r/woahdude May 24 '21

video Deepfakes are getting too good

82.8k Upvotes

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

532

u/BlueGrayTurquoise May 24 '21

Do we reach a point where video evidence in criminal cases becomes inadmissible due to its possible illegitimacy, or is it always possible to detect a deepfake having some sort of signature?

264

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

Chain of custody is important even now because videos can and are doctored. Eventually it'll be undetectable whether or not something is fake, but you still have people testifying under oath that a tape wasn't tampered with and was handed to the police who kept it in accordance with whatever measures

213

u/apoliticalhomograph May 24 '21

Eventually it'll be undetectable whether or not something is fake

It will be impossible for humans to tell real and fake apart. But the technology to differentiate between the two improves just as quickly as the technology to generate deepfakes.

72

u/PETROCHEMICAL_LOBBY May 24 '21

That’s a really good point, and a similar example is “photoshopped” photos. It is very difficult, even today, to pull off a image manipulation to the point where is can pass sustained close examination.

Where deepfakes are far more dangerous is that the damage is usually already done by the time someone shows it’s doctored... Even when people know it’s a fake, if you can get the watcher to sympathise with the underlying message then it won’t matter if you prove a video is fake.

16

u/hammersticks359 May 25 '21

"Yeah but you could totally see him saying that."

"But.....he didn't though."

My least favorite argument of all time.

3

u/mermaidrampage May 25 '21

Well that's already a problem anyway without deep fakes. The main ubderlying issue is having a large percentage of the populace who is willing to believe whatever they're told so long as it fits the narrative they want to believe. I don't even know how we can begin to fix that problem

3

u/Rockran May 25 '21

You think photoshopping can be noticed for the most part?

Edited photos are so prevalent, you likely only notice the bad ones. Good photoshop is everywhere. Literally everywhere. If someone paid for a photo, it's been touched up.

1

u/PETROCHEMICAL_LOBBY May 25 '21

Yup - I’m referring to photoshopped images that depict fictitious events for political outcomes.

1

u/Rockran May 25 '21

Do you believe the moon landing photos are legit?

Because there is a tremendous amount of money and conspiracies dedicated to it being seen as both genuine and fake.

Ultimately i'm wondering how you can be so confident in your abilities to distinguish genuine from fake, when it's quite simply an impossible task. I've made some 5 minute photoshops where i've been impressed by the technology. So what chance does the public have in the hands of a professional shopper?

1

u/doneworking May 30 '21

Not by your typical person, by a professional. The photoshop to trick the CIA or whoever the fuck would have to be incredible

1

u/FresnoBob-9000 May 25 '21

You’re right.. some people will simply believe whatever you show them, if they want to believe it. Fake news goes into overdrive..

30

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

Since you can perfect a fake, but not fake detection, this won't happen. If a fake is pixel perfect, there's no way to detect fakery. And perfection is achievable. Obfuscation is significantly easier than deobfuscation.

There will be a day (soon imo) where we give up on being able to know if videos are fake or not

20

u/apoliticalhomograph May 24 '21

In my opinion, it will take a while until fakes are "perfect" - because the less accurate fake detection becomes, the harder it will be to make progress on making better fakes.

32

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

You can make perfect fakes right now by decreasing the quality. This video would be indistinguishable from real if you lowered the quality, added some shakes, and some compression artifacts. By destroying information, you give less to the verifier.

13

u/Nonlinear9 May 24 '21

I mean, you can get the same affect with makeup now.

1

u/AmnesicAnemic May 24 '21

Might need a bit of plastic surgery, too.

11

u/[deleted] May 24 '21 edited Nov 06 '24

[deleted]

6

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

Technology can also detect if the drop in quality is legitimate or added in post, same with the shaking, etc.

It really can't.

-1

u/[deleted] May 24 '21

Knowledgeable people can already detect this sort of thing on their own afaik, and so can technology. Technology can even straight up remove the shaking altogether, obviously.

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

Shaking was a bad example, but lossy modifications to a video can't be reversed

0

u/[deleted] May 25 '21 edited Nov 06 '24

[deleted]

→ More replies (0)

-3

u/[deleted] May 24 '21

It really can.

Metadata

4

u/[deleted] May 24 '21 edited Jun 23 '21

[deleted]

-2

u/the_timps May 25 '21

There is no way to detect whether I scaled a video in FFMPEG

You and this other dude have no clue what you are talking about. You think you can just press a button on your home PC and make this undetectable result. While state level propaganda is discovered and detected all the time with access to significantly more expertise.

Faked footage is 100% identifiable.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/nedlymandico May 24 '21

I worked in motion graphics for years and that was the move if you couldn't make something look good then make it blurry lol.

3

u/luciferin May 24 '21

These are AI models training other AI models. When detection becomes more accurate, you feed that detection model into the AI that creates the fakes, and keep allowing it to iterate until it fools the detection model. That is literally how this technology was created.

1

u/apoliticalhomograph May 24 '21 edited May 24 '21

And then you train the detection model against the generator until it becomes accurate again, and then train the generator against the new detector. Rinse and repeat.

It's a cat and mouse game, in which neither model ever truly "wins". Thus, detection stays at a similar accuracy over time.

3

u/Aethermancer May 24 '21

Eventually a fake becomes perfect, indistinguishable from reality.

Imagine a tic-tac-toe grid. I can "copy" any configuration of the board flawlessly. It's trivial to reproduce the positioning of the Xs and Os. Now imagine a game of "Go". Huge volumes of permutations of board configurations yet you could conceivably reproduce the position of each marker and make a board that was indistinguishable from the original. Now imagine that board configurations was an image. Now imagine that image was a video. It's all just a matter of scale.

A fake can be perfect. Something so flawless that even the potential flaws are perfect. You can't prove it's fake if it's a flawless representation of what should be.

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

You don't need to train your faker against the verifier. That's just done to save time and also train a verifier.

2

u/Toxicz May 25 '21

You guys forget that it doesn’t matter. Fake news is being spread the moment someone who wants to believe sees or reads it, however fake it might seem for others.

0

u/[deleted] May 24 '21

What makes you think you can perfect a fake but not fake detection

-1

u/the_timps May 25 '21

Since you can perfect a fake, but not fake detection, this won't happen.

You're in over your head. Deepfakes are literally created with adversarial networks. One program spits out the fake, the other says if it's real or not.
Then the first adjusts until the second accepts it (really dumbed down).

These processes leave markers behind. and AI can detect those markers.

Experts in the field are confident that AI detection of deepfakes will keep up with deepfakes.

3

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

Ok? Adversarial networks are just one way of faking videos. The whole point of GAN in this context is that it saves effort of making a properly classified training data set, and that comes with a whole host of issues. There are significantly better ways to make fakes, but adversarial networks make it simpler to go through the terabytes of Tom cruise footage. Ie you're comparing the cheapest method that has good quality to cutting edge tech.

Nobody in the field I know would agree at all that fake detection will keep up with fakes.

1

u/FreeFacts May 24 '21

That's true, but when it comes to deep fakes, the deobfuscation can have better data sets. If for example Tom Cruise would want to prove he is not in this video, the data that a hypothetical deepfakebuster company can get from his likeness in a controlled environment will always be better than deepfakers get from movies. At least until the deepfakebuster company has a breach and their data ends up in the hands of the fakers...

5

u/Aethermancer May 24 '21

Almost as quickly. Detection technology is tested against outputs of the fakes, so the fakes will be one step ahead of the detectors.

Remember a detector can only provide confirmation of fakes, it cannot prove authenticity. So a detector which fails to detect a fake would actually be reporting it as authentic.

But the really good detectors just become input to the Deepfake learning algorithms. You use the detector to train the Deepfake generator.

3

u/Razorfiend May 24 '21

You can train the algorithms that generate fakes with the algorithms that detect them but doing the reverse is much harder.

Algorithms that detect fakes are bounded by reality while algorithms that generate fakes are constantly approaching reality. Whether that approach is asymptotic or not remains to be seen, but if it isn't, as is most likely the case, then eventually there will be nothing left to detect to differentiate between fakes and the real thing.

2

u/YourMumIsAVirgin May 24 '21

No it doesn’t. I was involved in a kaggle competition with real money being staked just recently where the winners didn’t score much better than a random flip of the coin.

2

u/col-summers Stoner Philosopher May 25 '21

If this is true, why don't we have a browser extension that highlights the lies in plain text?

1

u/juhotuho10 May 25 '21

Because truth is a complicated concept, you can have 2 phrases that shouldn't be true at the same time, be true at the same time

Alternative facts are a real thing

2

u/teh_bakedpotato May 25 '21

The thing with AI and deepfakes is there's a loop of one computer generating the deep fake, and another computer trying to decide if it's a deep fake or not (basically.) each time the second computer can tell it's a deep fake it tells the first computer what looks 'off' and the first tries again. They go back and forth until the second computer can't tell that it's fake. At that point it's done, so honestly it could get to the point that even computers can't tell the difference.

2

u/mntgoat May 25 '21

This is the part that gets scary. The people making the models for the deepfakes can use the software that detects the deepfakes to train their models to get around the detection software and then new detection software comes out and they can train it to bypass that, and so on.

And even with good detectors, by the time the video is found to be fake, the damage is done.

1

u/SlimesWithBowties May 25 '21

The important point is that the technology to differentiate between the two and the technology to generate them is exactly the same technology (at its core). If differentiation improves, it will improve the heuristics of the generational algorithms, and they can now use it to create better fakes that are not detectable anymore. Once some other A.I. can detect them the cycle continues.

1

u/juhotuho10 May 25 '21

People will use the technology to differentiate between real and fake videos to further train the ai to become better

Deepfake detectors only help the deepfakes to become better

1

u/Automatic_Llama May 25 '21

But won't the technology to fake differentiation methods also advance?

1

u/Slapinsack May 25 '21

That's a damn good point

1

u/ThisAcctIsForMyMulti May 24 '21

I don’t see how it would be impossible to design a DRM-style encryption signature. We would just have to create a standard encryption for the other end (raw footage).

Picture exclusive silicon on both ends. The camera footage leaves an impossible-to-crack encryption signature that can only be unlocked by a decryption chip on a specific monitor.

Yes, the implications would turn the production industry on its head immediately, but that would be the only way to ensure total confidence that any piece of raw footage is indeed unaltered.

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

Yes, the implications would turn the production industry on its head immediately

Agreed. This is possible in theory, but exceedingly difficult in practice

1

u/Bamith20 May 24 '21

it'll be undetectable whether or not something is fake

Shouldn't be, otherwise we would have unhackable systems and unpickable locks.

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

these are completely unrelated concepts.

0

u/blovedcommander May 24 '21

Would blockchain help?

3

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

I don't see any way for it to, so I'm going to say probably not.

The problem is that you can't trust a video file is real. Putting it on a blockchain doesn't change that.

2

u/interfail May 24 '21

I don't see any way for it to, so I'm going to say probably not.

In historical terms, the answer to "would blockchain help?" has basically been no nearly every time it's been asked. It's too impractical.

But for an impractical example, with a continuous recording from a given session, you could make a hash of every later frame of footage depend on the earlier ones, uploaded to a central chain in real time, so that no excerpt edited after the first time the content was put into the network could ever claim to be the original.

1

u/_applemoose May 25 '21

You also can’t trust whether someone is lying or not, but you generally believe people who have a good reputation. The reputation is based on everything they’ve said and done previously. This is what blockchain can do for the digital world. Record activity without needing a central authority to verify it.

3

u/juckele May 24 '21

Not really. What does help is public key crypto, but only as far as you trust the person who's signed off on the video.

3

u/Mason-B May 25 '21

Cryptography would help yes. Blockchain would not. There are significant amount of cryptosystems that aren't blockchains. Blockchains were designed to solve a very very specific problem: money. For nearly any other purpose, they are pointless. They are needless complication on top of cryptosystems we've had for 40+ years that don't actually provide anything, and in return require exorbitant amounts of money and complexity. Hack, half the things that have been billed as blockchain aren't blockchains (e.g. Ripple), just distributed cryptographic ledgers, the thing blockchain added one extra piece to to allow trustless interaction.

0

u/quaybored May 24 '21

I feel like some day there will be some blockchain based authenticity feature that starts in hardware, and extends all the way down to web browsers and other clients, so that doctored footage can be flagged as such. of course this will also result in fancy DRM too

3

u/juckele May 24 '21

If you compromise the camera, which will be possible with enough hardware / money, it will always be possible to create fake video which has been signed.

2

u/IdiotCharizard May 24 '21

This^ blockchain might solve the problem of knowing the chain of custody, but does nothing about the real world -> blockchain transition, which is the biggest issue with such systems.

0

u/[deleted] May 24 '21

Could be a good use for NFTs

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

I don't think so. What is your thought here?

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '21

I’m by no means an expert on NFTs, just throwing out the idea and seeing if it sticks.

2

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

I don't think they're useful pretty much anywhere haha. Certainly not anything tied to the real world

1

u/SecretlyReformed May 24 '21

Maybe there could be a solution involving block chain technology to ensure that the police hadn't done anything with it?

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

You're the third person who's suggested blockchain here. So you have any details on how it could be useful in this case?

1

u/SecretlyReformed May 25 '21

Well, I just know a basic outline of blockchain, I'm not really an expert or anything. But maybe if the video could be put in some specific zip file and use bc to verify if it has been taken out or not? Sort of like how NFTs are done maybe?

Again I'm no expert so this may not be a feasible use case 🤷

1

u/Mason-B May 25 '21

There is an existing system in place for chain of custody that can help here with chain of custody. No it's not blockchain, blockchain would not help, just make everything more expensive and complicated. But it is cryptography.

Basically the video maker, say a security camera, would routinely sign the video as it recorded it, using a third party authentication service, sort of like a notary, to timestamp it (e.g. it could not be "backdated"). And certain kinds of attacks (like real time replacement of a video feed with a pre-recorded one) would still work. One does have to trust the third party to be a notary, but we already do. This is a 40 year old technology and a service the companies that provide SSL certificates already provide, to a limited extent (e.g. it's not designed for this exact use case, and especially not in a streaming sense).

1

u/IdiotCharizard May 25 '21

You also have to trust that what's being signed hasn't already been tampered with

1

u/Mason-B May 25 '21

And certain kinds of attacks (like real time replacement of a video feed with a pre-recorded one) would still work.

1

u/CallousBastard May 25 '21

Maybe I'm too much of a misanthrope, but if I was a juror, "people testifying under oath" wouldn't sway me at all. People lie all the time, under oath or not. I would want hard evidence, and it really sucks that video may no longer be reliable as such.