Monday, July 10, 2017

The future of Fake News

You think that things are bad today, just wait:
Today, when people see a video of a politician taking a bribe, a soldier perpetrating a war crime, or a celebrity starring in a sex tape, viewers can safely assume that the depicted events have actually occurred, provided, of course, that the video is of a certain quality and not obviously edited.
But that world of truth—where seeing is believing—is about to be upended by artificial intelligence technologies.
The article says that the first of these will be audio, in perhaps 2 years.  Initially, forensics tools will be able to show that it is fake, but ten years out it may not be possible to tell real from fake.

Welcome to the fake future.

3 comments:

  1. I'm. Confused. So if the quality of the sex tape is very good does that mean it is likely a fake.??

    .... the exception to that is if it is a Kardashian ??? Because thoose are assumed to be highly produced ?

    ..... and does it really matter. ( as long as its generally available ).

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  2. Ted, I think we need to be ready to be skeptical of audio/video. This may put us back to a pre-communications age, where eyewitness testimony becomes more valuable than anything.

    Or not. Frankly, I'm not at all sure how this will play out, other than people WILL use this for political dirty tricks.

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  3. I remember Scientific America warning about this with photographs back when I used to read it; before they went totally "agenda science".

    I'm not sure when that would have been, but I vaguely recall having to wrestle my copy away from a Utahraptor.

    "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear"

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