Could Deepfakes Change the Course of War? (cnn.com) 64
CNN Business reports a deepfake video of Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fabricated to falsely depict him urging viewers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. But at the same time, "there was another widely circulated deepfake video depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin supposedly declaring peace in the Ukraine war."
Though both videos were "noticeably low resolution" (which they describe as a common tactic for hiding flaws), "experts still see them as dangerous." That's because they show the lighting speed with which high-tech disinformation can now spread around the globe. As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation. Even a bad deepfake risks muddying the waters further. "Once this line is eroded, truth itself will not exist," said Wael Abd-Almageed, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California and founding director of the school's Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory. "If you see anything and you cannot believe it anymore, then everything becomes false. It's not like everything will become true. It's just that we will lose confidence in anything and everything...."
The fact that they are now being used in an attempt to influence people during a war is especially pernicious, experts told CNN Business, simply because the confusion they sow can be dangerous. Siwei Lyu, director of the computer vision and machine learning lab at University at Albany, said under normal circumstances, deepfakes may not have much impact beyond drawing interest and getting traction online. "But in critical situations, during a war or a national disaster, when people really can't think very rationally and they only have a very truly short span of attention, and they see something like this, that's when it becomes a problem," he added.
Snuffing out misinformation in general has become more complex during the war in Ukraine. Russia's invasion of the country has been accompanied by a real-time deluge of information hitting social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Much of it is real, but some is fake or misleading. The visual nature of what's being shared — along with how emotional and visceral it often is — can make it hard to quickly tell what's real from what's fake. Nina Schick, author of "Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse," sees deepfakes like those of Zelensky and Putin as signs of the much larger disinformation problem online, which she thinks social media companies aren't doing enough to solve. She argued that responses from companies such as Facebook, which quickly said it had removed the Zelensky video, are often a "fig leaf."
"You're talking about one video," she said. The larger problem remains.
As deepfakes get better, researchers and companies are trying to keep up with tools to spot them....
Though both videos were "noticeably low resolution" (which they describe as a common tactic for hiding flaws), "experts still see them as dangerous." That's because they show the lighting speed with which high-tech disinformation can now spread around the globe. As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation. Even a bad deepfake risks muddying the waters further. "Once this line is eroded, truth itself will not exist," said Wael Abd-Almageed, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California and founding director of the school's Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory. "If you see anything and you cannot believe it anymore, then everything becomes false. It's not like everything will become true. It's just that we will lose confidence in anything and everything...."
The fact that they are now being used in an attempt to influence people during a war is especially pernicious, experts told CNN Business, simply because the confusion they sow can be dangerous. Siwei Lyu, director of the computer vision and machine learning lab at University at Albany, said under normal circumstances, deepfakes may not have much impact beyond drawing interest and getting traction online. "But in critical situations, during a war or a national disaster, when people really can't think very rationally and they only have a very truly short span of attention, and they see something like this, that's when it becomes a problem," he added.
Snuffing out misinformation in general has become more complex during the war in Ukraine. Russia's invasion of the country has been accompanied by a real-time deluge of information hitting social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Much of it is real, but some is fake or misleading. The visual nature of what's being shared — along with how emotional and visceral it often is — can make it hard to quickly tell what's real from what's fake. Nina Schick, author of "Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse," sees deepfakes like those of Zelensky and Putin as signs of the much larger disinformation problem online, which she thinks social media companies aren't doing enough to solve. She argued that responses from companies such as Facebook, which quickly said it had removed the Zelensky video, are often a "fig leaf."
"You're talking about one video," she said. The larger problem remains.
As deepfakes get better, researchers and companies are trying to keep up with tools to spot them....
low resolution (Score:2)
low resolution doesn't matter on small screens, to wit, cellphones. If people don't twig to unnatural motion and such then artifacting isn't going to be a giveaway. Since most people are consuming disinformation on their phones at least some of the time now, the bitrate doesn't matter. People are used to crappy video performance.
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I think it's time for you to buy either a new phone or glasses.
Anything less than 720p is noticeably blurry even on a small cell phone. And if the quality is very obviously different than other videos you've seen being released, it's going to be a red flag. If the resolution is low enough you can get by with a lookalike actor anyway and not even bother faking the video portion.
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Step down (Score:2)
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Why do the Russian people want this guy as their leader?
Decades of propaganda.
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Why do the Russian people want this guy as their leader?
It's not actually clear that they do.
Many aware Putin fear of Ukraine not its military threat but democratic freedom.
Russia is facing an existential crisis in the near future, not from democracy, but from loss of farmland due to climate change. Ukraine is a big exporter of grain... There's no doubt many reasons that prompted this, but they're all underpinned by the oligarchs and Putin running off with all the money. Can't reinvest what's been stolen.
Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky (Score:2)
When did he become president of *Russia* ?
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The video was deeply fake, you see.
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Apparently so was the article.
Give him a few months. (Score:2)
Give him a few months.
So far he and the Ukrainian people have turned a Russian invasion from a two-day cakewalk to a month-long mud march, and is starting to take back cities, while the Russian armies are dying, starving, surrendering, deserting, and running vehicles over their commanders.
If this trend continues, the next month could see Ukraine capturing the surviving fraction of the convoys of military vehicles, a sub
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Did you really drink the propagandists' Cool-Aid?
I wish Ukraine and allies victory.
Reality is that the winning side does not parade POWs making statements against their country, does not post dead enemy soldiers at roadblocks, does not request or demand aid daily, and its army does not retreat to within its cities with civilians.
The propagandized news that we get in the west, like about a miles long convoy stalled due to incompetence, is to convince Russian viewers to turn against Putin and to make those i
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Reality is that the winning side does not parade POWs making statements against their country, does not post dead enemy soldiers at roadblocks, does not request or demand aid daily, and its army does not retreat to within its cities with civilians.
Now that's a lot of propaganda you have taken in.
Not only russians parade POWs, but also film their torture and humiliation on Telegram channels.
Bullshit about hiding behind civilians is straight out of putler's propaganda book.
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I don't think the word propaganda means what you think it means. That convoy was not planned to be there as long as it has. That fact alone is sufficient to use the word incompetence. I see the claim of Western propaganda repeated often, usually combined with other points aligned with the Russian narrative, such as: the West / USA / NATO is to blame, this was wholly necessary for Russia, etcetera. Ot
It's a JOKE! LAUGH! (Score:2)
Did you really drink the propagandists' Cool-Aid?
It's a JOKE! LAUGH!
The previous poster was pointing at the newsie's slip-of-the-tongue, misidentifying Volodymyr Zelensky as the president of Russia rather than Ukraine. I ran with it, combining it with the Ukrainians' massive overperformance relative to Russian and world expectations, extrapolating "How can they continue topping that?" into a situation where Zelensky IS the president of Russia.
Think of Chuck Norris movies/TV shows with Zelensky as the Norr
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Re: Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky (Score:2)
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They might work once (Score:2)
People are critical and skeptical and will not be easily fooled unless they want to be
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People are critical and skeptical and will not be easily fooled unless they want to be
Are you kidding? Most people will believe anything, if it seems to come from an authoritative source and it fits their preconceptions. This has been going on for ages long before deep fakes were even a dream.
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Some people are critical.
Most people are not. Biologically speaking we haven't evolved to be particularly adept in statistics, logic, and rationality. It's very easy to forget that if you have a technical and/or analytical background.
I looked at the Zelensky video and it is actually a perfectly serviceable deepfake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (actual footage from 00:40).
You have to know about deepfakes and be wary of them to know this is one.
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We've become so conditioned to fluffy, fuzzy, appealing to emotion PR & marketing rhetoric that we can no longer tr
lololol (Score:1)
Re: lololol (Score:1)
More exactly: dishonesty used to not be rewarded, in most cases, over much of human history.
People tend to trust each other, until shown otherwise. After which liars, fraudsters etc. are treated with disrespect. Often punished in various ways.
In these fast-moving days of internet & social media, not so much. Fake info is rewarded with clicks, and those spreading it often profit somehow.
Society's reward / punishment mechanisms are failing us here.
Quora (Score:1)
I’ve noticed my quora feed has gone to 90% pro Ukraine propaganda.
Now I completely want Ukraine to defeat Russia ASAP, but the truth is suffering, even in this ‘live-streamed’ war.
Not more than other propaganda (Score:2)
First use they may be effective for a short time, but that is it. Deepfakes are not in any way special as a propaganda tool. They are new but that will wear off quickly. Those that believe what is shown would also have believed other forms of lying.
shallow fakes (Score:2)
We had a shallow fake that fooled millions for years: Trump.
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We had a shallow fake that fooled millions for years: Trump.
I think you are giving him too much credit. I think Trump is very authentic and honest about who he is. I don't think he is able to pull of any kind of deception beyond simple direct lies, because he is lacking the intellect for that. He does have the instincts of an excellent used-car salesman, I will give him that. But I think he really believes the abysmally stupid crap he is saying, at least when he says it. That is probably what makes his fans believe him. The problem is that his fans are somewhere be
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The problem with these obviously fake deepfake videos is it means that even if what is going on in Ukraine is actually shown in Russia, with hospital bombings, children getting killed and Ukraine cities levelled, the authorities can just claim that any real video evidence is fake - and point to the actual deep fake videos as "proof".
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Yes. This just means the time of video "evidence" is mostly over. But the impact is small. Even before you could easily just show stuff selectively to get pretty much the same effect. Some people even re-enact stuff. Also, videos of entirely different things have been successfully used to create an impression and when weeks later it became clear they were "transplanted" videos, nobody really cared. The only things deepfakes do is make lying a bit cheaper.
The problem is not what propaganda techniques are ava
People want to suspend disbelief (Score:1)
Because it's not fun to always be the skeptical curmudgeon, people reflexively believe some silly things.
And they pay for it. They want to believe $product will make their lives happy and glamorous, so they saddle themselves with useless gizmos and boats they don't use and timeshares and a new car every few years.
They vote for politicians who promise them that a flick of a pen is all that's needed to fix $social_problem or $economic_problem.
Deepfakes are a new technique but they do not open up a new battles
Truth is the first casualty of war (Score:2)
Truth is the first casualty of war. That's an old expression. Deep fakes are just the latest wrinkle. Just take a look at the wildly ranging casualty figures. Russia says 1500 KIA. Ukraine says 6000 to 10000. NATO said 7000 min I think. Other sources said 40k Russian troops were now non-effective (combined KIA, WIA, POW). Whose numbers do you believe? That's war.
If you're taking in any war information without questioning the source, you're naive. That goes for any news story, but particularly so
Okay here's a rethorical question (Score:2)
What if the videos of Putin and Russian soldiers doing war crimes in the Ukraine are deepfakes created by the US? Am I suppose to believe Russia creates deepfakes and the US and their buddies don't?
Ya know, just wondering who I should root and suspend my critical thinking to be on the right side of history...
Re: Okay here's a rethorical question (Score:1)
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The history books will record the winner's version of truth. As always.
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And 2 million Ukrainians escaped to Poland from what? Deep fake bombs dropped on their cities?
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Ya know, just wondering who I should root and suspend my critical thinking to be on the right side of history..
If you can't tell by now who the bad guy is. Did you ever have any critical thinking to suspend?
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I know who the bad guy is in the east. I'm questioning whether there's only one bad guy, and why I'm supposed to assume only one side does bad things.
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So THAT'S why there's a war in Ukraine (Score:2)
Apparently, there are two Presidents of Russia and they're battling it out for control.
I knew there was a rational explanation somewhere...
Changes it back to what it usually was (Score:2)
For most of the history of media (and word-of-mouth before it), "fake news" has been weaponized for political and military purposes, constantly (along with REAL news) not just "changing the course of history", but setting it. This has been especially true in the case of war. ("War is lies" as a Muslim saying goes, and this truism is present in some form in nearly all languages.)
Government actors, especially, have generally had the means to fake up convincing propaganda and use it to convince enough people
While at it (Score:1)
where's a deep fake of Putin eating a large bowl of shit without utensils?
Stupid people gonna stupid (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what you do to try and prevent the spread of misinformation, it relies on Stupid & Lazy.
Sure, there's some tactics that _can_ fool those blessed with more effective grey matter, so then it would target Lazy.
And yes, this depends on a number of factors:
* Availability of independent news outlets
* Quality of reporting and investigative journalism
* A democracy where at least the basic rights of freedom of speech are upheld
Right, so we add another to the list or what it relies on - Stupid,
Cryptographic Signatures (Score:2)
People are already being duped by misinformation, even in plain text form. Realistically faked videos will only make it harder for people to discern real people making statements from deep fakes. Perhaps it will become necessary for press releases and such to be cryptographically signed. For example, the White House could sign content with a private key, and provide a corresponding public key on their website. This would allow anyone to confirm that the statement was in fact from the White House.
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Not a bad idea.
Canon DSLR cameras have had for a long time a possibility to include a cryptographic signature in the photos so it can be verified that the image has not been altered. That particular algorithm or signing keys were broken at some point (I don't remember the details), but frankly, what should be done is that you should be able to sign your produced media with two signatures:
1) By the author, White House in your example, as "yeah, this was released by us"
2) By the production devices (cameras, e
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That would require me, a common person, to trust an invisible army of people responsible for the chain of events that happen between me clicking the "verify authenticity" button and the "yes it is authentic" or "no it is fake" message appearing -- and also trusting that chain was not hacked or faked somehow. More likely people will revert to distrusting technology and trusting their chosen circles. ... which is how you proved in ancient Rome you were a citizen: there was no documents, instead you'd have oth
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...people will revert to distrusting technology and trusting their chosen circles. ... which is how you proved in ancient Rome you were a citizen: there was no documents, instead you'd have other citizens vouch for you.
You already do this every time you visit a "secure" website using HTTPS. You are implicitly trusting the Certificate Signing Authority that signed the site's SSL certificate. Or perhaps more accurately, you're allowing the people who wrote you web browser to vouch for the CSA.
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That is some technical crap -- as they see it -- they don't really care about, as long as they are getting some assurance no one will still their money; they don't appreciate the amount of work that went into it, and they don't need to. Explosive videos that are deepfaked (or not) are very emotional because they align with or go against their deeply held views, at which point all kinds of suspicions and mistrust arises.
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Fact check missed here (Score:2)
Zelensky is NOT the president of Russia. He's the president of Ukraine. Idiot.
Unfortunately nothing new here (Score:2)
Famous Soviet actor Vsevolod Blumental-Tamarin was touring the parts of the USSR occupied by the Germans in 1941, and decided to cooperate with them. He effectively mimicked Stalin voice and read fake decrees of the Soviet government that were on the radio in occupied territories. Not many people believed him.
PS He was tried in absentia, sentenced to death and killed in Germany the day after the war ende
Who's the Russian president ??? (Score:2)
OK ... ...
everyone else noticed this fuck up as well
deepfake video of Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky
deepfake video depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin
get it right guys
What if? (Score:2)
Sometimes telling the truth can be extremely powerful.
Lookalikes don't work. Why Would This? (Score:2)
I've never understood why people seem to think that the public will be easier to trick using deep fake video than faked audio or lies in a news article. *Maybe* you could imagine it causing one or two scandals or incidents but, before it gets used more than maybe once we'll all be used to seeing deepfakes used to make US presidents say they love sucking dick or Churchill say he loves Apple computes.
Fuck, if this strategy really worked then governments would have long since just scoured the country for look
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I mean, yes in WWII the military did have encrypted means of communication but it was still plausible to claim that those were the 'faked' messages since enemies had been very effective at breaking such codes in the past.
Here's an idea (Score:1)
Why doesn't anyone produce a deepfake of Putins closest recording a video on his phone for news media where they explains why they assassinated Putin (before the fact) and that they intended to create an interim trojka until public elections can be held.
That would surely stir the pot.
Deepfakes could change the course of reality (Score:1)