With Easy AI-Generated Deepfakes, Is Every Day April Fool's Day Now? (vice.com) 60
"Every day is April Fool's Day now, requiring a low but constant effort," argues Motherboard's senior editor, in a post shared by Slashdot reader samleecole.
"As AI-generated shitposting becomes easier, it's inevitable that one of these will catch you with your guard down, or appeal to some basic emotion you are too eager to believe..." Even if you're trained in recognizing fake imagery and can immediately spot the difference between copy written by a language model and a human (content that's increasingly sneaking into online articles), doing endless fact-checking and performing countless micro-decisions about reality and fraud is mentally draining. Every year, our brains are tasked with processing five percent more information per day than the last. Add to this cognitive load a constant, background-level effort to decide whether that data is a lie. The disinformation apocalypse is already here, but not in the form of the Russian "dezinformatsiya" we feared. Wading through what's real and fake online has never been harder, not because each individual deepfake is impossible to distinguish from reality, but because the volume of low effort gags is outpacing our ability to process them....
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who's been studying manipulated media since long before deepfakes, told me that while he's used to getting a few calls every week from reporters asking him to take a look at images or videos that seem manipulated, over the past few weeks, he's gotten dozens of requests a day. "I don't even know how to put words to it. It really feels like it's unraveling," Farid told me in a phone call.
When AI generated fakes started cropping up online years ago, he recalled, he warned that this would change the future, and some of his colleagues told him that he was overreacting. "The one thing that has surprised me is that it has gone much, much faster than I expected," he said. "I always thought, I agree that it is not the biggest problem today. But what's that Wayne Gretzky line? Don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going. You've got to follow the puck. In this case, I don't think this was hard to predict."
Buzzfeed noted that a viral image of the Pope in a white "puffer" coat" was created by a 31-year-old construction worker who created it while tripping on mushrooms, then posted it to Facebook.
But Motherboard's article concludes with a quote from Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who died in 2022. "There's a large and growing fraction of machine learning and AI researchers who are worried about the societal implications of their work on many fronts, but are also excited for the enormous potential for good that this technology processes." Eckersley said in a 2018 phone call. "So I think a lot of people are starting to ask, 'How do we do this the right way?'
"It turns out that that's a very hard question to answer. Or maybe a hard question to answer correctly... How do we put our thumbs on the scale to ensure machine learning is producing a saner and more stable world, rather than one where more systems can be broken into more quickly?"
"As AI-generated shitposting becomes easier, it's inevitable that one of these will catch you with your guard down, or appeal to some basic emotion you are too eager to believe..." Even if you're trained in recognizing fake imagery and can immediately spot the difference between copy written by a language model and a human (content that's increasingly sneaking into online articles), doing endless fact-checking and performing countless micro-decisions about reality and fraud is mentally draining. Every year, our brains are tasked with processing five percent more information per day than the last. Add to this cognitive load a constant, background-level effort to decide whether that data is a lie. The disinformation apocalypse is already here, but not in the form of the Russian "dezinformatsiya" we feared. Wading through what's real and fake online has never been harder, not because each individual deepfake is impossible to distinguish from reality, but because the volume of low effort gags is outpacing our ability to process them....
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who's been studying manipulated media since long before deepfakes, told me that while he's used to getting a few calls every week from reporters asking him to take a look at images or videos that seem manipulated, over the past few weeks, he's gotten dozens of requests a day. "I don't even know how to put words to it. It really feels like it's unraveling," Farid told me in a phone call.
When AI generated fakes started cropping up online years ago, he recalled, he warned that this would change the future, and some of his colleagues told him that he was overreacting. "The one thing that has surprised me is that it has gone much, much faster than I expected," he said. "I always thought, I agree that it is not the biggest problem today. But what's that Wayne Gretzky line? Don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going. You've got to follow the puck. In this case, I don't think this was hard to predict."
Buzzfeed noted that a viral image of the Pope in a white "puffer" coat" was created by a 31-year-old construction worker who created it while tripping on mushrooms, then posted it to Facebook.
But Motherboard's article concludes with a quote from Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who died in 2022. "There's a large and growing fraction of machine learning and AI researchers who are worried about the societal implications of their work on many fronts, but are also excited for the enormous potential for good that this technology processes." Eckersley said in a 2018 phone call. "So I think a lot of people are starting to ask, 'How do we do this the right way?'
"It turns out that that's a very hard question to answer. Or maybe a hard question to answer correctly... How do we put our thumbs on the scale to ensure machine learning is producing a saner and more stable world, rather than one where more systems can be broken into more quickly?"
No. (Score:3)
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Because slash Dot is completely bereft of ponies. I demand ponies!
If you insist. [imgur.com]
Maybe (Score:2)
Maybe these images will work like a vaccine and make people more cynical and fact-checking than before.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe these images will work like a vaccine and make people more cynical and fact-checking than before.
Exactly. Look at how well it worked out for all those died who did their own research.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe these images will work like a vaccine and make people more cynical and fact-checking than before.
Exactly. Look at how well it worked out for all those died who did their own research.
This is the danger of using phrases like "do your own research" to mean "watch some random person's video on YouTube".
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Indeed. Precisely the type of person who falls for a phrase of "do your own research" is the type of person who is incapable of doing research correctly.
Research is done in a lab, not on the toilet using your phone.
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> Research is done in a lab, not on the toilet using your phone.
I'm still laughing.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe these images will work like a vaccine and make people more cynical and fact-checking than before.
Sadly, it won't help. The massive underfunding of news media has led to the complete breakdown of the fourth estate. There are no trusted sources for news, because the news media themselves are so caught up in the 24-hour news cycle that they don't take the time to properly fact-check and investigate. And when they do take the time to fact-check, they get fired or worse, because the results contradict their parent company's political agenda. Their parent company has a political agenda, meanwhile, because political anger is the only way to bring in enough viewers to sustain the 24-hour news cycle through advertising dollars.
The whole system is completely and utterly broken from top to bottom, and the people with enough money to fix the problem don't want to, because then they couldn't manipulate politicians to do their will.
The only way any of this gets better is if a bunch of wealthy billionaires get together and create a couple of giant nonprofit news organizations for the purposes of funding journalism at the federal, state, and local levels so that TV, radio, newspapers, etc. can fully separate their profitability from their ability to hire journalists, so that the pay scale of journalism can be competitive against other careers in a global market to attract the best and brightest into the field, and so that journalists can enjoy the journalistic and editorial integrity that they once enjoyed before mass corporate consolidation effectively eradicated the independent news media.
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The only way any of this gets better is if a bunch of wealthy billionaires get together and create a couple of giant nonprofit news organizations for the purposes of funding journalism at the federal, state, and local levels so that TV, radio, newspapers, etc. can fully separate their profitability from their ability to hire journalists, so that the pay scale of journalism can be competitive against other careers in a global market to attract the best and brightest into the field, and so that journalists can enjoy the journalistic and editorial integrity that they once enjoyed before mass corporate consolidation effectively eradicated the independent news media.
The majority of voters will still prefer Fox News et.al. to all that boring "truth".
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The only way any of this gets better is if a bunch of wealthy billionaires get together and create a couple of giant nonprofit news organizations for the purposes of funding journalism at the federal, state, and local levels so that TV, radio, newspapers, etc. can fully separate their profitability from their ability to hire journalists, so that the pay scale of journalism can be competitive against other careers in a global market to attract the best and brightest into the field, and so that journalists can enjoy the journalistic and editorial integrity that they once enjoyed before mass corporate consolidation effectively eradicated the independent news media.
The majority of voters will still prefer Fox News et.al. to all that boring "truth".
Implicit in that was the wealthy billionaires buying any holdout organizations (whether Fox News or anybody else) and liberating their news divisions by splitting them off into separate companies that are funded entirely independently of the network that hosts them, with an airtight contractual relationship that prevents the network from having any say whatsoever in what the news division produces or airs during their time slots or playing games with their time slots to pressure them into toeing the line un
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
"create a couple of giant nonprofit news organizations for the purposes of funding journalism at the federal, state, and local levels"
That already failed too. NPR was all into the Russian Collusion hoax as well as the Hunter Biden LapTop is Russian Disinformation hoax. Why NPR hates Russia I don't know, but they do.
The drive for ratings has wrecked the news. And the weather, every rainstorm seems to gets Weather Alert badge. "There might be lightning within 50 miles, hide in the basement!"
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"create a couple of giant nonprofit news organizations for the purposes of funding journalism at the federal, state, and local levels"
That already failed too. NPR was all into the Russian Collusion hoax as well as the Hunter Biden LapTop is Russian Disinformation hoax.
LOL. The Russian collusion was a giant hoax that resulted in 34 indictments, including 5 members of then-President Trump's original campaign staff [wikipedia.org]. Their eventual inability to pin it on Trump himself doesn't make it a hoax, and the fact that so many members of Trump's team were willing to go to jail on obstruction charges paints a solid picture that they knew he was guilty of something that would have come out had they not obstructed the investigation. Whether that was Russian collusion or some other cri
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NPR was all into the Russian Collusion hoax as well as the Hunter Biden LapTop is Russian Disinformation hoax.
Reality? You fail it! [justsecurity.org]
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sorry, you are the one who failed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bought and paid for by Hillary.
By the way, Fox News doesn't have a station here, I can't watch it. So blaming them won't help your cause.
The point of what can you trust remains.
CBS died on the Swift boat veterans thing, Dan Rather went bye-bye.
NBC had the creative editing of the Zimmerman 911 call, then it turned out Brian Williams had been making things up for years.
ABC was caught caught recreating a crime scene they couldn't get close e
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These news sources are absolutely despised on Slashdot, since most people here subscribe to the childish notion that “information should be free”. Maybe true, but collecting, distilling and publishing high quality information 24/7/365 ABSOLUTELY COSTS REAL $$$$$.
I pay about
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There’s still one source of news that’s generally extremely trustworthy. There are still a few outfits that sell high quality news and analysis that’s only available if you PAY A SUBSCRIPTION FOR IT.
And now you have to write what subscribers want to hear. That doesn't actually solve the problem. At all. If anything, it makes journalists even more compelled to write stories that are consistent with the organization's politics, because it is way easier to insert an extra ad break to make up lost revenue from lost viewership numbers than it is to magically make more subscribers appear when you lose those.
Additionally, subscription-only journalism completely fails to serve the public interest, because e
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With regards
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Maybe these images will work like a vaccine and make people more cynical and fact-checking than before.
That's the first good laugh I've had today.
Not just the future (Score:5, Insightful)
When AI generated fakes started cropping up online years ago, he recalled, he warned that this would change the future
With AI advances, the future is definitely something to be concerned about. But something that's maybe even more alarming is the ability to effectively change the past by altering photos and videos, speeches, texts, etc.
Because so much of the information we consume and the records we create are now in the digital realm, we're losing the somewhat immutable hard copies which are more resistant to revision. Records may be changed on a whim; that, combined with the short attention span fostered by advertising, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle, leaves us in danger of collectively forgetting who we were, what we did, and what we most valued. We can't learn from history if all we have is a fictionalized, propagandized, vandalized version of it.
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>we're losing the somewhat immutable hard copies which are more resistant to revision.
Which seems like a problem that can become a (partial) solution.
When we no longer trust the digital, hard copy will return for important records. The difficulty there is that hard copy can only be reviewed by experts you are in turn expected to trust, and with the exception of age-related decay, pretty much anything you might want a hard copy of from years ago can be faked today... and the testing to verify what you h
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The problem with hardcopy is it's hard to distribute easily, at which point you're back in the 1400's prior to the invention of the printing press.
The problem was that with people unable to access books and read, they had to trust a single institution to pass on the knowledge, in this case, it was often the church.
If experts are the only ones allowed access to hardcopy books, and honestly, it's happening right now as books get more fragile as time goes on. Handling destroys books and hardcopy, so the "unalt
you can screw off, in the first place (Score:3, Insightful)
"How do we put our thumbs on the scale to ensure machine learning is producing a saner and more stable world..."
Fuck right off with that noise.
The MOMENT you "put your thumb on the scale" you are picking winners and losers and trying to control something. Ask yourself why YOU are entitled to make that choice, instead of say a Nigerian Christian Evangelical? More specifically, ask yourself how you'd feel if someone you hate got to make that same choice, and what the ramifications would be?
The free market is wild, dangerous, and crazy. People get their feelings hurt. But it's the closest thing to a genuine rationalization of consolidated demand we have.
Better, anyway, then some pocket fascist insisting theyhave a monopoly on what's "right."
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Better, anyway, then some pocket fascist insisting theyhave a monopoly on what's "right."
You don't say [imgur.com].
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The MOMENT you "put your thumb on the scale" you are picking winners and losers and trying to control something. Ask yourself why YOU are entitled to make that choice, instead of say a Nigerian Christian Evangelical?
Welcome to the world, where might makes right. Just ask anyone with might.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that every time you put the Christians in charge, everything goes to shit, so not a great example there bud.
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You mean aside from, y'know, humanism, the renaissance, the enlightenment, the entirely of our modern world? The abolition of slavery which had been a thing since the formation of human society?
Lol sure. Terrible results.
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Right, the correct way to deal with anything is to just watch passively.
An innocent baby being cut open right in front of your eyes ? Do. Nothing. Let the free market handle it.
Do not put your thumb on any scale, just watch others put their thumb on it, the free market will handle it.
Ummmmmm Ummmmmm
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Please, go ahead and argue with that strawman you created.
What I said, on the other hand, is that NOBODY has a monopoly on the truth, and for some ai designer making the decision more or less anonymously what they want society to be, that is the WORST possible outcome.
I'll remind you that Christian missionaries thought they were doing "the right thing" for the "ignorant primitives" they were bringing Christianity to. How did that work out?
I'm against anyone who asserts they have an unquestioned monopoly o
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The MOMENT you "put your thumb on the scale" you are picking winners and losers and trying to control something.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Complete lack of control is universally bad in basically every aspects of life due to a very large variety of socio economic principles studied over the years, e.g. Tragedy of the Commons (people will destroy resources for their own self interest), or unregulated capitalism (the only stable state and singular goal is a pure monopoly).
In many cases "putting the thumb on the scale" i.e. "regulation" is done to ensure the winner is the people being served rather than some ne
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"How do we put our thumbs on the scale to ensure machine learning is producing a saner and more stable world..."
Fuck right off with that noise.
The MOMENT you "put your thumb on the scale" you are picking winners and losers and trying to control something. Ask yourself why YOU are entitled to make that choice, instead of say a Nigerian Christian Evangelical? More specifically, ask yourself how you'd feel if someone you hate got to make that same choice, and what the ramifications would be?
The free market is wild, dangerous, and crazy. People get their feelings hurt. But it's the closest thing to a genuine rationalization of consolidated demand we have.
Better, anyway, then some pocket fascist insisting theyhave a monopoly on what's "right."
You are completely deluded.
The so-called "free market" is just a system where the biggest thumbs get to press down on the scales to suit themselves and with no responsibility for the side-effects. The "free market" is in fact fascist and it works exactly how Hitler wanted the 3rd Reich to work - might makes right.
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Thank you for your useless contribution, Mr Godwin. On-brand.
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Thank you for your useless contribution, Mr Godwin. On-brand.
Stupid twat.
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Shouldn't that be "stupid NAZI twat"?
I mean, it's all you've got.
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The MOMENT you "put your thumb on the scale" you are picking winners and losers and trying to control something.
Right, right. Because letting things run out of control is the default thing to do in a society because it has helped us so much over the years and we never had any rules in society because rules are bad, m'kay.
Idiot.
Better, anyway, then some pocket fascist insisting theyhave a monopoly on what's "right."
You wouldn't have roads without those 'fascists', asshole. In fact, you wouldn't have a society to speak of.
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What a dumb reply.
Were those roads put in place by a SINGLE person deciding where they should be?
My point was that some closeted AI dev coding to "their" view of what's "right" is dangerous. We already have people who want to 'put their finger on the scales' of crime-prediction algorithm because the answers they get back offends their preconceptions (regardless of, y'know, FACTS).
Does that make sense?
People who think they're doing things "for the good of other people" are the most dangerous in the world.
D
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Were those roads put in place by a SINGLE person deciding where they should be?
The discussion, and the part you were quoting and reacting to, isn't discussing a SINGLE person. Now go play outside...
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Oh, I'm pretty sure the 'we' referred to in the original post to which I was responding refers to a small coterie of people who are: ...which means what, 1% of the 7.5bn people in the world? Less?
- western
- highly educated
- extremely wealthy (by any world metric)
- left leaning
Conceptually that's little different in essence than a single person, for my argument.
Pull the other one (Score:2)
Convincing? Not particularly.
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Easily created? Sure.
Convincing? Not particularly.
Would you like to try again [newscientist.com]?
One more reason for online withdrawal (Score:2, Offtopic)
Cutting back on my online presence some years ago already cut down on what I had to process every day, and even dumping Twitter for a saner and more positive spirit of the Mastodon instance I'm now at made another difference.
It's all about sticking to comfortable places and spending more time offline than online.
It's the new paradigm (Score:2)
Fuck it, roll with it. We ball.
I don't know about the "easy" part (Score:1)
I asked Craiyon to draw old harry potter. It produced this abomination. [imgur.com]
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The topic is "AI-generated shitposting" (yes, really, it's in TFS).
Got modded "Offtopic" for an AI-generated shitpost.
Happy April Fools, I suppose.
New rule (Score:2)
Betteridge says "Yes".
Ha, ha. April Fools!
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A functioning democracy would be a start (Score:2)
Instead of two-party rule by the rich and the slightly richer.
"Every year..." BULLSHIT DETECTED (Score:2)
That is simply nonsense, and shame on the authors and editors for putting BULLSHIT like this into a story.
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"We are tasked with processing 3x as much mental tasking as we were in 2000."
"We are tasked with processing 5x as much mental tasking as we were in 1990."
Yeah, there has probably been some incrementing but you'd have to insist on some pretty wonky metrics to get these numbers.
Too Late (Score:1)
These cats are already out of their bags. The real question is, when it bites us on the ass, will we be able to put them back in?
Fakes should be digitally signed by the source (Score:2)
All DeepFakes should be digitally signed by the software user/author and their Digital ID registered. Why? When a DeepFake is being passed off as a non-DeepFake it can actually do significant harm. In fact this will soon become a major problem in society and needs to be controlled somehow while simultaneously protecting Free Speech.
Essentially all images and video should be signed so that the "authenticity" of the source can be verified by its signature metadata and to digitally offer proof that the image
Easy answer: (Score:2)
No. Al Gore can't do that. Only Trump can do that.