"Deep Fake" .. How will destroy the possibility of the existence of truth?

It seems as if the world has gone crazy. Do not spend a few months now without a new video of a public figure saying absolutely unexpected things. Take, for example, this video in which former US President Barack Obama appeared to insult Donald Trump with blasphemous words, or a passage in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that his primary platform mission was not to help people communicate as he claimed, but to maximize Information about users is easy to predict and control their future actions.

Strange remarks from prominent figures such as a former head of a superpower and the founder of one of the most important applications of modern times, right? But here's the surprise, none of them uttered any of those words at all, and the two previous videos are completely fabricated.

At first glance, it would seem to anyone that those in the previous two passages are Obama and Zuckerberg themselves. In the videos, we see the familiar faces and voices of the former president and the technology giant. But behind the scenes, American director Gordon Bell sat in Obama's video talking, an anonymous man in Zuckerberg's video followed those weird confessions, and by using a technique called Deep Fake, Obama and Zuckerberg's face and voice were attached to the videos, and ultimately, the result Two fake clips seem quite frighteningly real.

We say scary because, as we lose the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is false, our experience with reality and our concept of truth will be unprecedented fragility. The suspicion will wear our senses, and in front of each video we will stand up and wonder: Did what we see really happened, or did someone create it through a program on his computer? This is the very near and confusing future that deep counterfeiting promises us.

The technology first appeared on a Reddit collection - a popular American forum-like site - where a user under the false name "Deep Fake" was able to mount the faces of famous women on the bodies of pornographic actresses, publishing the result on Reddit. . The management of the site closed the group from which these videos were launched and the owner's account, but it was too late. Software developers in the group were able to write algorithms and programs that would make it easier for anyone to use the technology, install anyone's face on a recorded clip to anyone else, and then make those programs available online completely free and easy to download. [1] This technique can produce visual effects in cinema at a much lower cost than usual, or re-simulate the voice of a person who has been injured and has lost speech. But its risks remain far more dark than any possible benefit.

Using deep counterfeit technology, anyone sitting behind a computer can create things out of nowhere, presenting them as if they were completely real incidents,

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To understand how dangerous this technique is, we must first look at its classification; it is a kind of optical illusion that makes us believe that something else has happened. Of course, visual "tricks" are not new to us as recipients. We have seen them for nearly a century in movies. However, while the viewer signs an unwritten contract stating that everything he sees is pure fiction, and therefore puts himself in a state of mind that presupposes that what he sees has not really happened, he is in a completely different state of mind while watching a video of a politician giving a speech, or A passage from a television news report documenting an incident. The viewer here presumably assumes that everything he saw happened on the ground.

But now, using deep counterfeit technology, anyone sitting behind a computer can create things out of nowhere, presenting them as if they were completely real incidents. Here's the nightmare that it represents: it takes optical illusions from the imagination of the real world, and makes it difficult to It was not impossible to differentiate between the two. In reality, there is almost no more serious use of counterfeiting than politics.

Policy of lies

As long as lies are the weapon of choice for politicians, politicians have never been known to be truthful, and as philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arent said in her article Truth and Politics: "No one has ever doubted that the relationship between truth and politics is bad. As far as I know, honesty is one of the virtues of politics. Lying has long been considered an important and justified tool in the profession of both politician and statesman. To win the election and defeat the rivals, one politician rarely hesitated before his opponent fabricated lies, and one country's media machine did not think much before cracking down on another country based on questionable information. Speeches made by politicians to the masses often aim to address their emotions rather than their minds, and in this, they often slip into lies and exaggerations. [2]

As a recent example, Britain's former foreign minister and current Prime Minister Boris Johnson lied to the 2016 Brexit campaign to arouse voter anger and convince them that Britain should leave the EU. Johnson has repeatedly stated that Britain sends the EU 350 million euros each week, a claim that the Brexit campaign was firmly based on, and which the British Bureau of Statistics [3] later described as “ridiculous,” however, it did not influence voter sentiment. Little. [4] Johnson and his campaign did not need sophisticated technology to fabricate exaggerated figures. Likewise, lying in politics to influence public opinion has never depended on technology. It is as old as political practice itself. But what the technique added to the equation of lies was its ability to make our own senses fool us.

We have always thought that the most reliable way to receive any information is to see evidence of it with our own eyes. So vision has always been the best proof of the truth of its subject, your eye can not fool you, right? Perhaps in the past, but since the beginning of the millennium, you can not trust completely even what your eyes tell you. We say the beginning of the millennium, because that period of time, precisely in 2004, witnessed the first and most prominent incident of falsification of photographs in order to influence voters using Photoshop. During the presidential campaign, a black-and-white picture of the 1970s spread online, with Democratic Party candidate John Kerry gathering with actress and activist Jane Fonda while delivering a speech at an anti-war rally in Vietnam.

That Fonda, considered by some as a traitor after she traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam during the US war, has anything to do with a presidential candidate that is enough to stir public opinion. It is exactly what this fabricated picture aimed at. Fonda and Kerry never met in an anti-war rally, and the online image, which was then published by major New York Times newspapers as real, merged two separate images, one for Fonda in 1971 and the other for Kerry in 1972. [5]

Thus, through Photoshop, photographers were able to create something that had never happened, and get photographic evidence of it, paving the way for today's world where everything we necessarily see is no longer real. Now, deep-forging technology takes what Photoshop began in 2004 a step further. Just as Photoshop has made it difficult to fully trust what we see in images, deep forgery is on its way to making what we see and hear in videos vulnerable to manipulation.

We are not talking about a distant future, but about things that are already emerging. Deep counterfeiting is no longer used only in comedy videos and movie tricks, but has begun to put its foot on the ground to change our perception of truth forever. In May this year, a video of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, appeared in which she spoke slowly and stuttered as if drunk. The video is actually fabricated. In the real video, which was later published by The Washington Post, Pelosi speaks quite naturally. However, this did not hinder the widespread spread of fabricated video on social media platforms, nor did US President Donald Trump prevent himself from sharing it on his personal Twitter account. Even after the video was known to be fabricated, social media platforms refused to pull it from their sites. [6]

Deep forgery and death of truth

The use of technology to manipulate images and clips is nothing new, but the deep counterfeiting technology, with its ease of use and access to anyone, has taken this forgery to another level altogether. Tim Huang, president of the Harvard Initiative for Ethical Intelligence Control, says: "A long time ago we could bleed pictures and videos. But in the past, if you wanted to photograph the president saying something he didn't actually say, you would need a team of specialists. "Today, artificial intelligence will not only automate this process, it will also fabricate forged clips of the best quality. In addition, accessing this technology online is easy, and you will find yourself in the midst of a storm of disinformation." [7]

Robert Chesney himself, a professor of law at the University of Austin, wrote in his article in Forin Affaires: “What makes the risk of deep counterfeiting unprecedented is its combination of high quality and ease of application to media from which we used to draw our information, such as video. And sound recordings. ”[8] With a technique such as deep counterfeiting on the scene, the possible scenarios for political manipulation are all nightmares. This is what Chesney goes on in his article on that technique. Imagine a scenario that is no longer impossible, for one rigged video showing on the eve of the election of a potential candidate saying disgraceful things, and turning the election results upside down, before anyone can even correct the issue and make sure that the video actually Real or not.

You may tell yourself, truth always lies after lies, and there are data and evidence that shows whether something has already happened or not. This may be true, but the effect of lies does not disappear on its own after finding out the facts. "When a political narrative turns from one direction to another, it's almost impossible to get it back to its original direction," says Stanford University professor Aileen Danaho. "To illustrate that one of the pervasive passages is actually apocryphal will not erase its impact." [9] In the midst of a video claiming something and then refuting this passage, recipients will find themselves in a mess of claims that makes it difficult for them to know where the truth is and where to lie. Here, everyone will resort to their initial bias.

If you were a pro-right European and disliked by other Arab and Muslim groups, you would have fallen under the tweet that political activist Theodora Dickinson posted on her Twitter account: "In response to the attack on the New Zealand mosque, the Islamists burned down a church in Pakistan. This in the news? "[10], which I published with a video clip of a burning church. But that passage actually dates back to 2013, six years before the New Zealand incident, and took place in Egypt, not Pakistan. But as a conservative right, you will not care about any of this, you will rush to press the share button before you see what you see. Everything that is consistent and in your mindset is necessarily real; or so a small percentage of humans think of what is scientifically called "cognitive bias." [11] (Cognitive Bias).

Thus, with a technique such as deep counterfeiting on the scene, the importance of truth will automatically diminish and become like opinions: multiple and interpretable; there will be no single "truth", but different choices of facts from which each will choose what corresponds to his prejudices.