Fake Video

[Phoebe]

On the occasion of reading another interesting pair of articles about fake video and the recent viral-video of a toddler that was put online without parental approval, I was having this discussion about how such things should be (or presently are) handled. I wonder what people think about this. Start with the examples that make sense and we know about:

- Political satire videos where the head of a politician is cut and pasted onto the video of a body - like Obama riding that unicorn down the rainbow or whatever it was. It's obviously fake, it's obviously political speech, it's obviously protected.

- Filming someone without their consent and putting it on the internet - e.g. a child at school when the parents have not consented to release such video, releasing a sex tape for revenge on an ex, stealing people's videos off their phones. We have legal remedies, if not entirely adequate practical remedies. People will view and distribute this material even when they know it's wrong to do so, and sometimes they have no idea what they're viewing was created without the appropriate permission.

As it becomes easier to make realistic fake video, do we have the legal remedies we need to handle it? Where are the limits to free speech here, when one person's wonderful Obama on a unicorn video becomes another person's completely fake but realistic video of Obama saying something terrible he didn't really say? Sometimes we know that regardless of legal solutions, the damage is already done. What then - how do we change our culture to handle the proliferation of fake video, whether in political life, or to target particular individuals? It's already happening, this isn't new - it's just that we can expect it to be more common, more readily produced, and less easy to detect as fake. How do we maintain privacy when we have so little control over all the things that can get "out there", even without permission, or now maybe as realistic fakes?

One of the things I find most unhappy about this situation is that initially, the opening of the internet to widespread sharing of information from local sources was an incredible opportunity. You could see real footage of an incident unfolding in nearly real time, rather than waiting a day for the spin and inevitable distance of traditional reporting to tell what happened. In many cases we are unlikely to get an accurate picture of what is going on without someone on the scene uploading a video. Think of all the many situations where that has proven important, and then - what if faked video was so common as to lay a generalized layer of mistrust over all of this?

It comes down to another fundamental problem we have now: disregard for the truth, and the whole process of gaining and verifying evidence, leads to a situation where people simply repeat lies and they gain a purchase and cause damage. How do we recommit our culture to better standards of evidence and truth? It's kind of overwhelming as a problem. I feel overwhelmed by it at times, especially when I start taking for granted that people (and maybe especially people younger than me) have picked up similar habits of thinking in their educations.

[mimekiller]

tech like this is concerning https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... i-algorit/

[bralbovsky]

Ya

[Phoebe]

Yes, that is exactly the type of thing. Combine this with a world where people no longer trust standard news sources - for good reasons, sometimes, so it's not like there's an easy fix - and enormous resources are behind the easy effort to manipulate other sources of information they take in. I have some hope that educational institutions remain champions of truth, evidence, and other things we need to combat the difficult possibilities ahead. But... who knows. Right now the big push where I live is to divert as much money as possible to non-public schools, and cut off funding to public ones. Some of the non-public schools are really excellent, just as good, but trust me that Jesuits who favor top-notch education are not behind this latest push to defund and privatize.