Last year, University of Washington researchers used the technology to take videos of things that former President Barack Obama had already said, then generate faked videos of him spitting out those lines verbatim in a machine-generated format. The research team stopped short of putting new words in Obama’s mouth, but Get Out director Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed have done just that in a PSA warning malicious actors could soon generate videos of anyone saying just about anything.
Using technology similar to the University of Washington study and Peele’s (fairly good!) imitation of Obama’s voice, here’s a clip of the former POTUS saying “So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don’t know, Killmonger was right. Or uh, Ben Carson is in the sunken place. Or how about this, simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.”
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“We’ve covered counterfeit news websites that say the pope endorsed Trump that look kinda like real news, but because it’s text people have started to become more wary,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote. “And now we’re starting to see tech that allows people to put words into the mouths of public figures that look like they must be real because it’s video and video doesn’t lie.”
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As colleague Adam Clark Smith noted before, there are countless potential uses of this technology that would qualify as mundane, like improving the image quality of video chat apps, or recreating mind-blowing facsimiles of historic speeches in high-definition video or holograms.
But machine-learning algorithms are improving rapidly, and as security researcher Greg Allen wrote at the time in Wired, it is likely only a matter of years before the audio component catches up and makes Peele’s Obama imitation unnecessary. Within a decade, some kinds of forensic analysis may even be unable to detect forged audio.Here's the clip:
Machine Learning is only a baby step on the road to Artificial Intelligence, but it's already at least powerful enough to convincingly swap celebrities’ faces with those of porn actors, and the potential chaos that this almost certainly will cause in our public discourse is mid-blowing. It's still a little crude, with FakeApp Obama still lodged firmly inside the Uncanny Valley... but we're also clearly on the upslope that leads out of that valley, and not that far away from the day when even the video that you see on the Internet simply can't be trusted.
This is a lot of power to put into the hands of almost everyone on Earth, and if there's one thing that we know, it's that this power will be used for evil. FakeApp Obama is just a proof of concept; the genuinely malicious fake videos are coming, and you're going to need to be very alert to spot them. Especially since we're living in an era when the actual news of the day is... surreal, to put it lightly. Stay woke, bitches.
We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.