Walter Kirn tweeted recently: “Gemini AI is inventing damaging stories about people and figures I know. It is an automated false-witness weapon.”
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To whatever extent digital information is a form of wealth, its digital producers must always fight counterfeiters — just as currency issuers must do.
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As the technology advances, companies whose customers will likely be harmed by deepfakes lag behind in strategies to counter them.
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New speech AI technology is able to take just a couple seconds’ worth of audio and extrapolate on it to make complete sentences. Theoretically, scam artists could take a short video from TikTok and use it to impersonate an unsuspecting child. In fact, this has actually happened, and more than once. It’s easy to see how one could use speech AI to “resurrect” those who have passed away. And in fact, this too has already happened. In an essay titled “The Speech of the Dead: Against AI Necromancy,” David Walden writes how in 2020, the nonprofit Change the Ref made a video featuring Joaquin Oliver, who encouraged viewers in the clip to vote for gun control in the presidential election. The Read More ›
An AI-generated image showing a billowing fire near the U.S. Pentagon caused panic this week. False alarms of an explosion started to proliferate across social media, with even a Russian state outlet reporting on the situation, according to TMZ. Nonetheless, the image showed various distortions and was quickly dismantled as a hoax by a number of vigilant viewers. Even so, the image looks realistic at first glance, and was enough to ignite concern; the incident occurs amidst legislative talks on Capitol Hill over AI regulation. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (which was originally funded by Elon Musk) testified before Congress and noted that while he sees great benefits in new AI systems, the possibilities of their abuses are evident. The Read More ›
With the proliferation of AI text and images, the issue of deepfakes is of deepening concern. The better AI gets at refashioning reality, will the already murky waters of the Internet become too surreal to navigate? Even real videos, when divorced from their proper context, can be deeply misleading. When entire clips are artificially contrived, then, it seems like the line between fact and fiction dissolves entirely. Some folks are already worried. Victor Tangermann writes at Futurism, [Given] recent developments, the situation is likely to get worse before it can get better. AI tools are making it easier to generate deepfakes every year. These days, an AI can be trained on a relatively small stockpile of audiovisual data to convincingly Read More ›
Leaders in business and science have called for a moratorium on developing artificial intelligence. They’re putting human wisdom up against humans’ quest for power, and we know who always wins those battles. Pardon the cynicism, but honestly, I don’t think we’ve begun to realize what a horrific mess we’re creating for ourselves here. AI developers will promise you great good from it. In reality it looms over us as a huge yet mostly unrecognized threat, especially for the damage it will do to human trust. AI itself won’t care, though. On one level it feels nothing, knows nothing, understands nothing. On another level it’s really quite insane. It’s innocent enough when confined in proper limits. AI-assisted braking in your car is Read More ›
By Jeff Gardner The threat that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to us has been dominating the news cycle. Exactly what AI will do to us is hard to predict — it hasn’t happened yet. But some, like Elon Musk, worry that AI will be used primarily to peddle lies to us. Musk is right, but not because AI is the next thing in fake news. “Fake news” is already here, and it’s not composed of made-up stories. It is someone’s opinion being passed off as the story, the “facts” of the event. With fake news, the events are real, but the assigned meaning, the “frame” as it is called in the media, is manufactured. The Problem AI’s danger to us Read More ›
The human brain tends to think concretely. We barter thoughts, words, and ideas through images. It’s why metaphorical language can be so powerful in conveying otherwise abstract ideas. I immediately think of the verse in the Bible: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). It’s hard for me to picture justice on its own, but a raging waterfall? That’s a powerful image. I can now imagine what justice, in some aspect, might look like. Our natural tendency to think this way is both a strength and a vulnerability. A recent article from The Stream relates the human imagination to the current conversation over AI. While the debates rage over AI’s most pertinent Read More ›
Tech writer Martin Anderson offers a simple trick to detect deepfakes in video calls: Ask the caller to turn sideways: DeepFaceLive is a live-streaming version of the popular DeepFaceLab software, and is capable of creating alternate video identities in real-time. From more or less face-on viewpoints, most of the celebrity recreations are quite effective, and some are very convincing even at fairly acute angles – until the facial angle hits a full 90°.ry good at recreating profile views. Martin Anderson, “To Uncover a Deepfake Video Call, Ask the Caller to Turn Sideways” at Metaphysic (August 8, 2022) Then, as his examples at the site show, the possibly convincing face fuzzes out. He thinks that computer security analysts have overlooked this Read More ›
From Gizmodo this week we learn that the FBI has received a number of complaints about people using “stolen information and deepfaked video and voice to apply to remote tech jobs”: According to the FBI’s announcement, more companies have been reporting people applying to jobs using video, images, or recordings that are manipulated to look and sound like somebody else. These fakers are also using personal identifiable information from other people—stolen identities—to apply to jobs at IT, programming, database, and software firms. The report noted that many of these open positions had access to sensitive customer or employee data, as well as financial and proprietary company info, implying the imposters could have a desire to steal sensitive information as well Read More ›
A homunculus is a little person created in a test tube. There was a time when some of the most prominent scientists in the world believed they could create miniature life in the lab. But while the search for homunculus has long since ended, there are some who believe they can find a similar kind of life through artificial general Read More ›
What is happening in Russia right now with regards to development of artificial intelligence? In today’s bingecast, Samuel Bendett and Robert J. Marks discuss Russian military and non-military development of AI including autonomous weapons, entrepreneurship, and free enterprise. Show Notes Additional Resources
That’s the looming scenario astrophysicist and social scientist Simon DeDeo (pictured) sketched for journalist Kelly Catalfamo because the required technology — GPT-3, facial GANs, and voice synthesizers –- exists now. Catalfamo asks, Now imagine how you’d feel if you found out your friend didn’t really exist. Their profile turns out to be a Frankensteinian mashup of verbiage dreamed up by the powerful language generator GPT-3 and a face born from a generative adversarial network, perhaps with a deepfaked video clip thrown in here and there. How would it affect you to learn that you had become emotionally attached to an algorithm? And what if that “person” was designed to manipulate you, influencing your personal, financial, or political decisions like a Read More ›
In a recent podcast, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks hosted Denise Simon, an intelligence analyst, talking about the way hostile foreign powers can use AI to generate false information. Denise Simon discusses both deepfake attacks—and some much more sinister ones. https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-119-Denise-Simon.mp3 A partial transcript follows. This portion begins at about 17:50. Show notes and links follow. Denise Simon: That [the Maskirovka Technique of deception and deepfakes] is another component of how we try to decipher what’s real coming out of the Kremlin and what isn’t real. And even if it isn’t real, what consequences it has on influence and activities. Robert J. Marks: One of the things that Russia is invested in is artificial intelligence. Vladimir Putin has Read More ›
What are Russia’s psychological strategies in warfare? How are they employing them today? And how should we respond? Robert J. Marks interviews Senior Research and Intelligence Analyst on Foreign and Domestic Policy, Denise Simon, to discuss the Russian use of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and maskirovka in the context of psychological warfare. Show Notes Additional Resources
When our Walter Bradley Center director, Robert J. Marks, was discussing with Eric Holloway the events that really made a difference in AI, one very interesting issue that came up was the use of deepfakes to substitute for actors in films. Robert J. Marks: Eric, how is Disney using deep fakes in entertainment? Eric Holloway: Well, Disney is using deep fakes and entertainment as a way to capitalize on not having to hire lots of really expensive actors. So you can have a few expensive actors, they do their thing, and then you copy their body movements and face. And now you can just hire a bunch of cheap actors and stick the expensive actors faces on them. Or you Read More ›
Our Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks is back with Jonathan Bartlett and Eric Holloway, are back, with the second instalment of 2020 smash hits in AI. Readers may recall that we offered a fun series during the holidays about the oopses and ums and ers in the discipline (typically hyped by uncritical sources). Time to celebrate the real achievements! Well, our nerds think that #5 is believable deep fakes in entertainment, for better or worse Here’s a partial transcript. (Show Notes and Additional Resources follow, along with a link to the complete transcript.) Robert J. Marks: Jon, what are deep fakes and what is Disney doing that’s going to wow us? Jonathan Bartlett: People are worried about the Read More ›
Elizabeth II is among the longest-serving constitutional monarchs in history (1953–). Britain’s edgy Channel 4 tested the waters with a deepfake Christmas address: In Commonwealth countries like Canada, it is a longstanding custom to listen to Elizabeth’s Christmas Address. So how did the fake fare?: If you have bad eyesight and limited hearing, you might, might, be fooled by the fake Queen on a busy Christmas day. But by the time she starts talking about Netflix and launches into a dance routine, you’d surely know something’s up. Channel 4 makes little effort to hide its deception, but that hasn’t stopped some critics from expressing discomfort with the stunt. Rhett Jones, “First Deepfake Address from the Queen of England Makes Its Read More ›
Since 2014, there has been a new twist to misrepresentation in politics: deepfakes—computer-generated images that seem quite real. Adam Garfinkle of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University explains how the technology, generative adversarial networks (GANs), works: A GAN operator pits a generator (G) against a discriminator (D) in a gamelike environment in which G tries to fool D into incorrectly discriminating between fake and real data. The technology works by means of a series of incremental but rapid adjustments that allows D to discriminate data while G tries to fool it. Adam Garfinkle, ““Disinformed”” at Inference Review Once the problem is reduced to a giant calculation, a giant computer learns much more quickly than the rest of us. And it can then Read More ›