The Digital War: The Future of Fake News is Here by Mark Dice

Remember when we first learned that you could easily make somebody say anything you want in a video? Well, no surprise, it's a lot easier to do that today. Mark Dice explains. You can watch him or read the transcript.

The Future of Fake News is Here

RubyRayMedia on Rumble (mirror of Mark Dice on Rumble)
Published Jan 19, 2022
8:20 viewing length (transcript below)

Transcript

Mark Dice 0:00
Once upon a time, fake news consisted primarily of made-up stories posted on cheap websites nobody had ever heard of, or websites with similar URLs to brand name outlets publishing completely fake articles hoping that they'd go viral through social media and generate a bunch of ad revenue from all the clicks. And I'm sure that you're familiar with people making fake screenshots and Photoshop and posting them on social media, claiming that they came from news articles, text messages, DMs, or someone's supposed deleted tweet. But we're far beyond those primitive forms of fake news and rapidly approaching a world that was once only found in science fiction films.

In Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 film The Running Man, he was an innocent helicopter pilot who was framed for the massacre of civilians looting a grocery store after an economic collapse. And with the help of some doctored video that aired on national television, the general public thought that he had been caught red-handed, murdering a bunch of people, when in fact, he had actually refused orders to open fire on them. His face was also digitally placed onto the body of someone else at another point in the film to further sell the lie to the public. Well, deceptively edited video has been a problem and can cast people in a false light and twist their statements or place them out of context. The video tricks that we're now facing are far more sophisticated. They can make almost anyone appear to do or say almost anything. Just like what happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man. These fake videos are called Deep Fakes after the deep learning of artificial intelligence algorithms that are used to create them. And this same technology has been used, dating back to the 1990s, in order to make it appear that Forrest Gump shook hands with President John F. Kennedy and made John Wayne look like he was handing off a six pack of Coors Light to someone in a commercial, even though he had been dead for over 10 years. More recently, it was used to digitally impose Paul Walker's face on to another actor's body to finish Fast & Furious Part 7, after he died in a car accident before filming was done being shot.

But unfortunately, this technology isn't just being used for entertainment anymore and people are starting to realize that, in the wrong hands, it could cause tremendous danger. In 2018, Comedian Jordan Peele released a video showing Barack Obama appearing to warn about deep fakes. And then the video cut to a split-screen showing Obama on one side and Jordan Peele on the other, revealing that he was doing the voice for Obama since he does a pretty good impression. And he was also using real-time face mimicking software in order to match his lips and facial expressions onto a digitally recreated version of Obama. It was a clever PSA to bring this kind of technology to people's attention, since at that time, most people hadn't heard of deep fakes.

Two years earlier in 2016, researchers at Stanford University posted a video demonstrating their face-to-face real-time face capture technology, showing how using their software and an ordinary webcam, they can map a person's facial expressions onto George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. This may have been the same software that Jordan Peele used for his video. Technology to manipulate video in such ways was once extremely expensive and required teams of people to produce.

But today's deep fakes can be made by amateurs on their home computers. Snapchat filters and Facebook Messenger filters can now overlay different cartoon faces and effects on someone's face in real-time. You may have seen back in 2018, someone took a video of actress Amy Adams singing I Will Survive and swapped her face for that of Nicolas Cage's. Then the following year, someone made one by taking a segment of Jennifer Lawrence speaking with reporters backstage after the Golden Globe Awards, and put Steve Buscemi his face in place of hers. The video was so bizarre and realistic-looking that it became the most viral deep fake video since Jordan Peele's Obama video and introduced the term deep fake to a much wider audience.

But well over a decade before all this, the US military had some insight into the potential of this kind of technology for psychological warfare operations. When the Bush administration was planning for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the CIA came up with the idea to create a fake video appearing to show Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy. The CIA also reportedly discussed making a fake video appearing as if Osama Bin Ladin was bragging about using Bacha Bazi boys, which in Afghanistan, it's a widely accepted practice for older men to have sexual relations with young boys who are often from very poor families or orphans, just like it was in ancient Rome. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for news here because you're not going to hear about this on Fox News. US soldiers who were stationed in Afghanistan were told to ignore such abuse because it's part of the culture in regions of the Middle East. And this abomination is a whole other issue. The point is, the CIA actually proposed making a deep fake of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden as pedophiles, thinking that it would help incite the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow him, because if such a video were real, people in a civilized culture would do just that.

Invidia, a graphics card company, has created an AI so powerful that it can automatically change the weather in video footage, making a clear clip of a car driving down a road on a sunny day appear as if it was actually shot in the middle of winter with a few inches of snow on the ground and the leaves missing from the trees. This same technology can take photos of cats or dogs and change them to make them look like a different breed and can change people's facial expressions from happy to sad or anywhere in between. In videos, AI can even generate realistic pictures of people that don't actually exist by taking features from actual photos and combining elements of them together into a composite that's almost impossible to tell that it's fake. The website "this person does not exist.com" uses this technology to display a different fake photo every time you visit it. Most of them look like HD photos of ordinary people. AI can now create 3D models of people just from a few photographs. And while it may be fun to input a character in your favorite video game that looks just like you, the capacity for nefarious abuses of this technology are virtually limitless.

In 2016 Adobe, the creator of Photoshop, demonstrated what they call Adobe VOCO or Photoshop for voices, which can generate realistic-sounding audio, making it sound like someone is saying something that they never actually said. The software works by inputting samples of someone's voice and then can create fake audio files in that same voice, saying whatever is typed onto the screen. Three years later, a group of machine-learning engineers released an audio clip that they created using their real talk technology, which sounded like Joe Rogan talking about investing in a new hockey team made up of chimpanzees. It wasn't perfect, but if you didn't know that it was fake before you heard it, you may have been fooled into thinking that it was real.

In a recent documentary about Anthony Bourdain called Roadrunner, the filmmakers included some deep fake audio to make it sound like Anthony was saying things that he had written but never actually said out loud. The film didn't even disclose that it used AI-generated audio and after it was discovered, it sparked a major conversation about the ethics of doing such a thing, and the possibilities of such technology being used in even more nefarious ways.

Right now, it still takes quite a bit of sophistication to create such material, but as technology advances, it'll likely be possible that anyone can use a basic app to create realistic looking and sounding deep fakes of politicians, CEOs, celebrities, anyone, to make it appear as if they're saying racist, hateful, violent things. And as Winston Churchill said, A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. So nobody is safe from being smeared by deep fakes. Whether they're an ordinary person who has been targeted by a jealous ex-lover or a disgruntled co-worker or classmate, or whether they're the President of the United States, whose political opponents want to bring him down. We are clearly not in Kansas anymore, and only time will tell how pervasive and damaging deep fakes will become.

Fake news may be about to go supernova. And if you want to learn more, order my book, The True Story of Fake News: How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions. Get it in paperback from amazon.com or download the eBook from any of the major eBook stores. And of course, there's a link to the Amazon listing in the description below. So click it and head on over there and check it out.

Transcription by Otter, edits by Carol Allen, Ruby Ray Media

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