BBC News
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2018–2020
1:26 · 1.7M views · Jul 19, 2017
A BBC News segment on University of Washington research that synthesized a photorealistic Obama video, modeling mouth movement so any audio can be put in his mouth.
Cited as a concrete early example that AI-faked video was already convincing, in discussions of misinformation and trust in media.
3 comments from Hacker News
Many reasons. - For one when a news article is incorrect it is very easy to hold accountable the source of that information. How many people keep track of who said what on the internet? - Fake Information takes more time to respond to than true information. False news travels 6 times faster (..) than truthful news [0]. - Media has a cycle of information that is way slower and more curated (even if manipulative) which allows true information to be heard louder. - It's becoming easier and easier to fake image, video, and audio in a way never seen before [1]. - It's way easier for platforms like FB and Twitter and YT to make you spiral down a rabbit hole of similar content. Sure, this did happen in the past, but the current level of detailed recommendations makes it really easy for people to lose context inside their bubble. - People are not machines, if they hear a message many times by different sources that trigger the right emotional responses they will believe it to be true. Now group every point and compound it by a lot of consumption and ingest it into monkey-like brains :) [0]: [LINK] [1]: this video
Photo, audio, and video evidence should already be dismissed until one is able to verify the integrity and source. All of these can already be believably faked - it's just a matter of educating people that a layperson can easily create fake things by using tools developed by research teams. Fake text is the easiest to fake if you can identify the font used - any image editor will work. HN uses 9pt Verdana, even without using dev tools I could fake your post to say anything I wanted it to say since it would just be 9pt Verdana on a solid background set to text wrap every 1050px. See: [LINK] & this video
It's called agree of misinformation because it's become increasingly easy to produce convincing fake footage. It's entirely possible to fake a real-time video interview for instance using voice synthesis and mapping the face of your target upon your face. It's frighteningly convincing. I.e. this video