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.

 

[sbrothy]

... and "if wishes were fishes...", as (I think) someone said. I suspect it'll continue to be one big ugly mess...

EDIT: In fact, this thread made me glad that I seldom watch "random" videos online.

 

[Hornbein]

I found out that most of the news I’d been listening to for the past few months had been generated by AI impersonators! So what I do now is expose myself only to trusted sources and assume all else is fake. That’s easy, so now the interesting question is, why was I so bamboozled?

What I wrongly thought was that content was being stolen from my trusted sources and repackaged with ugly AI visuals. So why not listen to it. Eventually I realized that the quantity of the stuff was much too high. Larry C. Johnson isn’t producing six videos every day. I was thrown off for a while because the channel had his name on it. But this was just because Larry had innocently neglected to use his own name for his channel. The faker was able to appropriate it and thusly the impersonation channel was named Larry C. Johnson. Another reason I was hornswoggled was that I thought the people like Larry would have Youtube terminate impersonation channels. But on reflection one realizes that this is not so easy. The problem is that the impersonators were NOT copying content. Instead they would tell an AI to “generate a video of the latest news in the style of Larry C. Johnson,” which they could do every hour. So the videos are in a sense original. Larry can’t show that any copyrighted work was copied, so it isn’t that easy to build a case.

The other thing was that while the visuals were hideous the imitations of the voices and thoughts of people like Johnson were quite convincing. This had me fooled. Pundits like Johnson release hundreds of authentic videos and their views seldom if ever change. AIs are very good at imitating such things. The fake Larry would challenge the lies of the media as he always does. Those lies also persist for years, so the AIs just copy the challenges he has made in the past. So the news was actually quite believable, not at all manipulative fake news. I was tempted to keep listening to it, but nah.

 

[Hornbein]

This video includes a Fox News report of Russian warships in Cuba and Venezuela. This would be very big news. Real or fake?



I say fake. The channel name is Secure Free Society. I have no faith in them, and others reporting this show equally dubious sources.

 

[QuarkyMeson]

This doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. Large content creators and celebrities' should just take a note from the cryptographic world and start issuing certificates that a video is legitimate and video hosting platforms like YouTube and Facebook (and end users to some extent) should be liable to verify the certificate before hosting (or believing) videos of public figures.

 

[QuarkyMeson]

This video includes a Fox News report of Russian warships in Cuba and Venezuela. This would be very big news. Real or fake?



I say fake. The channel name is Secure Free Society. I have no faith in them, and others reporting this show equally dubious sources.

This is legitimate. PBS source

They do this all the time. They're even talking about putting missiles in Cuba again. Around and around we go.

 

[Hornbein]

This is legitimate. PBS source

They do this all the time. They're even talking about putting missiles in Cuba again. Around and around we go.

Just goes to show, I can't tell anymore. And if I can't tell truth from fiction then why should anyone else be able to.

 

[Hornbein]

The latest wrinkle is that I block these phony sites and Youtube keeps recommending them regardless. Shows how much respect they have for my wishes.