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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King. Today, we're talking about doctored videos and the future of reality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [chuckles] Yeah, it's a wild topic. Before we dive in, a note about MailChimp's all-in-one marketing platform. It allows you to manage more of your marketing activities from one place so you can market smarter and grow faster.
--:-- Noel King: We want to give this president the opportunity to do something historic for our country. This video of Nancy Pelosi made the rounds online a few weeks ago. While there are those in our family who think, why would you work with him if he, you know, and basically he's saying back to me, why would I work with you if you're investigating me?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the fact is, something happened there. The video had been doctored, slowed down. This is what the real video sounded like.
--:-- Noel King: We want to give this president the opportunity to do something historic for our country. While there are those in our family who think, why would you work with him if he, you know, and basically he's saying back to me, why would I work with you if you're investigating me?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the fact is, something happened there. We've all seen and heard enough slow motion in our lives to know that if you slow down video, the audio drops down. Your voice lowers and deepens. But that didn't happen as it should have in the Pelosi video that was doctored.
--:-- Noel King: It was manipulated to make it seem like it hadn't been. To make Nancy Pelosi look sloppy drunk while talking about the president. It was very, very, very strange.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This video renewed concerns over fake videos as we head towards big, consequential elections. People were saying, oh my gosh, look at her. Like, can you just believe how she sounds?
--:-- Noel King: Drew Harwell wrote about it for The Washington Post. By the time we went to Facebook to ask them about this, the video had been shared almost a million times, had tens of thousands of comments and likes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most of these comments were people who were totally believing what they were seeing. Even when people started to fact check, Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's attorney, shared the video and said, wow, doesn't she look bad?
--:-- Noel King: Did anyone step in and try to stop this video from spreading? When we talked to YouTube about the Pelosi video, they took it down almost immediately and said it was a clear violation of their policies against deceptive practices.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So videos with a thumbnail that purported to show something that wasn't in the video or a totally false caption. YouTube says they take those videos down, so the Pelosi video came offline on YouTube.
--:-- Noel King: But on Facebook, it was a totally different story. Facebook asked their independent fact-checker partners to rate the video, and they ultimately rated it false. And they put a little sort of information box next to the video that gave a fact check, but they kept the video online.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then people went after Facebook, right? Yeah, totally. People were saying, well, maybe if the video was made of Mark Zuckerberg, the company would react differently.
--:-- Noel King: So people tested that hypothesis and they made a fake video of Mark Zuckerberg saying all sorts of crazy things. Imagine this for a second. One man with total control of billions of people's stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whoever controls the data controls the future. The voice wasn't spot on, but the lip syncing was perfect. And it was a video of him like looking directly into the camera.
--:-- Noel King: So it was really just like a showcase of what people could make and what could happen if you really did want to target somebody specifically and kind of undermine them in that way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Zuckerberg video was different from the Pelosi video, right? It wasn't just slowed down. Yeah, it was a deepfake.
--:-- Noel King: Deepfakes are computer-generated fake videos. They look like the real thing, but they are morphed in some way by the artificial intelligence into looking very deceivingly convincing and a lot like the real thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. Yeah, we talked about this last year in the context of fake celebrity porn videos circulating online. But now there's this doctored video of the Speaker of the House circulating.
--:-- Noel King: Is the government getting involved? Not really. I mean, there have been some bills that have been proposed at the congressional level, but deepfakes are a tough problem to solve.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this was sort of brought out in a hearing of a House Intelligence Committee last week, actually, where, you know, a lot of lawmakers had these AI experts come to the stand and talk about deepfakes.
--:-- Noel King: I sure that members of the committee are familiar with their run with the media and know just how awkward it can be to have words put in your mouth that you didn't say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Deepfakes take this problem and potentially accelerate it. There's a fine line between a deepfake that meant to discredit someone and a deepfake that's satirical or a joke.
--:-- Noel King: Did anyone at the hearing address that? Yeah, you know, deepfake videos do sort of fall into that gray area that we've always protected as a part of free speech and free expression.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the classic articles about former Vice President Biden comes from The Onion, that he was waxing his Camaro in the driveway of the White House. It was a comedy bit, and it had manipulated content on it.
--:-- Noel King: If we went to that extreme, we would have a country where everything that's ever been changed or modified for any reason would have to be policed, and we'd be asking a private sector company to police that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, First Amendment, we've always seen as protecting parodies and protecting satire and political speech. But with deepfakes, is that protected political speech?
--:-- Noel King: I think some of them could be. And you could make the argument that, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg video may be political speech. It's making a broader point about people in power, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But where does it get into the kind of speech that you don't want to support? And some people have also gone to Facebook and say, you know, there's a difference between freedom of speech and what they call freedom of reach.
--:-- Noel King: The power that the tech platforms offer to videos and creators like this, where they're supporting their ability to go viral almost immediately. So I think there's going to be more talk on the lawmaker level about what they can do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can they craft a piece of legislation that would not go too far in violating people's rights to free expression, but would also prevent active BS video campaigns from going viral online?
--:-- Noel King: I saw something from John Herman from the New York Times online that said one of the real problems here might not just be the proliferation of fake video that is indistinguishable from the real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the fact that the existence of so much fake video could lead to the point where politicians or anyone else could just say like, oh, that video of me, that was fake when it was in fact real.
--:-- Noel King: Totally. And that's actually one of the bigger concerns around some of the researchers who look at this. You know, if you're captured on camera saying something or doing something you'd rather have not been recorded, you can say, oh, it was fake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, that is not that's not an unprecedented problem. Right. Because we saw with Donald Trump, after the Access Hollywood video, he was even saying, he was telling his people around him, you know, this video was doctored, it was inauthentic, who are you going to believe?
--:-- Noel King: You know, that's the problem right there. Do you think all this confusion might just make people check out of the news?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so people call this reality apathy, where they say, like, if everything online is fake and I can't believe anything, then screw it. I'm just not going to read the news.
--:-- Noel King: And so if we get to a point where we're not believing videos or we're just saying to hell with it, I think that's going to be a huge and very subtle change to how we encounter the problems we deal with and end up causing more harm than we're trying to avoid.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you can imagine a situation in which reality apathy leads to serious voter apathy in, say, the next election.
--:-- Noel King: You know, I think videos are probably just going to be one part of the misinformation machine that will be churning during the 2020 campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're getting very close to the vote. Maybe we will see these, you know, blockbuster deep fakes that are really convincing and that, you know, may be fact-checked in due time and we may all realize that they're fake in enough time.
--:-- Noel King: But in the interim, there'll be enough to maybe convince people to vote the other way or maybe just convince people not to vote at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Deborah Johnson. I'm an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia in the School of Engineering.
--:-- Noel King: I worked with Nick Diakopoulos, who is a professor at Northwestern University. And together we came up with a set of scenarios that would make it clear the potential harm that can be done through deep fakes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Scenario one, supporting a candidate. So imagine that it's 2020, Seth Moulton is running in the primary, and he is one of the only candidates with military experience, which a pack wants to use to build up his campaign.
--:-- Noel King: They might develop a video that used both real footage and synthesized footage in which the candidate had been a hero. Some people would be claiming that it was fake. Other people wouldn't even know that it was being claimed to be fake, and it would just spread across the Internet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And even though he might have had a heroic record, it's now being called into question. Even though it might have been intended to help his campaign, it's actually hurting his campaign.
--:-- Noel King: Scenario two, hurting a candidate. In this case, we can imagine Elizabeth Warren increasingly doing well even among white men. One of her competitors in the primary or if she were the candidate the incumbent fabricates a video which depicts her as making disparaging comments about white men.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even if her campaign could convince the major networks to spread the fact that this was a fake, a good deal of damage would be done just by the thing being out there and circulating.
--:-- Noel King: Scenario three, undermining the election process. It's the night after the debate between the incumbent and a competitor. Let's say it's Biden. He did very well in the debate, And suddenly a synthesized video appears, which suggests that the person who was in charge of the debate is talking to a member of Biden's staff and asking something about whether the questions were OK or got there in time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With the implication that Biden had been given the questions before the debate. And even though there might be time for Biden to kind of counteract the claim, the whole debating process would have been undermined.
--:-- Noel King: The three scenarios just suggest really serious ways in which candidates can be hurt and the whole election process can be undermined so people don't know what to believe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this casts doubt on, you know, the major way in which we decide what's true. It really threatens the integrity of our election system.
--:-- Noel King: After the break, can anything be done about deepfakes or should we all just start prepping for the apocalypse?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you have a business? Because if so, MailChimp would like to help you grow it. They've got an all-in-one marketing platform that allows you to manage more of your marketing activities from one place.
--:-- Noel King: So you can market smarter, grow faster. The platform eliminates the need for multiple tools by giving you everything you need to create, publish, manage, and measure your multi-channel marketing campaigns if you have them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe you want them. This is the time. MailChimp's all-in-one platform is powered by a marketing CRM, which I recall means Customer Relationship Management, so you can collect, organize, understand and act on all of your audience data.
--:-- Noel King: So you'll know who to talk to, what to say, when to say it, and the best channel to deliver the message. The complete marketing platform has everything you need to start marketing your business today, explained, and they'll be there to help you as your business grows and needs new capabilities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let MailChimp help you market smarter. Learn more at MailChimp.com.
--:-- Noel King: Drew, I know we're mostly talking about fake video here, but I'm thinking if it's getting easier to manipulate video, it's got to be way easier to manipulate audio, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So fake audio is a big issue too. And these AI researchers are using some of the similar systems that they use with fake video to do audio matching where you can put in a bunch of audio from an original speaker and train the AI system to be able to change that person's voice and say whatever you want.
--:-- Noel King: The voices are surprisingly convincing. Like if you're just hearing it at a glance, you might be fooled.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I saw that these two Facebook engineers used AI to create audio clips of a bunch of famous people saying things they never said. And the Bill Gates ones were something. Two plus seven is less than 10. Poured as a strong wine with a smoky taste.
--:-- Noel King: The glow deepened in the eyes of the sweet girl. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was sort of wild.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And even fake text, like you can invent these whole fake news articles where, you know, you read it and it seems like a human wrote it, like the words make sense, it's convincing enough for potentially enough people.
--:-- Noel King: So all of these things are in the stew of misinformation and all of them are getting better way quicker than anybody really expected.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are there any technical solutions, any ways people can detect fakes?
--:-- Noel King: There's actually a research team led by this guy, Hani Farid, in California, where they'll take these really precise scans of, in this case, world leaders' faces.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so they have like this computer model of how somebody like Barack Obama facial features correlate with each other. You know when Barack Obama smiles he tends to tilt his head in this way.
--:-- Noel King: When he talks his cheek moves this way and his upper lip raises this way. And so then when they see a video later on, whether it's like a human impersonator trying to satirize them or whether it's like a total AI generated deep fake, they can compare the two and say, these facial tics don't really line up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the issue is that if you're not one of these world leaders who has had this, you're out of luck.
--:-- Noel King: Is this video detection tool public? Can anyone use it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Honey for Eats team has like made their research public now. They've given up some details of what they're looking at.
--:-- Noel King: But the specific tool that they have made to like test videos, they're really protective of. They don't want to just put it online for everybody to test because then they feel like the deep fake creators will find ways to poke holes in it, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they want to maybe give it to media outlets and fact-checking groups to be able to use it as news video comes out.
--:-- Noel King: But they're really afraid of, like, putting it out there more widely or else it'll be kind of misused to the point where it's almost useless.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What happens when the deep fakes get so good that even a program like that can't identify them? Is that a possibility?
--:-- Noel King: I think it is a possibility. And some of the researchers think that's only maybe a couple years away till we get a video that is so realistic that it convinces most, if not all, people who watch it that it was the real thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, this isn't just like a political thing. This could affect like criminal justice. I mean, video that's submitted into evidence in the courtroom.
--:-- Noel King: What if somebody has a fake video made of them doing something they never did? That's going to be a huge burden on the police to prove it, the jury to understand it, let alone like the people who are being accused of the crime in the first place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this isn't necessarily some wait and see thing that's coming in the future. We're already at a place where kids are following digitally created models on Instagram and don't even realize they're fake.
--:-- Noel King: We're at a point where people are sharing this Nancy Pelosi video and thinking that it's real and continue to believe that it's real even after they're told that it's fake?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it is really alarming that our own reality is already being questioned.
--:-- Noel King: I think it is. And these are like pretty big moments that people should be in agreement on, right? Like we all heard the Access Hollywood tape on our own, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like we all think we knew what happened there. And yet even there, there's disagreement. And with the Pelosi video too. Like we know it's fake. And yet the brain acts in interesting ways when we encounter even fake stuff.
--:-- Noel King: Like a fake video like the Pelosi video can get its message across even when you know it's fake. Like the message has been conveyed and it's important for people to be careful, but I almost think that that's not enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like we have to really engage with this idea that video at some point could be compromised. And what we see with our eyes may not always be like something we can truthfully believe.
--:-- Noel King: When video first came around and images came around, it was something like you were given a portal into this other world where what you were looking at was real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was a part of society somewhere else. You know, videos from Tiananmen Square, videos from the Vietnam War.
--:-- Noel King: These were like pivotal moments in how we understood the things around us. And they helped push the world to be a little bit different too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so if we get to a point where even that like window into the world is just another tool to be used by people who want to deceive you, that's a huge problem.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm worried we're going to be there sooner than we'd like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Drew Harwell is a self-proclaimed Washington Post human covering AI and the algorithms changing our lives.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Sean Ramos for him, a Vox human covering the news every day but not on the weekends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of the Today Explained humans are Irene Noguchi, Afim Shapiro, Bridget McCarthy, Noam Hassenfeld, Amina Al-Sadi, and Halima Shah.
--:-- Noel King: We've got two human interns right now, Will Reed and Alex Pena.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is obviously not a human.
--:-- Noel King: And by the by, Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Noel King: Thanks to MailChimp for supporting the show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Once again, their all-in-one marketing platform will really revolutionize your life because it will tell you who to talk to, what to say, when to say it, and the best channel to deliver the message.
--:-- Noel King: I mean, this is about marketing, not about like your social activities, but who knows, maybe it'll teach you a thing or two about that too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Learn more at MailChimp.com.
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