Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed teamed up to make this video, which features Obama speaking about the dangers of hi-tech photo-realistic fake news and saying things he would never say, yet Obama never made such a video.
The video was made using tools such as Adobe After Effects and the AI face-swapping tool FakeApp and footage of videos featuring Obama. FakeApp is an example of Deepfake (deep learning + fake), an artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique, used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos. It is often used to create pornographic videos with celebrity faces.
Peele and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti created the Public Service Announcement (PSA) to demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate videos that can be used to spread misinformation and fake news.
Peele, who recently won an Oscar for "Get Out," has impersonated Obama on multiple occasions on his Comedy Central show "Key & Peele."
AI-based tools are new weapons in the hands of bad actors in the political world to generate misinformation and fake news.
“Obama” begins the video with — "We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time."
We have to be extra vigilant in what we see and what we trust, because videos are much more powerful than written words or still images in presenting a fake reality that does not exist in real life.
www.buzzfeed.com/… has some tips of how to spot fake videos —
Here are some questions to ponder over and to discuss -
- What steps can we take as individuals and as groups to identify fake videos?
- How will we educate others to do so?
- How do we ensure that we don’t end up in a state where we mistrust every news item?
- What will happen when state actors start using this technique?
- Should society and governments regulate the creation of fake videos and news in general?
- Will AI come to the rescue, in alerting us to fake videos?
Keep in mind this is only the beginning. The field of AI is growing in leaps and bounds.
As “Obama” says in the PSA: “It may sound basic, but how we move forward in the Age of Information is going to be the difference between whether we survive or whether we become some kind of fucked up dystopia.”
References
- www.theverge.com/…
- www.cnbc.com/…
- Deepfake — en.wikipedia.org/…
- FakeApp, a desktop tool for creating photorealistic faceswap videos with deep learning — www.fakeapp.org
- www.buzzfeed.com/...