PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog has been addressing the increasing risk that increased reliance on logarithms in courtrooms can lead to the falsification of audio, video, and documentary evidence in criminal and civil courts - with potentially severe ramifications to justice systems in North America and throughout the world. Here is more grist for our mill.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Since the beginning of algorithmically-altered face swap videos, or deepfakes, as a mainstream phenomenon, scholars have been sounding the alarms about what realistic, manipulated videos will do to society's concepts of truth and reality. This small user study shows that those concerns are valid, and already coming to life—when everything is fake, nothing is real. People are already easily duped when it comes to videos that confirm what they want to believe, such as we saw with the edited video of Nancy Pelosi. But when they're put on alert, confirmation bias swings the other direction, to total disbelief of what's actually real. In their whitepaper, the researchers on this text-swapping method commit several paragraphs to the ethical considerations of such technology. "The availability of such technology—at a quality that some might find indistinguishable from source material—also raises important and valid concerns about the potential for misuse," they write. "We acknowledge that bad actors might use such technologies to falsify personal statements and slander prominent individuals. We are concerned about such deception and misuse."
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STORY: "Researchers Can Make People Say Anything in Videos by Rewriting Their Words," by Samantha Cole (an assistant editor at Vice) published by Motherboard on June 7, 2019.
SUB-HEADING "Using text inputs, a team of machine learning experts edited videos of people to realistically form words they never said.
GIST: "A research team consisting of machine learning experts from Stanford
and Princeton Universities, as well as the Max Planck Institute for
Informatics and Adobe, created a method for literally putting words in
people's mouths, using just text inputs and a source video. By
analyzing the speech patterns in a video of one person speaking into a
camera, they're able to swap whole phrases for completely different
ones. The result is pretty realistic. Their project, "Text-based Editing of Talking-head Video," was published online this week, as a whitepaper to be presented at the SIGGRAPH conference in July. In the video demonstration, a woman saying "one hundred and ninety one
point four" is made to say "one hundred and eighty two point two"
instead. A man reciting the Apocalypse Now quote "I love the
smell of napalm in the morning," is made to seem like he's saying "I
love the smell of french toast in the morning." To do this, the researchers identify and isolate the phonemes—tiny
units of sound within speech—in the spoken phrase. They also create a
3D face model that tracks how the face and lips move with the words.
Then, they find the visemes—sounds that look the same in how the lips
move, such as "v" and "f"—and combine parts from the face model to match
the new phrases. Someone saying "viper" and "-ox" in different parts of
a video can be sliced up into a face model saying the word "fox." To make the edited voice match the rest of the person's speech, the researchers use VoCo, Adobe's voice-editing software which the company unveiled in 2016. If you watch closely and know what to look for (slightly stiff mouth
movements, small inconsistencies in the motion of the mouth) you can
tell where the new words are inserted. But without knowing where the
edits occur, your eyes easily gloss over it. In terms of fact
versus reality, this might be the most startling part of this processing
technique. It's a small change, isolating the mouth and jawline and
inserting only a few words within a longer sentence. In context, your
eyes see what you want to see, filling in the rough spots to look
seamless. To test how convincing their edited videos were, the researchers
conducted a web-based study of 138 participants which them to view real
and edited videos, and rate their response to the phrase “this video
clip looks real to me" on a five-point scale. More than half of the
participants—around 60 percent—rated the edited video clips as real. The
unedited, "ground truth" videos were only rated to be "real" around 80
percent of the time. Since the beginning of algorithmically-altered face swap videos, or deepfakes, as a mainstream phenomenon, scholars have been sounding the alarms
about what realistic, manipulated videos will do to society's concepts
of truth and reality. This small user study shows that those concerns
are valid, and already coming to life—when everything is fake, nothing
is real. People are already easily duped when it comes to videos that confirm what they want to believe, such as we saw with the edited video of Nancy Pelosi. But when they're put on alert, confirmation bias swings the other direction, to total disbelief of what's actually real. In their whitepaper, the researchers on this text-swapping method
commit several paragraphs to the ethical considerations of such
technology. "The availability of such technology—at a quality that some
might find indistinguishable from source material—also raises important
and valid concerns about the potential for misuse," they write. "We
acknowledge that bad actors might use such technologies to falsify
personal statements and slander prominent individuals. We are concerned
about such deception and misuse." They write that they hope bringing these methods to light will raise
awareness of video editing techniques, so that people are more skeptical
of what they see. "
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywyqab/ai-text-editing-talking-head-video-siggraph-2019
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywyqab/ai-text-editing-talking-head-video-siggraph-2019
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
