Impersonation News

[Hornbein]

A new phenomenon is AI-generated news videos pretending to be by well-known professors Jeffery Sachs and John Mearsheimer. The amazing thing is that they both seem very tolerant of this. Youtube will block these if they request it but this has been going on for months and such blocks never seem to happen. The other surprise is that while they may be visually ugly or even grotesque the news analysis is quite good. If given the sound alone I don't believe I could tell it from the real thing. I suppose the two professors see it as getting their message out and thusly don't mind.

Such may be produced in mass quantities, up to six a day! I guess someone just says, produce me a video of the latest news in the style of Jeffery Sachs and that's all there is to it. Crank it out and broadcast it, done. Next hour, do it again.

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In vaguely related news someone used AI to convert Captain Beefheart's double album Trout Mask Replica to singing by an imaginary acapella troupe. It more toward good rather than great but it is a highly original concept. The creator says the group is real but I don't believe it. It's too accurate. Someone placed the original of a song in the left ear and the singing on the right and they are exactly in sync. For such complicated and eccentric stuff that's well beyond human capability. The other big clue is the hideous visuals. Is some group of five men going to do a huge amount of work -- five years he says -- and then allow themselves to be represented by such ugly crude figures? Not a chance.

 

[PeroK]

A lot of videos on YouTube are fake now. I've seen videos of Barack Obama and Warren Buffet, where I've thought there must be something wrong. Here's a news item. The future looks very scary to me.

 

[jedishrfu]

They don't block them for a reason, it's a whack-a-mole game. There’s so many that it's impossible to see them all so they all acquiesce.

Youtube should be blocking them because they can but they don't because will hurt their business model.

 

[256bits]

Just six months ago not so much a problem. Used to run across videos of high profile individuals such as AI Musk, selling financial advice.
Now it seems to have proliferated to made up stories ( that have comments as if the story is true life ) and AI generated world events as if it really happened.
As long as revenue is generated these things will continue to channel out drowning out searches for real content.
At the very least, AI Generated should be mandated as a signal on each for the unsuspecting.
That will have to come some day we wish.