[HN Gopher] AI fakes duel over impeachment of Vice-President in ...
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AI fakes duel over impeachment of Vice-President in Phillipines
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-06-28 19:14 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (factcheck.afp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (factcheck.afp.com)
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| It could be a plot line in a Black Mirror episode
| roughly wrote:
| Welcome to the future, y'all. It's gonna be a wild decade.
| kylestanfield wrote:
| Realistic AI video generation will put us firmly in a post-truth
| era. If those videos were 25% more realistic it would be
| indistinguishable from a real interview.
|
| The speed with which you'll be able to create and disseminate
| propaganda is mind blowing. Imagine what a 3 letter agency could
| do with their level of resources.
| patrakov wrote:
| No, it won't.
|
| Expected reaction: every camera manufacturer will embed chips
| that hold a private key used to sign and/or watermark photos
| and videos, thus attesting that the raw footage came from a
| real camera.
|
| Now it only remains to solve the analog hole problem.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| I don't think that's as trivial and invulnerable as you think
| it is. You are talking about a key that exists on a device,
| but cannot be extracted from the device. It can be used to
| sign a high volume of data in a unique way such that the
| signature cannot be transferred to another video.
|
| Now you have another problem -- a signature is unique to a
| device, presumably, so you've got the "I can authenticate
| that this camera took this photo" problem, which is great if
| you are validating a press agency's photographs but TERRIBLE
| if you are covering a protest or human rights violation.
| kylestanfield wrote:
| I hope you're right
| blibble wrote:
| a capable university student with their lam equipment could
| easily extract that key
|
| I don't think the CIA will have any problems
| hansvm wrote:
| - Attach a screen to the camera. Bonus points for bothering
| to calibrate that contraption.
|
| - Watermarking is nearly useless as a way of conveying that
| information, either visibly distorting the image or being
| sensitive to all manner of normal alterations like cropping,
| lightness adjustments, and screenshotting.
|
| - New file formats are hard to push to a wide enough audience
| for this to have the desired effect. If half the real images
| you see aren't signed, ignoring the signature becomes second-
| nature.
|
| - Hardware keys can always be extracted in O(N) for an N-bit
| key. The constant factor is large, but not enough to deter a
| well-funded adversary. The ability to convincingly fake,
| e.g., video proof you weren't at a crime scene would be
| valuable in a hurry. I don't know the limits, but it's more
| than the 2-10 million dollars you need to extract a key.
|
| - You mentioned the analog hole problem, but that's also very
| real. If the sensor is engineered as a separate unit, it's
| trivial to sign whatever data you want. That's hard to work
| around because camera sensors are big and crude, so
| integration a non-removable crypto enclave onto one is
| already a nontrivial engineering challenge.
|
| - If this doesn't function something like TLS with
| certificate transparency logs and chains of trust then one
| compromised key from any manufacturer kills the whole thing.
| Would the US even trust Chinese-signed images? Vice versa?
| The government you obey has a lot of power to steal that
| secret without the outside world knowing.
|
| - Even if you do have CT logs and trust the company
| publishing to them to not publish compromised certs, a breach
| is much worse than for something like TLS. People's devices
| are effectively just bricked (going back to that 3rd point --
| if all the images you personally take aren't appropriately
| signed, will a lack of signing seem like a big deal?). If you
| can update the secure enclave then an adversary can too, and
| if updating tries to protect itself by, e.g., only sending
| signed bytecode then you still have the problem that the
| upstream key is (potentially) compromised.
|
| - Everyone's current devices are immediately obsolete, which
| will kill adoption. If you grandfather the idea in, there's
| still a period of years where people get used to real images
| not being signed, and you still have a ton of wasted money
| and resources that'll get pushback.
|
| Etc. It's really not an easy problem.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Persistent media watermarking through the analog hole is a
| solved problem and has been for years. It's standard
| practice on films.
|
| What does it even mean that hardware keys are extractable
| in O(N) time? If there's some reasonable multiple of N
| where you can figure out a key, your cryptosystem is
| broken, physical or not.
|
| It's also very straightforward to attach metadata to media
| and wouldn't take a format change.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > Persistent media watermarking through the analog hole
| is a solved problem and has been for years. It's standard
| practice on films.
|
| Can you expand on that a bit? Wikipedia's coverage on
| this seems mostly historical and copy protection focused.
| card_zero wrote:
| The problem would be spurious watermarks, not vanishing
| ones. Create fake video, point camera at screen, re-
| record it. Now it's fake _and_ authenticated as a genuine
| camera recording.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't agree. 3 letter agencies have been able to fake videos
| since the inception of videos. Even more so with CGI.
|
| It has always been about trust in the authors.
|
| The main difference is petty fakes would be cheap. I.e. my wife
| could be shown a fake portraying me for whatever malicious
| reasons.
| heylook wrote:
| You're being obtuse. There's an obvious difference between
| "state-level actors can produce misleading films" and "anyone
| with an internet connection and 5 minutes can make anything
| they want".
| krapp wrote:
| Not in terms of effect. This might have been a gamechanger
| 20 years ago but nowadays people already trust TikTok memes
| more than they trust CNN. The bar for credibility is so low
| that this sort of thing is almost trying too hard.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| "People" aren't a monolith. Certain people are definitely
| falling for low effort TikTok trash but now more people
| will fall for these more "credible" fakes.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The post I responded to wrote "Imagine what a 3 letter
| agency could do with their level of resources" and I don't
| think much changed in that regard.
| baxtr wrote:
| Text can be mass faked since Guttenberg, photograph since at
| least decades.
|
| What makes you think fake videos will have an outsized impact?
| heylook wrote:
| A picture is worth a thousand words.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| Text - "we have no idea if they actually said that"
|
| Picture - "this could be out of context" (this is used
| constantly in politics and people fall for it anyway)
|
| Video removes the question of context and if the person
| actually did it. So now instead of printing about it or
| showing an awkward picture from a certain unflattering angle
| I can generate a video of your favorite politician taking
| upskirt photos on a city bus.
|
| As the tech gets more and more realistic we're increasingly
| straining the average persons ability to maintain presence of
| mind and ask questions.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes! And:
|
| Video - "There's no way to tell whether this is AI-faked or
| not."
| ofjcihen wrote:
| Ha, I'd love to share the optimism that that's what most
| people would say but what we've seen is the opposite. The
| more convincing the media (as in media format) is the
| more people are willing to believe it.
|
| Don't get me wrong. I hope this level of fake media
| causes people to stop taking things at face value and dig
| into the facts but unfortunately it seems we're just
| getting worse at it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _speed with which you'll be able to create and disseminate
| propaganda is mind blowing_
|
| The problem isn't the fakery, it's this speed of dissemination
| on algorithmic social media. It's increasingly looking like the
| modern West's Roman lead pipes.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yet people in this very website are 200% hyped about GenAI
| because it makes it easier to generate slop frontend code or
| whatever.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| The Philippines has a story of foreign influence on their local
| politics. It wouldn't be crazy to expect this is just the
| latest chapter of the 3 letter using it as laboratory.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Content authenticity follows from the source's credibility.
| This is why chains of evidence are crucial. If squinting at
| pixels were the harbinger of a post-truth reality, then it's
| already _many_ decades late.
| pkoird wrote:
| Good luck telling that to aging grandparents and people in
| third world countries who are just getting acquaintanted with
| the internet.
| dingnuts wrote:
| even in first world countries grandparents are reading the
| print version of The Epoch Times lol
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Realistic AI video generation will put us firmly in a post-
| truth era.
|
| Verifiable authenticity might just be the next big thing.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| People don't want authenticity. They want confirmation of
| what they already think.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| People want authentic confirmation of what they already
| think, which makes it easy to give them the confirmation
| and lie to them about the authenticity.
|
| If they can't have both, _some_ people prefer confirmation
| to authenticity. But that 's far from a universal
| preference.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| To be honest I can consider myself pretty savvy when it comes
| to identifying fakes and the schoolboy ones would have fooled
| me. Pretty flawless videos and the accent and lip sync were
| spot on. I don't even think you truly need that extra 25% for
| the casual observer.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's the 'authenticity' issue of generative AI tat troubles me
| rather than the content of the viewpoints.
|
| If these same ideas were expressed by Vtubers (virtual youtubers,
| anime-like filters for people who want to do to-camera video but
| are shy or protective of their privacy), it would not be
| troubling, as everyone understands that fictionalized characters
| are a form of puppetry an can focus on the content of the
| argument.
|
| But using generative video to simulate ordinary people expressing
| those ideas is a way of hijacking people's neural responses. Just
| pick the demographic you wish to micro-target (young/middle/old,
| working/middle/upper class, etc. etc. etc.) and generate
| attractive-looking exemplars for messages you want to promote and
| ugly-looking exemplars for those you wish to discredit.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I didn't have "I generated myself as the chad and you as the
| soyjak" turning out to be a valid psyop strat in my AI tech
| doomerism bingo.
| johnfn wrote:
| I wonder what recipients would think if I sent this sentence
| 10 years back via time machine.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The basic framing of the sentence works fine if you know
| what those terms are. And while "soyjak" is a bit newer,
| "chad", "soy boy" and "wojak" were well established at that
| point, so I think it would be easy enough to figure out.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Send it back a century and it'd even be "what's a bingo
| card?"
| john2x wrote:
| Once again the Philippines is leading the way with how these
| things will play out for other countries in the future[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-38173842
| ninjaa wrote:
| Lol students fake stuff. These actor-less statements got to go
| for humanity's sake.
|
| IMO all digital content is going to have to be signed so the
| provenance trail can be crawled by an AI across devices.
|
| https://aditya-advani.medium.com/how-to-defeat-fake-news-wit...
| vik0 wrote:
| AI fakes, and AI in general, will push more and more people to
| interact with each other in real life. I, for one, can't wait for
| that. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the
| same
| ghushn3 wrote:
| I don't know that this is true. A lot of people are getting
| sucked into "this is my AI
| friend/girlfriend/boyfriend/waifu/husbando" territory.
|
| In real life, other humans are not machines you can put
| kindness tokens in and get sex out. AI, on the other hand, you
| can put any tokens at all into AI and get sex out. I'm worried
| that people will stop interacting with humans because it's
| harder.
|
| Sure, the results from a human relationship are 10,000x higher
| quality, but they require you to be able to communicate. AI
| will do what it's told, and you can tell it to love you and it
| will _.
|
| _ for some values of "will".
| logicchains wrote:
| That problem will naturally sort itself out through the magic
| of evolution: generic and cultural traits that increase the
| chance of pairing with AI will be bred out (as such people
| won't have children), and traits that reduce it will be
| selected for.
| fullshark wrote:
| Sounds like a plan for a healthy social order
| perching_aix wrote:
| Implying that this is all somehow a genetic trait?
|
| Which gene do you think encodes for having the hots for AI
| models?
|
| You remind me to a reporting I saw on Taiwanese
| schoolchildrens' career goals. Most reported aiming for the
| semiconductor industry. Crazy how the local gene pool
| works, what a coincidence.
| dimal wrote:
| Does anyone else feel like at some point reality turned into an
| unpublished Neal Stephenson novel?
| billy99k wrote:
| Well, we could use AI to write one.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Or a published PKD novel, for that matter.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Was chatting to someone last week who was using AI to help
| teach their kids. A young ladies illustrated primer.
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