Our limited attention potential leaves us over-saturated with content choices. We are drawn to headlines and titles that are more appealing and engaging. Sensationalism, emotional appeals and big claims lure us in, where some content gets more attention than others. This has already been a factor in tabloid news magazines, but now it's playing out online and being propagated much more easily.
Lies can spread farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in some cases, as a recent investigation has shown. The top 1% of false or fake news reaches between 1000 and 100,000 people, while accurate news rarely gets above 1000. In a world with fake news that can more easily be spread through the Internet and social media, artificial intelligence is being summoned into the information war.
pixabay, CC0 Creative Commons
Reality Vertigo
A strategic prediction model suggests that by 2022 people will encounter more fake, inaccurate or false information than real, accurate or true information. Computer scientists are developing AI systems that can put out realistic-seeming information which is being called "reality vertigo", where they are generating content that most people have a hard time discerning is false or true. The balance between reality and unreality is twisting in vertigo.
Computer algorithms have been good at detecting spam in emails by looking at the subject and messages text to evaluate if it's a real person or not. AI systems have more complex algorithms now for looking at content online. They can filter content based on headline and text comparisons, as well as looking to see if similar articles from different news media have differing "facts" to identify suspicious websites.
Amplified Fake News
As much as the spread of fake news can be hindered with AI, it can also be amplified. A neural networks AI system can model the shape of lips and replace what someone says with falsified audio as well. All they need is an audio file and they can make Barack Obama say what they want, as shown here:
Fake Obama created using AI video tool - BBC News
Face2Face is another AI neural network that has been developed. It can take the facial movements of someone (input source) and replicate them onto the screen of anyone they choose (target actor), like Obama, Trump or Putin. It can work with any webcam and works in real-time. This video explains how they do it all:
Face2Face: Real time Face Capture and Manipulation - CVPR 2016 Explanation
Through RGB overlays, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence it is possible to simulate another person's speech, face, facial movements/expressions, and mannerisms in real time.
We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time.
"Deepfakes" is a new term for altering videos and photos. One person's face is replaced with another seamlessly, which has been used to make celebrities look like they said something they never did, or be in "faceswap" porn. This could make spotting fake news even harder than previously done with fact checking and refuting false claims. What people see they will tend to believe, and try to get someone to dismiss what they have seen, even if it's fake.
Consciousness is the Cure
As technology gets more sophisticated and able to create better fake news, we can see more doubt cast on news media and governments, creating further divides as people fall for various lies that come from anywhere. The real solution to fake news is to develop our capacities of consciousness, of being more intelligent and thinking critically about the information we are exposed to.
One place to start is in our social media platforms. Instead of sharing news stories based on headlines alone that stir us up and motivate us to share with others, we should read them first. This can prevent false information from going viral more quickly. And if we read them, we should check if the information is credible or what source it comes from. Some sites are really bogus and just put out false information that is more easily detected that the current article you may be reading.
The more we are able to gather real and true information, the better we will be at detecting it. Our ability to filter our obvious fake news will get better. But for the fake videos and photos, we may have to rethink how much we can trust what we see. Seeing is believing, but believing isn't a de facto truth. Trust is a proxy for truth. Videos used to be relied upon for proof, but we may be seeing a dramatic shift in how much we can trust video sources for anything in our future.
References:
- The spread of true and false news online
- Gartner Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and Beyond
- How artificial intelligence can detect – and create – fake news
- Go to YouTube and See Me Tomorrow: The Role of Social Media in Managing Chronic Conditions
- AI will solve Facebook’s most vexing problems, Mark Zuckerberg says. Just don’t ask when or how
- Astronomers explore uses for AI-generated images
- Watch Jordan Peele use AI to make Barack Obama deliver a PSA about fake news
- Go to YouTube and See Me Tomorrow: The Role of Social Media in Managing Chronic Conditions
- Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective
- Tracing Fake-News Footprints: Characterizing Social Media Messages by How They Propagate
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very informative and scary AF! we are in for a trippy existence in the near future and it will only get weirder as the years pass
The most interesting element of this is of course the upcoming arms race with itself.
Advances in both AI and neural NLP have exceeded Moore’s law in recent years. Even people in the knowledge of there being fake items often don’t manage to spot the fake reviews. Queue the fiasco that was Google Duplex’s demo - due to being too human - and the upcoming predictive sentences and it’s going to be very interesting.
Only one thing we are certain of: English will be further dumbed down. Just4U&M3
Awesome post, well researched and written. Excellent work.
1984's Newspeak becoming a reality. Idiocracy too. :/ Thank you, glad you gained value :)
More and more the credibility of "news" doesn't seem to matter. As long as the transparency of "news centers" is under question. And personally, when I hear each freaking news presenter sounding exactly the same I also start to wonder if there isn't more going on behind the scenes.
It might seem like fake news is more prevalent today. But fake news has been with us for a very long time. Only our ability to spot it has changed.
Video and image and sound have long lost their importance in credibility. It's not about what seems real but what actually happened. And there are usually ways to find out if you dig deep enough.
But most people don't have the time to dig. For those poor souls I suggest you find a reasonably reliable source of news (if news is important and truth is important to you) then stick with those. If something seems fishy then check it out and if it turns out false remove that source from your "trust".
the integrity of the one reporting and caring about what is real and true matters in order to trust what they say. Media has lost the trust and has long been into faking reality for certain agendas, indeed.
Something that was bothering me. Was the fact that media was so convinced that Trump had ties to Russia that they kept on reporting on it. It would have been one thing if they actually backed their claims up with facts, but they didn't.
Also politicians. When the French president was confronted with the terrorist attack he just kept repeating the same thing over and over. Basically trying to cling to his small seat of power. Where's the humanity? If he was going to go on air I'd prefer tears, shouting, fury. Not the way he was acting.
I'm not saying that Trump's a GOOD leader. But he sure was one of the most honest leaders in the history of America. And I think that's a bad thing.
The real tragedy isn't Trump as president. its that the country has fallen so far that it was never a competition between two humans. Rather one human, and one politician.
I can of course go on about how and why Trump is bad but it isn't the point I want to make.
This is what people should always do before believing anything they read online, but the truth is there are a lot of lazy people who just by reading a title they are already tapping retweet and sharing the news on every social media they use.
I think fake news tend to be more shocking and that's why they spread faster.
And the technology behind deepfakes can, as you say, be used to manipulate people into believing all types of horrible (but fake news), this can even be used as a tool to deploy terror campaigns on innocent people.
But as it is always the case with technology, it has a good use, in this case with deepfakes, it could be put to use in movies to simulate actors
Not enough time, too much info, share share share and get a like! LOL
The shicking stuff tends to spread faster indeed, make it sensational and appealing to engage in :P
But the endgame when news is completely fake is to... completely ignore it.
I wrote recently on the art and science of propaganda and one key element is to elicit emotional responses. Belief in what we see is part of that emotional trigger. This is, indeed, bizarre as most of us do not know any of the people paraded in front of us on the news - our emotions are being sucked towards fictions.
Go back and find out what your neighbours are doing - that's news you can impact.
Also... upvoted, resteemed and has been added to the latest MAP Upvotes post.
Thanks for the support ;)
Yeah, they are all actors, and it's best to go find news than to have it fed to us by them. Local reality is important, but so is knowing what we are a part of as a collective human species ;)
Sure, I scan the mainstream news sites just to see what I'm supposed to be concerned about; sometimes useful to see some global event heading towards my locale. But, it is just info; I have little to zero emotional reaction to it.
What does piss me off is the huge weaponisation of almost every vector imaginable - fake science to toxify everything, such as food, water, air, EMFs etc etc. That kind of news is on different kinds of websites, often on globalist sites that "inspire the future" to their technocratic readers.
Turning that kind of news into anti-propaganda is something I rarely see. That kind of news needs a plan. If only I had more time...
I wish I could share your optimism that we can somehow stay on top of it and learn how to filter fake news. We can try, but the main problem is that there' s yet so few of us who even acknowledge this problem. We have 1 million users here and I don' t even know how many millions/ billions of users on mainstream social media mindlessly believing and sharing nonsense. It's a losing battle and time is of the essence. We need more people on truly free platforms before it's too late.
People like distractions more than hard hitting truth that shatters their worldview and "brings them down" from that fantasy :/
this is the world we live in now and people need to understand this. In the past we had "pics or it didnt happen", but we will find other ways to determine the truth. All important statements should be signed on the blockchain as this is still tamperproof. Everything else should be either personal experience, trusted third part experience or disregarded as a fake.
Yeah it's getting harder and harder to trust in other sources :/
You brought attention to a very painful subject. The ordinary citizen is drowning in so much information and it is difficult to know whether everything is true and real.
However you have givena good advices that I think should be adopted to be suspicious and try to check content before sharing and first of all read...Thanks!
Yeah, info overload is big, people don't even want to look or think more than they have to :/
Technology is going so far that soon anyone anywhere will be able to create any video of anyone person doing anything. How to heck will we even use video as evidence for crimes then ? This is just getting crazy...
Yup, scary how unreal our reality will be in the future...
Whoa, you really finished it.
Many people think that everything on the Internet is real and this has caused so much bad in our society.
Like you said, filtering these information will be difficult, since the fake has been edited to look so real.
We hope that the AI may have what it takes to detect false informations and edited fakes.
This already happens on Steemit as there are users who share news, but not in the old social media way(as you metioned above). There's much more conscious attention in sharing news around here than Facebook for example. They often come with opinions from the author also. Not just a simple based on title incentives share.
Yeah, Steem has a push for content creation, it's not a social media site of sharing. It's supposed to be about putting things out, not just copy/paste.
This was a well-researched post and very well written. You identified a serious problem we will all have to cope with as we try to discern the truth from the fake media. Unfortunately, the disinformation warfare that's already occurring is swaying uncommitted voters to change their opinions based on spurious accounts being posted in social media. This is an Orwellian nightmare that can seriously disrupt our society. Thank you for producing such a thought-provoking post
You're welcome, I'm glad you gained value form it.
Technology one of the best thing that has ever happen to the world 🌎,it has it positive and negative effects but it more of positive than the negative to me, great post @krnel best of regards
Yup lots of positives for sure, gotta deal with negatives too ;
I am resteemit your post @krnel
his really is a real dilemma, that we can not trust even in the videos that we are looking at directly. Who will we trust later? We must make a good conscience education campaign so that people do not make these mistakes. The truth is that we have to be well informed so that no one cheats us.
very good publication, thanks for this good content. Greetings see you at the top.
Side note, prove I am not an AI! lol
Curated for #informationwar (by @truthforce)
With the advent of AI technology further narrow the product of counterfeit products so that can boost the satisfaction of consumers
Instead of sharing news stories based on headlines alone that stir us up and motivate us to share with others, we should read them first.
It seems so obvious :D
riight?? but it feels like nobody has that kind of time anymore
It should be :/