an
| uncharitable way, interviewing non-experts, etc etc.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >If Disney can't make Luke Skywalker, one of their most
| iconic characters, look good in a show with a budget the size
| of the Mandalorian
|
| and yet are willing to put it out there that means actually
| they see this technology as important, it's the future for
| them, and what do you do when you think a technology is the
| future, that's right you invest time and money in using it so
| that you can improve it. It's not that they have the budget
| of the Mandalorian to do this scene, it's that they have the
| budge of Disney to improve the technology.
|
| I would say in 10 years Disney in a show with a budget the
| size of the Mandalorian (adjusted for inflation natch) will
| probably have something really worrisome.
| dabbledash wrote:
| Yeah, it doesn't seem like people believe misinformation
| because the evidence for it is just so convincing. I see
| people link to sources (if they even bother doing that), with
| completely false descriptions of what it shows. It doesn't
| matter; as long as the description is the kind of thing that
| outrages people they'll amplify it. Corrections will get one
| tenth of the attention.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I see you haven't watched The Book of Boba Fett. I can assure
| you the deepfake technology is now... fully operational.
|
| Everyday misinformation techniques were already really bad,
| but things could stand to get a lot worse.
| dhc02 wrote:
| Yeah the improvement in young Luke in The Book of Boba Fett
| was pretty impressive.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Agreed! That was the first one I've seen where I felt it
| was basically "passing". Like if I didn't know, I
| wouldn't know.
| gdubs wrote:
| Not weighing in on whether one should be frightened or not, but
| just pointing out that what you said would have applied to the
| computer graphics industry about 30 years ago. The interesting
| thing about computers is they tend to get faster over time.
| sosuke wrote:
| I've never been worried about this because I just assume that
| official outlets and websites will use some kind of verifiable
| encryption keys. Makes official official and everything else
| suspect.
|
| Is this too simplistic an outlook? Are there different options?
| I'm not sure but I know that third party unverified content is
| always suspect. First party content less suspect. Verified
| content is ... verified. Still could be deepfake but then the
| risk is on a loss of trust.
| vannevar wrote:
| It's worth noting that society existed for thousands of years
| without photography, audio recording, or videography. As you
| allude to, society is held together via trust networks, and
| these are independent of the prevailing media.
| syshum wrote:
| Speed of information is problem today we did not have in the
| past. Wrong, or disinformation can spread faster than the
| truth can be exposed in alot of cases.
|
| Especially when you have companies silencing people that
| criticize approved sources, and are determining what "truth"
| is allowed in public discourse
| vannevar wrote:
| Yes, but this works both ways---the truth also spreads
| faster over faster networks.
|
| It's always been true that rumor (or disinformation)
| spreads faster than truth. It always will be true, because
| rumor is easier to generate than truth.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| I was watching a livestream recently, and the person turned to
| grab something out of frame, and for a split second when their
| face was near the border, the filter glitched out and gave
| flashes of the person's real face. I was truly shocked as I had
| been watching for about five minutes with zero inclination that
| the person was essentially wearing a digital mask.
| Uehreka wrote:
| My partner was showing me a Doja Cat TikTok last night where
| she was singing an old song with an "old age" face filter on,
| and the effect was stunning. Super realistic wrinkles, contours
| and skin texture, it never glitched out and had no visible
| edges. We are truly through the looking glass.
| zehaeva wrote:
| I love living in an age where old scifi movies/plots that most
| people thought would never actually happen, actually start to
| happen.
|
| I'm thinking specifically of 2002's S1M0NE[0].
|
| I can't wait for this future.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)
| echelon_musk wrote:
| You may also enjoy The Congress.
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/
| kingcharles wrote:
| What a trippy trailer. Must watch.
| sgfgross wrote:
| If anyone is interested in the paper (PDF):
| https://oa.mg/work/10.1073/pnas.2110013119
| bell-cot wrote:
| If Hollywood's use of deepfake Luke Skywalkers gives "more truth-
| oriented" folks a good-enough awareness of the technology, and
| fact-free stuff like the Pizzagate conspiracy is good enough for
| the "less truth-oriented" folks...then deepfakes aren't much of a
| threat.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| So I guess these people don't remember Stalin and Lenin
| photoshopping in the 1930s.
| https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1...
|
| And then there's _doubles_ : when you just find somebody who
| looks exactly like the real person, and get them to do some
| acting.
|
| A deepfaked video or photoshop can be debunked because we're all
| aware that the technology exists to fake it; all we have to do is
| show evidence that it's not true. And at the same time, there
| will always be people who simply want to believe something and so
| will refuse any evidence to the contrary. You don't need a
| Deepfake for someone to believe that Hillary Clinton is running a
| gang of pedophiles out the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor
| in the DC suburbs.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Ahhh these fears are really overblown.
|
| This is just an iteration of the same overreaction that has been
| occurring since the days of splicing audio tape together.
|
| If anything, I would argue malicious editing of REAL footage,
| which already occurs in media outlets today, is far more
| frightening than the possibility of having a deepfake video,
| though it might be another tool in that slimy toolbox.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Even malicious editing has been around a long time, but the
| ease and accessibility, coupled with social media
| proliferation, is on another level. I'm not sure to what extent
| this matters yet when mere text on a screen can fool certain
| demographics. Is doctored footage/images a moot point if the
| target viewers are going to believe it anyway?
|
| What we need is better inoculation to psycho misinformation
| politics
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is the thing.
|
| Convincing enough deep fake + the 24/7 news industry + Twitter
| rage machine combined will at some point overreact way too fast
| and too hard and someone will get actually hurt, maybe even
| killed.
|
| Actors have had clauses for not using their likeness for a long
| time now, if their face is 3D scanned, the use cases are
| carefully limited. They can't just put Brad Pitt in a random
| commercial even though they have the scans of his face and body
| and can find a voice actor.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| This sometimes is very advantageous for celebrities.
|
| Bruce Willis got paid an insane amount of money for his
| deepfaked face to appear in a Russian commercial. He
| literally got paid a couple million dollars to do NOTHING
| except agree to his likeness being used.
|
| https://www.ign.com/articles/bruce-willis-russian-
| commercial...
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Not sure why this would be downvoted.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| HN has by far the most bizarre downvote patterns I've ever
| seen. Not really worth wondering about.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| IMO the voting pattern changes pretty clearly as the
| Earth turns and different groups of people become the
| dominant readers at any given moment.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I think there are definite categories. They seem to range
| from legitimate uses of downvoting such as against
| obvious trolls, facetious argumentation, etc. to
| enforcement of ideological tyranny. It's always
| interesting to analyze.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > enforcement of ideological tyranny
|
| Boy, that escalated quickly.
| space_ghost wrote:
| There's a subplot in The Newsroom where a producer edits an
| interviewee out of context, leading to the network broadcasting
| false accusations of serious war crimes. The producer wasn't
| careful enough, and a clock visible in the background is seen
| to jump around. Without that clock it would have been
| undetectable.
| cortesoft wrote:
| You don't even have to change the ordering of the video
| during editing to craft a false narrative. Take reality TV,
| for example... if you film people for 24 hours a day for a
| week, and you need to edit the footage down for a 30 minute
| show, you can create a huge variety of impressions.
|
| For example, let's say you want to make someone seem like a
| jerk... in 168 hours, everyone is going to have at least 30
| minutes of actions that, in a vacuum, make you look like a
| jerk. By choosing only to show actions that contribute to a
| certain narrative, you can completely change how someone
| appears to behave.
| not2b wrote:
| That's how "reality TV" operates. They record a ton of
| video, decide what the story they want to tell is, and chop
| things down to tell that story.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Life imitates art - when Russia started attacking Ukraine, RT
| reported a 5pm emergency meeting of their military leaders.
| Included was a photo showing two of their watches at 11:45.
| (The report was at about 7pm the same day, so it couldn't
| have just been a long meeting)
| dugmartin wrote:
| And parodied by the Simpsons here:
|
| https://youtu.be/qEGFaOeUm2A
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That episode is from November 27, 1994. That Newsroom
| episode aired July 28, 2013. Less Simpsons parodying
| Newsroom and more them predicting the future [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future
| [deleted]
| Jiro wrote:
| Michael Moore did this in Bowling for Columbine.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm not sure what failure to reliably discriminate between real
| pictures of people I don't know and therefore wouldn't be able to
| recognize and (what are basically composite) computer-generated
| people who don't exist is supposed to prove. Artists who can
| paint a picture of someone who doesn't exist that I can't tell
| from pictures of people who do exist, and I could probably piece
| together somebody who doesn't exist in photoshop from pieces of
| people who do.
|
| Also, a weird-ass set of conclusions here:
|
| > People are also excellent at incorporating context and
| background knowledge into their judgments in ways that computers
| mostly aren't, and in ways that the sorts of tasks in these
| studies mostly don't assess. One exception is a pair of deepfake
| videos of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un included in the video
| study. People were much better than the model at classifying
| these videos. Whereas a majority of participants correctly
| spotted these fakes, the model was way off, highly confident that
| they were real.
|
| > Here, people may have taken into account factors like their
| memories of previous statements made by these leaders, or
| knowledge of what their voices sound like, or the likelihood that
| they would say the sorts of things shown in the video: all things
| not included in the model at all.
|
| Couldn't it just be because they were bad imitations of people
| they recognized? Isn't the entire ominous point of "deepfakes" to
| deceive people by presenting them with people the recognize doing
| things they didn't do? Looks like people still don't have a
| problem recognizing those as false.
|
| The only good "deepfakes" I've seen are ones that have been
| extensively touched up manually, using the automatic part as raw
| material. New techniques have certainly made that a lot cheaper.
| andrewgioia wrote:
| Related: Lucasfilm hired a digital artist, Shamook, who re-did
| Luke's scene in The Mandalorian with some improved deepfake
| techniques[1].
|
| Here's his video comparison:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
|
| [1] https://www.engadget.com/lucasfilm-hires-
| shamook-054904077.h...
| victor9000 wrote:
| The biggest problem for me is that the mouth movements seem
| completely off.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| That's been an issue for all CGI, I guess our ability to spot
| even the slightest imperfection in how mouths look has us
| well stuck in the uncanny valley
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| His top lip doesn't move when he speaks
| mywacaday wrote:
| The firs comment on the video says it would be better if they
| had access to the original video and not just the original
| fake.
| SECProto wrote:
| It's off on both sides, but to me it looks more off on the
| deepfake side
| stavros wrote:
| I think that's because they used the original fake to make
| the deepfake. If they had used an actual actor (with a
| completely different face but accurate mouth movement) I
| think it would have been spot on.
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