Since ‘fake news’ became a serious issue during and after the 2016 US presidential elections, a variety of measures have been taken to try and counter it. Sites like Google and Facebook are attempting to flag stories that are incorrect or in dispute. A variety of tools have been created by journalists to help people evaluate the reliability of sources and ‘fact checking’ has become one of the hottest trends in media. However, if you think it’s difficult to convince people that what they’ve read is wrong, wait until you try to convince them that what they’ve seen and heard is a lie.
Artificial intelligence software is getting better at putting words into the mouths of politicians. Software designed to do theoretically helpful tasks like automatically dubbing foreign language news, could create realistic video of a politician or other public figure saying words that they never actually said.
The system, described in New Scientist and ArXiv uses a still image of a face and an audio clip to create video which appears to show just about anyone you like saying anything you want them to say.
“Pretty soon we will have trouble distinguishing between real and fake video,” says [creative.ai co-founder ] Alex Champandard. Given enough time, experts can already create fake videos that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine ones. Artificially intelligent tools are making the process so quick and easy, that eventually almost anybody could do it.
While the technology has great positive potential for creative industries such as filmmaking it’s implications for news and even court proceedings is more ominous and, as with any technology, it will only become more advanced over time.