The Press
Motherboard writes yesterday:
We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now
A user-friendly application has resulted in an explosion of convincing face-swap porn.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley
From The Verge, about a year ago:
Watch a man manipulate George Bush’s face in real time
https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/21/11275462/facial-transfer-donald-trump-george-bush-video
TNW, two days ago:
I trained an AI to copy my voice and it scared me silly
https://thenextweb.com/insights/2018/01/22/i-trained-an-ai-to-copy-my-voice-and-scared-myself-silly/
The Future
What will the world look like when anyone can simulate anyone else's voice or face, realistically, in realtime, from publicly available data?
What will social media look like when face swapping anyone or any expression on any image or video, real or rendered, is a few taps away?
What about when this is applied to writing or texting styles?
Already, seeing is not believing. Soon, this technology will be everywhere, and a lot of the things we took for granted in society will no longer hold true.
It's not just advertising and video chats; this will be done in realtime for news, presentations, all manner of things. The resolution and accuracy will only increase with time. Soon, videos like the one of Eric Garner that spawned an entire movement will be rendered relatively powerless due to their perceived inadmissibility in the court of public opinion, as anyone will be able to generate anything that looks like implication for any person or group they don't like. The real whistleblowing videos will get lost in the cosmic background radiation of a continuous and contiguous internet outrage (at almost entirely manufactured and extremely realistic-looking content produced to drive someone's specific agenda).
This is a really interesting future we're faced with. Right in the middle of the generation when everyone got a networked video camera in their pocket, video and audio was rendered irrelevant as a primary source for independent decision-making.
Hold on to your butts.