The line between truth and fiction is being erased.

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Graham Kennedy
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The line between truth and fiction is being erased.

Post by Graham Kennedy »

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Advanced machine learning technology is being used to create fake pornography featuring real actors and pop stars, pasting their faces over existing performers in explicit movies.

The resulting clips, made without consent from the women whose faces are used, are often indistinguishable from a real film, with only subtly uncanny differences suggesting something is amiss.

A community on the social news site Reddit has spent months creating and sharing the images, which were initially made by a solo hobbyist who went by the name “deepfake”. When the technology site Motherboard first reported on the user in December last year, they had already made images featuring women including Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, and Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams.

In the months since, videos featuring other celebrities including Star Wars lead Daisy Ridley, Game of Thrones’s Sophie Turner, and Harry Potter star Emma Watson have been posted on the site, which has become the main location for sharing the clips.
So I went out and found a couple of these. There are well done ones and badly done ones, as you'd expect. but the good ones are... amazingly convincing. Maybe because I'm not as keyed up to what to look for as I am with a photoshopped picture, but wow.

So, seriously NSFW links follow for the purposes of example :

Here's a topless photo shoot with Natalie Portman. Only it's not Natalie Portman, it's somebody else with Portman's face CGI's onto it.

If you know Ana Kasparian from the Young Turks Youtube show?

Image

Here's a super-NSFW video of her.

Now fo course Hollywood could do stuff like this for years. The difference is that it's becoming massively easier. We're talking about software that can google up a bunch of facial images of a specified person and map it over a clip of somebody else in minutes, maybe a few hours, all on a home laptop.

And software is coming out that can modify sound in much the same way that photoshop treats images; let it listen to clips of a star speaking for 20 minutes or so, and it can then take any voice and modify it into the star's voice. So you can not only show a person doing anything, you can make them say anything.

Now this isn't perfect, of course, I saw a Daisy Ridley "Metal Bikini" attempt that wasn't great - she had two sets of eyebrows for one thing. But it will get better. And even if it's still discernible, the result will be that critically thinking people are informed and careful about what is or is not real and what is bullshit, but dumb lazy people who want to believe the lies they want to believe will just believe fake things because they want it to be true. Well, that's already happened to a large extent, but it will be far, FAR more so when this is around.

Who thinks that the next Presidential election won't involve people putting out carefully faked videos on a candidate saying something horrific? And who will listen to the experts saying it's fake over the evidence of their own eyes and ears?

The future is screwed.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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