ZDNet - Nixon's unheard moon-disaster speech is now a warning about the deepfake future
“On September 29, the Emmy for interactive documentary went to 'In Event of Moon Disaster', a film that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create a fake video featuring former US President Richard Nixon. The film shows him delivering a speech that was prepared in case the Apollo 11 mission failed, leaving astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to die on the moon.
The multimedia project was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Virtuality, with a bit of help from a Ukrainian voice-cloning startup, Respeecher, which worked on Nixon's voice.
Alex Serdiuk, the CEO of Respeecher, says the idea behind this seven-minute film was to show what online misinformation will look like in the future. The project was ‘not just an opportunity to do cool stuff with our technology, but also to showcase what these technologies are capable of,’ he said.
In the years to come, deepfake videos might become more common on social media and more difficult to spot, with awful consequences at the societal level. It's already known that fake news tends to travel faster. An MIT study showed, for instance, that false claims are 70% more likely to be shared than truth.
This danger is why Serdiuk says it's his duty to help raise awareness on the misuse of deepfakes. ‘That's quite an important part of the work we do, educating society about synthetic media technologies,’ he tells ZDNet.”
Video:
https://youtu.be/LWLadJFI8Pk (Remember, this is fake)
My thoughts: There is much more in the article. The ethical questions that are raised in the article are valid. However, I don’t believe that this Pandora’s box can be closed and this technology will be used and abused.
post edited by Flint 1760 - 2021/10/22 07:34:16