Convincing "deep fakes" just to make you smile?

Leviathan Press:

I personally think Walter Scherer is too optimistic about the future of "deep fakes". Sometimes, all kinds of celebrity face-changing are not just entertainment and spoofs. They often become the focus of technical processing on pornographic websites. Not only that, look at the recent Israeli-Palestinian war, all kinds of malicious and hateful false information are flying everywhere, especially those fake pictures, trying to provoke people's anger through visual stimulation - this undoubtedly divides public opinion and fan the flames of violence.

On the Internet, how do we know what is real? In the spring of 2023, a photo of an explosion near the Pentagon (below) caused a minor panic on Wall Street, marking the first case of an AI-generated image spreading through the Internet to affect the market.

While the hoax disappeared after being censored, to many it seemed like a harbinger of worse things to come.

This fake photo shows a large amount of smoke near the Pentagon, the US military headquarters in Virginia. © IAPONOMARENKO/TWITTER

But when Walter Scheirer, a computer scientist and expert in media forensics at the University of Notre Dame, had his students scour the internet for examples of AI-altered videos , he was surprised by what they came back with: “an endless supply of memes,” he said.

So far, most of the convincing deepfakes seem designed to make you smile rather than cause an economic collapse: a fake Tom Cruise talking about washing his hands; Nicolas Cage appearing in all his movies; Biden, Trump, and Obama playing Call of Duty together.

Scheller concluded that the internet is indeed rife with false content, but the vast majority of it appears to be designed to connect rather than disrupt and destroy.

Walter Scherer. © Glass Darkly Films

Scherer and the internet grew up together. An older millennial, he describes his first computer as “very primitive” — a Texas Instruments set-top box connected to his family’s TV. In middle school, he began hanging out on the Internet Relay Chat hacker channel, virtually hanging out with cyberpunk rebels in the early computer underworld. Even then, he says, hackers loved to mix scientific fact and fiction, simply for the fun of showing off.

In his new book, A History of Fake Things on the Internet, Scherer argues that today’s deep fakes are best understood in this spirit: that they are in many ways the digital descendants of pre-internet traditions of parody and imagination, from 18th-century satire to Victorian ghost photography.

In a recent conversation, Scherer told me that he had come to realize that the prevalence of false information on the internet was not a radical, terrible departure from civic norms but a completely natural evolution of our human drive to create myths and tell stories.

-How do we define harmless false information and dangerous false information? -

One of the things I came to appreciate more in writing this book is the value of parody and satire in human communication. It's a very old form of social critique, and it's often used quite strategically. A very famous example of this, from long before the internet, is a 1729 essay by Jonathan Swift called "A Modest Proposal."

The article talks about cannibalism and eating babies, which is disturbing, but Swift isn’t actually talking about cannibalism, he’s trying to make a social critique of poverty in Ireland . If you read it critically and deeply, you’ll make an immediate connection, you’ll probably find its subject interesting in a dark way—which is of course what Swift intended.

© Audible

But over the years, the essay has been misunderstood. Occasionally it's read aloud in public, and even today people lose their minds - how in the world could anyone advocate eating babies? - and that's clearly missing the point.

A lot of content on the internet is like this. It's full of disruptive content that requires you to think a little before you understand its message. The problem is that the information flow nature of social media often causes us to stay at the surface level of information, which can cause an uproar.

-What about deepfakes? Content that looks and sounds so real that it’s hard to tell, let alone refute. Are concerns about these overblown, too?

-Yes, this is a recent problem. Deepfakes first appeared on the internet in 2017, so it is not a particularly new technology today. There was a lot of concern that the videos would appear in a political context and could change the course of an election or lead to political violence. However, none of this happened.

© Michigan Radio

You write a lot about the computer underground in the 1990s and early 2000s. From your account, you can see that even at that time, people were blurring the line between fact and fiction on the Internet. Hackers shared technical information with each other as well as rumors and jokes. How did you get drawn into this world as a teenager?

-I had always been interested in computers, but in junior high school, a friend of mine found some hacker text files, basically creative writing magazines made by hackers, and he said, "Look, this stuff is really interesting!" That's when I realized there was this whole other world of computers.

-What's in these documents? Any conspiracy messages like "Guess what the government is doing?"

- touches on that, but there's a lot more to it, like there's tons of cheat codes for video games. But then it goes deeper, like, have you heard of the Unix operating system that's used by businesses and governments? Well, here's how to access it, how to use it. And then, there's the creative writing section. In addition to the classic conspiracy theory stories, there's a lot of stuff about UFOs and the paranormal that can't possibly be true but is interesting enough to make you want to keep reading. I think it's really cool to have all of these ideas blended together.

© Wikipedia

-Have you participated in any legendary hacking operations yourself? Is there anything you would like to reveal?

-I want to give all the credit to the hackers that I wrote about in my book. I was very young at the time.

-Because there's a story I'm curious about. You wrote about a large text file that appeared online in 2012 that seemed to document years of very successful attacks on major corporate and government targets - deep penetration, the kind that could land someone in jail. You commented that to this day, no one knows who was behind it. Your wording made me wonder if it was you.

-No comment.

- (Laughs) So, you obviously subscribe to the anarchist idea of ​​"the internet's desire for freedom". But today you teach at Notre Dame, and your bio says that you "advocate for the development of technology inspired by Catholic social teaching", and I'm having a little trouble connecting the two: anti-authoritarian hacker, Catholic social thinker. Can you explain?

-The connection between them is about the idea of ​​community. Hackers are a very interesting subculture - a group of people who connected with each other for the first time and created something lasting. They created the computer security industry. And Catholic social teaching is about: How do we thrive in a sense of community? How do we build some notion of the common good?

There’s an important connection here: if you go back in time and look at the ideas that we use to build the internet today, a lot of them came from Marshall McLuhan, a famous media theorist from the 1960s who was closely associated with the counterculture movement, but a fact that many people don’t know is that he was a devout Catholic.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) is a Canadian philosopher and educator who taught English literature, literary criticism and communication theory at university. He is also the founder of modern communication theory, and his views have profoundly influenced human cognition of media. He predicted the birth of the Internet before the word "Internet" appeared, and he was the first to adopt the term "global village". © The Paris Review

-I really don't know about that.

-He converted to Catholicism and came to believe that the Catholic faith was the ultimate media system. Because you're always communicating, right? With saints, with the dead, and of course with God. It was fascinating to see how that idea permeated his thinking about media, combined with prayer and meditation - these forms of spirituality. He was fascinated by the idea of ​​uniting the entire planet through a network of information.

-Didn't he write that eventually we would become information? That sounds like some kind of cyber communion.

Exactly. When you think about technology, it's kind of mysterious, right? I don't think it's a completely crazy idea. A lot of people talk about emerging technology in that way, especially when they're trying to understand artificial intelligence - like, is there some kind of spiritual dimension to it? I think there's a reason for that. All of this technology is a form of human creation, and in Christianity, we are called to co-create with God; he gives us this ability to create.

-So you see the Internet as an extension of humanity's collective imagination. Rather than seeing it as a market-driven technology, you see it as a tool for myth-making.

You talked about anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea that we live in two different realms simultaneously: the real world, or the realm of truth, and the mythic cycle. How does that apply to all the weird stuff on the internet?

-Levi-Strauss's insight was that imagination was very useful for human survival, but by the 19th and 20th centuries, it was neglected. Yet we still make up stories. Well, why is that? If you were a perfectly rational person, you would want to optimize every aspect of your life. Why waste time telling stories and making things up? It's not efficient.

Especially in the 21st century, it’s shocking to think that daydreaming could be useful. Aren’t we supposed to just be working? But Levi-Strauss argued that both ways of thinking are important and that they complement each other.

© The Boston Globe

-It's interesting, because we might wonder why we spend so much manpower constructing a simulated virtual world - trying to build a crappy copy of our creation online. But it seems to me that your point with Levi-Strauss is that the Internet is what gives us humans the impetus to create myths.

Maybe the fascination isn't gone, but has crept back into this wild, unformed frontier of our internet creation. If so, then all those little memes mean more than we thought?

I firmly believe this. It's not surprising when you look at culture over the centuries. We develop innovative new technologies and they're like, "surprise, surprise!" - and we use them to tell stories. I think this is largely misunderstood.

I mean, what is the internet for? A lot of people still talk about it as the information superhighway; that you go there to get facts and get your work done — a throwback to the corporate hype of the dot-com era in the 90s. But that was never what the internet was about. It was more like McLuhan’s vision of a creative space where we could share projections of our imaginations with others.

-This makes me think that we've been talking to the wrong people about the internet. Instead of talking to technology gurus and online policy wonks, we should be turning to psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and theologians—people who focus on thinking about the stories we tell, and our unconscious motivations for telling them. Sigmund Freud would feel right at home online.

-Yeah, think about dreams. I mean, the internet - especially through these creative AI technologies - is like a dream, right? How much of human life is encoded in these AI hallucinations? I think there's a lot of interesting work to be done in this area, but very few people are studying it.

- Another one I read recently - "Resurrected Deep Fakes". "Chatbots" or replicas of deceased people. This is a topic that desperately needs in-depth analysis.

-Yes, it's a great idea that AI can actually bring people back to life. And it's an old idea, kind of like the "ghost photography" that was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Photographers were getting better and better at special effects - yes, actually editing photos in the darkroom! They discovered that if you exposed a negative twice, you could get two different images. So you could have someone sit for a portrait, then expose the same negative to an old photo of their long lost relative, and it would appear as a ghostly apparition in the second exposure.

© National Science and Media Museum

People are basically doing the same thing with deepfakes now, right? There's this urge to stay connected to deceased loved ones - I guess McLuhan would have been pretty pleased with that.

-You remind me that asking whether something on the Internet is real or fake seems irrelevant. Not that you endorse immoral behavior. But one of your main points is that online falsehoods reveal more than they hide because they tell us something about ourselves. What message do they convey?

-That's the big thing that a lot of social scientists try to find - a general explanation to summarize the whole phenomenon. But at the end of the day, it's just telling stories. People just want to have some kind of connection with other people. A lot of these media objects are for interpersonal connection. Like I want to share something with you, I want you to know something about me or my community.

By Anne Strainchamps

Translated by tamiya2

Proofreading/tim

Original article/nautil.us/stop-worrying-about-deepfakes-470212/

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