Obama Says to Stay Woke, Bitches
April 17, 2018 3:00 PM   Subscribe

Sitting before the Stars and Stripes, another flag pinned to his lapel, former president Barack Obama appears to be delivering an important message about fake news — but something seems slightly...off. As the video soon reveals, the man speaking is not the former commander-in-chief, but rather Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele with a warning for viewers about trusting material they encounter online.

The video was made by Peele’s production company using a combination of old and new technology: Adobe After Effects and the AI face-swapping tool FakeApp. The latter is the most prominent example of how AI can facilitate the creation of photorealistic fake videos. It started life on Reddit as a tool for making fake celebrity porn, but it has since become a worrying symbol of the power of AI to generate misinformation and fake news.

As “Obama” says in the PSA: “It may sound basic, but how we move forward in the Age of Information is going to be the difference between whether we survive or whether we become some kind of fucked up dystopia.”
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes (51 comments total) 55 users marked this as a favorite
 
The original version of this I saw was super compressed. I figured that was on purpose to hide the CGI aspect.

But the link above has the original hi-def version and...yeah, we still have a ways to go before we defeat the Uncanny Valley. I had a hard time watching it without my brain screaming about how extremely fake/not-fake it was.

Edited to add: To clarify: at first the blurry/compressed version had me sold as Obama (as I went into the video cold), but the hi-def one was definitely fake right from the beginning.
posted by sideshow at 3:04 PM on April 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


On the right fuzzy platform, I think plenty of folks would buy this effect, and it's only going to get more realistic. Excellent message.

I don't know whether we can be saved or not, though.
posted by allthinky at 3:06 PM on April 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


That ways is going to be measured in years, not decades. Best that awareness be ahead of the technology.
posted by Zalzidrax at 3:06 PM on April 17, 2018 [13 favorites]


On the right fuzzy platform, I think plenty of folks would buy this effect, and it's only going to get more realistic. Excellent message.

Or, more likely, people with a vested interest in believing whatever fake message is being conveyed. $20 says Obama's "Killmonger was right" shows up on some Infowars-esque site in the next week.
posted by leotrotsky at 3:09 PM on April 17, 2018 [32 favorites]


Yeah, excerpts will quickly be posted on various wingnut nazi-wannabe sites, to be quickly followed by facepalming at Snopes as they write a debunking article.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:13 PM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Deep fakes

Lawfare is all over it.
posted by Max Power at 3:20 PM on April 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Deep fakes would've scared me more a few years ago. After the election, I realized how many people would choose to believe the dumbest, most obvious fakes (all of that crazy pizzagate stuff, for example, or the pope endorsing Donald Trump) if it gave them license to do what they wanted to do anyway (vote for Donald Trump). That makes the believable fakes thing seem less alarming -- though of course, if deep fakes confuse investigators and real journalists, they could be a serious problem.
posted by grandiloquiet at 3:32 PM on April 17, 2018 [17 favorites]


It doesn't solve the hoax problem, but just slapping on a random line of face paint would be a good way to defeat the deep fake process and make a provably-real video.

This is probably why face paint in general is much more popular in the future (as shown to us in sci-fi movies) than it is today.
posted by 0xFCAF at 3:39 PM on April 17, 2018 [19 favorites]


We are living in a William Gibson novel.
posted by davebush at 3:40 PM on April 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


All I can think is that this will get plenty of traction whenever the pee tape turns up.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:47 PM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


We are living in a William Gibson novel.

No. We have cameras cell phones.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:52 PM on April 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Jordan Peele hosted a 2016 Adobe conference where they demoed the audio editing tool VoCo ("photoshop for voiceovers").

An engineer plays a clip where Key says he kissed his dog and wife after learning he got an award. He then live-edits it to say that Key kissed Jordan, just by typing.

"Don't worry," the engineer says. "We actually have researched how to prevent forgery. Think about watermarking detection. As we're getting the results much better, making it so people can't distinguish between the fake and the real one, we're working harder trying to make it detectable."

Peele, clearly freaked out, then does an Obama impression. The creative seeds!
posted by waninggibbon at 3:54 PM on April 17, 2018 [10 favorites]


The negatives probably out weigh the positives.
One positive is remixing of video in interesting ways. I can't wait till I can see a Blade Runner remix with Humphrey Bogart instead of Harrison Ford.
posted by hot_monster at 4:10 PM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


My grandmother has convinced my entire family that I have a tattoo based solely on this ten year old facebook photo despite the fact that I have been sleeveless in their presence multiple times since then.

This could be a video of actual Jordan Peele in a suit talking saying he was Obama and my grandma would go to her grave swearing Obama called her a bitch, telling everyone she knows.

"Image quality" and hand-wringing over video compression is meaningless. People will see what they want to see.
posted by phunniemee at 4:14 PM on April 17, 2018 [48 favorites]


What I learned from the video is that Obama did a video pretending to be Jordan Peele, merely so he could say some shit that was really on his mind. He did so using some technology to fake the Jordan video.

Good on him.
posted by el io at 4:38 PM on April 17, 2018 [52 favorites]


Meanwhile 77% report they believe the mainstream journalism outlets report fake news, generally according fakeness to the process of fabricating content from facts as well as outright falsehoods.

Pres. Trump's frequently imploring "Believe me!" has been noted and discussed. Less discussed has been content like this video where I see journalists or "the institutions" demanding the same, albeit with superior elocution.

Have the institutions considered becoming worthy of trust?
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 4:42 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


One positive is remixing of video in interesting ways. I can't wait till I can see a Blade Runner remix with Humphrey Bogart instead of Harrison Ford.

See, though, this example really points out that there really isn’t anything in the way of identfiable positives to this technology beyond just dicking-around for lols or entertainment. On the other hand, the negatives are myriad and potentially quite horrific.

When I think about just how easily manipulated people can be, I really do fear this sort of tech.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:00 PM on April 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


who says the part where peele reveals himself in the video isnt itself a fake video in which obama is actually pretending to be peele so that he has cover to say everything he wishes he could say? until i see some multilayered recursive moebius fakes, i'm not worried.

(j/k. the implications of this are fucking terrifying and may portend the end of democracy as we know it.)
posted by wibari at 5:31 PM on April 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


We are living in a William Gibson novel.

The dystopia is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:35 PM on April 17, 2018 [39 favorites]


The idea of going to live in a remote mountain cabin just becomes more and more appealing.
posted by Automocar at 5:40 PM on April 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


I want an island so I can get away from everyone.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:59 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


It ain't perfect, but damn, it ain't that bad either. The article says that "Sosa first pasted Peele’s mouth over Obama’s, then replaced the former president’s jawline with one that moved with Peele’s mouth movements. He then used FakeApp to smooth over and refine the footage — a rendering that took more than 56 hours of automatic processing."

I'm curious how much time was spent in the AfterEffects part of this. And if you could speed up the FakeApp portion of the process by distributing it over multiple computers. It looks like AfterEffects can do a lot of the face-tracking work for you; how easy it is to use that tracking data to paste over the mouth, I can't tell - but I suspect it's not too hard. I wouldn't be surprised if getting to the stage of "Peele's mouth pasted over Obama's face" was done in no more than a few hours. Maybe a bit more to manipulate video of Obama giving a speech to better match the cadence of Peele's dialogue; I'd have to watch it again to be sure but it feels like the same footage of Obama gesturing was used multiple times.

So I'm estimating about, oh, four days? to go from "recording Peele doing his Obama impression" to this. That's pretty impressive. And pretty scary, if we assume that the "let FakeApp grind for two and a half straight days" part of the process is only going to get better over time.

It's not like this is the only way to do this, either. Back in 2016, Epic started showing off what you could do with Unreal, a real-time facial mocap rig, and a few people who made a nice sculpture.. It's more up-front work, but damn if it's not convincing.

All video may be fake, soon. Only things caught by two or more cameras owned by unaffiliated hands will be something you even begin to trust. Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia.
posted by egypturnash at 6:30 PM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


This Buzzfeed article was deeply unsettling to me: The Terrifying Future of Fake News
Beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up. Ovadya is quick to remind us that this is common in areas where information is poor and thus assumed to be incorrect. The big difference, Ovadya notes, is the adoption of apathy to a developed society like ours. The outcome, he fears, is not good. “People stop paying attention to news and that fundamental level of informedness required for functional democracy becomes unstable.”
In some ways we're already there, but what happens when no one trusts what's real unless they're physically present at the event? And how can we trust those people? Even if we do trust specific journalists or public figures, how do we know that their reports were actually spoken by them? Neo-nazis could easily start a riot by faking videos of white police shooting Black people. We're already primed to believe it and we've seen social media react very quickly to things that were taken out of context (or that are blatantly false).
posted by AFABulous at 6:48 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


It looked fine on my phone, and people who want to believe will believe. And, he is right re: Killmonger and Trump so there’s that.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:55 PM on April 17, 2018


The voice impersonation is a dead giveaway, but that is also coming soon. I’m surprised it isn’t widely available already.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:13 PM on April 17, 2018


I knew it. It just looks like an orange mess, and nothing he says makes any sense, as if it's just cut and pasted from a bunch of unrelated sentences. No-one talks like that. It's like a markov chain of bullshit. How long has Donald been doing this?
posted by adept256 at 7:42 PM on April 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


> Automocar:
"The idea of going to live in a remote mountain cabin just becomes more and more appealing."

Okay, Spider, as long as you come back to investigate the Smiler and the Beast.
posted by Samizdata at 8:02 PM on April 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


Also, the mouth would subtly jump closed at certain points.

As I tweeted to Jordan Peele earlier, in response to his Tweet about this video - "Will you stop being so brilliant already?"
posted by Samizdata at 8:06 PM on April 17, 2018


The Era of Fake Video Begins - "The digital manipulation of video may make the current era of 'fake news' seem quaint."
posted by kliuless at 8:55 PM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Imagine video streams compressed by sending a single image - enough to reconstitute a talking head - with a transcript of a talk plus notes on intonation and delivery. Forgery would be an absolutely trivial problem. We wouldn't be able to trust videos at all. It's basically the technique we use to compress and reconstitute books, by sending the output of a scanner to Adobe Acrobat or TeX. The finished product looks clean and freshly typeset, but the text itself may have been invisibly corrupted. In fact, I believe some photocopiers already do this automatically, and corruption is in fact a real problem.

This isn't a new idea: Vernor Vinge wrote a book called A Fire Upon the Deep that was published in 1992 - more than a quarter of a century ago. One of the minor twists occurs when

SPOILER!

the heroes discover that the video channel they're using has been heavily compressed due to interference, and some low-level AI in the heroes' receiver has filled in the gaps in transmission with "normal" video. When they turn the receiver's AI off it turns out that what originally looked like a transmission from a perfectly normal spaceship was actually transmitted from a ship full of mind-infected zombies. Hijinks and the death of trillions ensue.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:34 PM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Great use of technology: Digital Damnatio Memoriae for every Hollywood rapist and predator
  • replace Kevin Spacey in every critically-acclaimed role with Christopher Plummer and/or a cat
  • replace Bill Cosby in every episode of The Cosby Show with GOAT Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
posted by nicebookrack at 10:07 PM on April 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


In fact, I believe some photocopiers already do this automatically, and corruption is in fact a real problem.

Correct. (previously)
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:39 PM on April 17, 2018


The voice impersonation is a dead giveaway, but that is also coming soon.

Also correct. (previously)
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:43 PM on April 17, 2018


plus notes on intonation and delivery

Already exists as a W3 markup standard just like HTML. You can mess with it yourself by signing into Amazon's Polly service and taking your pick of gender, accent, nationality, and then use SSML to markup the delivery and download a file.
posted by bradbane at 10:58 PM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


that fundamental level of informedness required for functional democracy becomes unstable.

What was the level of informedness in 1820? How is this measured?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:01 AM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


> "Image quality" and hand-wringing over video compression is meaningless. People will see what they want to see.


This. When photography became a thing, people would believe things there were photos of. Like fairies at the end of the garden, say. We've long been accustomed to the idea that photos can be undetectably faked. There was a time when people would automatically believe anything just because it was on TV. Earlier, I guess things like, say, printing had similar power. Fake video is just the next step. In our future dystopia we will have moved on to something else. Fake thoughts perhaps.

Meanwhile people will believe things just because it suits them, regardless of evidence far more powerful than fake video.

We just need people to learn to think critically... we are doomed :(
posted by merlynkline at 12:30 AM on April 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


It ain't perfect, but damn, it ain't that bad either.

Well, it's a proof of concept cobbled together in two days that demonstrates how dangerously close we are to this actually working, and it does a heck of a job at that.

I mean, just imagine that instead of two days with some half-ready consumer software, you get to use whatever computing and manpower any big intelligence agency will have a couple of years from now.

Showing this clip to someone without comment can demonstrate so much, so much more quickly than trying to explain how dangerous media will be in the (very near) future, which is, I assume, the whole point of the PSA.

I love him for doing this, and I will never get tired of reading "Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele", because, well... fuck, yes. There are some good things about this timeline after all.
posted by rokusan at 2:27 AM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


We are living in a William Gibson novel.

No. We have cameras cell phones.


Only Americans have cell phones. The rest of the world has mobiles.
posted by rokusan at 2:30 AM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


The Germans have "handys" for some reason.
posted by Harald74 at 6:10 AM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Mandatory acid trips so people know to mistrust their very senses.
posted by whuppy at 6:32 AM on April 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


You're missing the point, we have the technology for a

FACE/OFF REBOOT

only with Cage and Travolta actually as themselves
posted by a halcyon day at 8:04 AM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


We've been in the era of fake digital photographs for some time - anyone with decent Photoshop chops can, for example, put one person's head on another person's body without leaving any obvious evidence of fakery. Fake video is just another step forward on the same path, with the only complication being that people tend to "believe" video more than they believe a digital photograph.

The only real solution is to only trust photos and videos obtained from reputable sources. Which underlines the need for reputable sources that haven't sold out to advertisers or been driven out of business by modern market economics.

Making people aware that realistic fake videos are soon to become a thing is important. And it's also important to realize that about 30% of people are going to believe whatever they damn well want to, regardless of the facts. After all, long before the Internet and modern niche media, the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News existed.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 9:42 AM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


We just need people to learn to think critically... we are doomed :(

My [private] high school had a required class called Critical Thinking. Forget math and everything else, that was the single most important class I've ever taken, because all other learning flows from that. I wish it would be required for everyone. It makes me annoyingly skeptical at times (especially when watching movies), but I feel I have a better grasp on reality because of it.
posted by AFABulous at 11:13 AM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


The idea that the way to combat this is in putting more faith in “trusted news sources” makes me furious—as if any news source is perfect, and as if any perfect news source would be forever incorruptible.
posted by aedison at 11:41 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


The voice impersonation is a dead giveaway, but that is also coming soon. I’m surprised it isn’t widely available already.

Even at the current level of voice twisting, it's a big problem. If you want to disguise the fake voice, throw some noise in it - make it look like a speech in a rowdy public area, or somewhere with weather or other environmental interference: rain, storm winds, crackling campfire, birds.

And as has been mentioned, it really doesn't matter how verifiably realistic it is; we have plenty of people ready to believe that California has three million fake voters, based on tweets from a guy who spells coffee with a v. A video that passes superficial inspection - as in, "I saw it on a 4" phone screen and it looked real" - is more than enough to persuade millions that the target of the week has been proven to be evil.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:03 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


The negatives probably out weigh the positives.

I completely agree.

I knew someone working on technology like this because he was into privacy and felt that it would make video surveillance useless as evidence. But courts have time to think about the trustworthiness of sources carefully and deliberately, to hire people who have expertise in identifying fakes, while most people just don't have that time, and in fact are growing used to technological practices that encourage less introspection around the information we consume.

I do agree that once this technology becomes powerful and ubiquitous enough that it is unavoidable, the best thing to do is probably to put out big examples like this that help people learn that videos can lie just like prose can lie, and that you should vet your video sources just like you vet your prose sources...
posted by tarshish bound at 3:18 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


The idea that the way to combat this is in putting more faith in “trusted news sources” makes me furious—as if any news source is perfect, and as if any perfect news source would be forever incorruptible.

No news source is perfect, but we can still draw a distinction between those that mostly don't say blatant falsehoods and deliberately mislead their readers/viewers/listeners, and those that do. The news establishment gets things wrong on a regular basis, but you're still likely better off with that then the highly-reputable Snarky Democrat and Cold Dead Hands that are regularly cropping up on my friends' Facebook feeds as what appear to be their primary source of (at least political) news with stuff that's...just laughably incorrect.
posted by thegears at 5:20 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Okay yes I absolutely understand the potential harm this could do but you guys we could reconstruct all the missing Doctor Who episodes
posted by webmutant at 6:37 PM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's okay - it's only a matter of time before someone invents optolythic data rods.
posted by Start with Dessert at 8:24 PM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


The idea that no news source can be trusted seems a sort of Trumpian view of the world, kind of like the idea that all politicians are inherent liars. How do I know global warming is happening? How do I know my Alexa isn't secretly spying on me? How do I trust anything I read, given that words have no inherent connection to truth? We give our trust to certain communities of experts who test and verify the truth, often via a chain of trust (someone I already trust vouches for X). And that's a good thing! The alternative is a Trumpian post-modern meaninglessness, or some engineer's folly imagining they they themselves can directly ascertain the truth of every scientific and historical claim they are presented with. Neither alternative is tenable; the only possibility is trust.

You just have to give your trust wisely, and there have to be communities of self-policing entities worthy of the trust. But at this level -- the level of words that outright lie or intentionally fake videos -- there are plenty of those. We (the truth-seeking 60%) are not yet in an Orwellian dystopia of zero-information science and media. Even junky outlets like CNN have very strong norms against knowingly writing outright lies and knowingly posting fake videos, which extends to vetting those items, albeit often via trusting yet other entities to vouch for them. But again -- that the way it should work, and that's the only way it can work. Fake videos are no more an existential threat than the discovery thousands of years ago that written words can be false. Once we learn not to trust our eyes, we're right back where we should be: trusting those who earn our trust. There are plenty of trustworthy communities of experts out there, and when a video can't be verified by some expert, we should just do what we've always done with unverified text, images, sound, etc -- ignore it.
posted by chortly at 8:47 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Looks like Adobe's Voco project is dead -- Google cache
posted by daHIFI at 10:38 AM on April 20, 2018


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