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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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A bit of a tempest in a teapot, leading to a tangent:

A manipulated video shared by Musk mimics Harris' voice, raising concerns about AI in politics

A manipulated video that mimics the voice of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away.

The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X(opens in a new tab) on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.

(emphasis added)

I remembered seeing it in this format, with the disclaimer intact, so I thought it was a classic "don't trust your lying eyes" situation (not helped by the refusal of every site except CTV and Business Insider to actually link to the tweet). But...

Link and screenshot to the tweet in question, and link and screenshot to the post he was retweeting.

X changed its layout recently, and the text of the original post wasn't carried forward in the retweet. Their claim is accurate.

I'm guessing that there was a slow rollout of the new layout, so some people saw it in the old format and some in the new.

I would like for primary research to build common ground off of a shared foundation of facts, but that can't happen if the results are different based on the person looking. You can (presumably?) see it with the website's layout. It happened with personalized Google recommendations here last week.

I'd count when I almost missed half the context in a post last week (not helped by bitrot in the top level post), and noticing all of the intact teleprompters (so Trump's ear wasn't hit by glass in the assassination attempt) as marginal successes in primary research, but who's to say that the next issue won't be "personalized" so I can't actually see what other people are talking about?

I’ve been wondering if generative AI will usher in a new appreciation for receipts. Something which will trace a “legitimate” film, soundbite or xeet back to its alleged author. If the NYT reports a police shooting, they should have the checksum for whatever bodycam footage they used. Or at least a way to follow those breadcrumbs back to whoever allegedly filmed the shot.

Then again, if the digital age has completely failed to bring this up for text documents, what chance does video have?

I am not proud that this came to my attention via the alpha/beta/etc. labeling in a certain story by 0HP Lovecraft.

I've wondered similar at https://www.themotte.org/post/440/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/85958?context=8#context , albeit overengineered a little.

containers for digital media (video, audio, hell why not text documents or tweets) that's trusted for public decisions must be cryptographically signed and checksummed by the originating device before it hits userland, and further signed by a trusted location service that claims the capturing device was actually present. Media without the container is considered not possibly trustable. Unpacking the container and doing ANYTHING to the contents, without the private key of the originating device, becomes detectable. The entire problem reduces to a) key management, which is merely moderately hard at scale, but made easier by centralized management for many (almost all?) mobile device, b) the trusted location service, c) protection against extracting the signing key of the originating device. Obviously this trades off significant amounts of privacy, but if you're submitting your film to the MSM to influence public opinion, that's maybe acceptable.

It is an interesting topic, but this in particular was a pretty bad example of the conundrum "deepfaking" can present, because the voiceover is pretty obviously fake. There are a ton of deepfakes on YouTube from last year of all the presidents discussing their favorite anime waifus, but as soon as the joking goes too far, I guess everyone has to try to regulate it.

Even beyond the faults in the AI voicegen, "I'm a deep state puppet" is a pretty overt 'parody'.

Yeah, I'm reluctant to even classify this as 'misinformation' any more than, say, The Daily Show airing a creatively edited interview with a politician.

Either you can detect the joke from the context, or you are so susceptible to being misled that no amount of disclaimers would help. Probably.

Eh, I'd say tempest in a teapot is right. The Argentina Election last year was sort of a capability-demonstration of what AI-powered campaign support can do, and there's really nothing you can do to stop AI-propaganda given both the decentralized and also international dynamics to it. But that's not even new in and of itself- social media influence efforts are far more ubiquitous than most people realize, and so while in terms of volume greater AI role is increasing volume, that doesn't correspond to an effectiveness increase due to how people largely disassociate from high-volume propaganda they don't already gel with.

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