The Future of Fake News | Simon Adler | TEDxIndianaUniversity

all right so uh back in October of 1910 a guy by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for state senator in the great state of New York and our buddy Frank he was having some troubles because he wasn't really a known entity at the time uh and despite the fact that in New York City where he was living uh he was known and popular by Democratic donors and the Democratic electorate upstate he was either not known or sort of reviled reason being he was seen as this Silk Stocking city slicker who couldn't possibly imagine the the plight of the working man and just couldn't represent the the citizens of upstate New York I'm so he had to figure out like what the heck am I gonna do about this and after lots of thinking he came up with this sort of revolutionary idea which will sound funny now but this idea was you know what I'm gonna go campaign in a car and the reason that was revolutionary was because there are very few cars on the road at this time probably about the same amount then as there are self-driving cars on the road now so imagine like I don't know who Indiana's state senator is but driving around in a self-driving car you'd think like this guy's kind of a piece of work so anyways he comes up with this plan he's like this is gonna allow me to shake hands with more and more people who's gonna be great however when he brought this proposal to his aides they were like Franklin you can't do this is a terrible idea because there's so few cars they're seen as these luxury items that only the rich and wealthy have and it's going to further ingrain the very idea that you were trying to dispel here that you are a city slicker with a bunch of money and he pushes back and says no no no no no I I will overcome that just let me do this thing so on a Sunday on a sunny morning I in early October he along with his driver who was a piano tuner and knew the back roads of upstate New York very well from going to house to house to tune the pianos they hopped in a red car with no roof and started winding their way through the dusty backroads of upstate New York and what they did was they yielded the right away to every horse and buggy that that they came across and more than that every time they passed a field with a farmer in it Franklin would get out in his three-piece suit and expensive leather shoes and trudged through the barley or wheat or corn or whatever it was go shake the hand of the homesteader the farmer and say I hope I can count on your vote on November 8th and when November 8th finally did come it turned out that it had worked he had managed to talk to enough people and sort of present himself to enough people to dispel these feelings that he was out of touch and when the ballots were cast and counted it turned out that he had received enough from upstate to win win the election and became a senator in New York City excuse me in New York State now what I love about this anecdote is it seems to capture sort of perfectly what it takes to win an election particularly a national one now a hundred years plus in the future and that would be number one being able to harness a new technology in a way that allows you to reach out and connect with more people than your opponent and more importantly than that to be able to do so in a way that feels authentic history is rife with examples of this sticking with FDR for a moment he went on to do his fireside chats which I'm sure you have all heard about in American history class where he would go into essentially every living room in America and talk to people as if he was sitting right there JFK understood the power of television better than anyone before him and was able to broadcast himself into living rooms across American make people feel like he was right there Barack Obama more recently really took hold of mass emailing big data and social media in a way to connect with young people like nobody ever had and most recently whether you love him or hate him Donald Trump we have to give him that he really harnessed the 24-hour news cycle and Twitter better than anyone before him and I think what you see and all these examples are is a man who is connecting with thousands or millions of people well at the same time making those people feel like he is just speaking to them and I think this is what sort of we long for as Americans in our politicians we want somebody to feel authentic no it's probably news to nobody in this room that there's been sort of a rash of we could call them inauthentic news stories circulating throughout America over the past year year and a half or some speaking of fake news and the reason that these two juxtaposing ideas I think have been in my head is because I'm worried that we that we are on the precipice of a new technology two of them actually that are going to enable politicians to betray this thirst for ident or this thirst for authenticity that we have and maybe even worse sort of undermine what's at the fundament of our democracy so these two technologies I'm talking about were originally introduced to me by a writer for Vanity Fair a guy by the name of Nick Bilton and the first one is something called vocal synthesis so whether you know it or not you all have very likely interacted with vocal synthesis it is what a allows Siri on your iPhone to speak back with you or speak back at you also Stephen Hawking he's one of the most famous folks who has used vocal synthesis for a very long time to facilitate his ability to speak and well this technology has been around for a long time the way it has historically worked is you got to bring a voice actor into a studio sit him down for hours or tens of hours and have them read thousands of these little nonsense words words that then after these dozens of hours of recordings are done an engineer has to go into the studio chop all those recordings up into tiny tiny tiny pieces and then label what they are put them into a database with all the proper labels and then when you or I or whoever has access to this text-to-speech program can type in whatever they want and it will make sort of a robotic sounding version of a human saying whatever the heck it is you wanted to say this technology however in just the past year has sort of entered its adolescence and like all adolescents or good adolescents it's beginning to mature very quickly and one think about specifically is a program that adobe the folks that make Photoshop just showcased about a year ago it's called voco and their hope is that voco will do two audio what Photoshop has done two images so essentially what it can do is I don't mean to pick on you but let's say that I I'm a radio reporter I stick a microphone in your face for 20 minutes I ask you some silly questions and you just sort of talk at me for 20 minutes I could take that audio file feed it into voco VOCA will spend about three seconds automatically doing all of that slicing and labeling and databasing and then in a little text box that pops up in the program I can type whatever I want and I can make you say in your own voice indistinguishably whatever the heck it is I want to make you safe so let's say I don't know what's something you probably really dislike we're in Indiana like go Buckeyes go like would that be something that would or go Badgers I don't know who'd is Indiana now like but anyway is a problematic right it's not too difficult to imagine the negative consequences of this but uh just just to drive the point home let's take a quick look at this I'm gonna do some context just in case instead of kissing her you know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful I just started kissing them it's like a magnet when your star they let you do it you can't do anything whatever you want his legs elegance easily no I want to play okay so that of course is uh the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump back in 2005 bragging about sexually assaulting a woman on top of the fact or maybe or I guess what I want to point out is and what's worth noticing is that everything vilde that he said he said before he in fact got off the bus and so if this sort of technology was pervasive at the time that this video came out it's hard to imagine him not saying it's fabricated I never said that somebody made me say that and that means we're about to enter a moment where anyone will be able to plausibly deny anything that's ever been recorded of them saying or maybe worse someone will be able to make some make anyone say whatever they want and we won't really know whether they said it problematic but let's imagine for a second that that video camera had been on the bus it was trained right on Donald Trump's face as he spewed these these misogynistic thoughts he we'd get him then right like there's no way we're working around that well let's take a look at technology number two that I'm thinking about here if we can see that on the video screen we present a novel real-time facial reenactment method that works with any kimono a web cam since our method only uses RGB data for both the source and target actor we are able to manipulate YouTube videos in real time ok as you'll notice here the man on your right eye is controlling the face of George Bush this is something known as facial reenactment or facial animation software and the way it works is in real-time it allows for with just this the program in a standard web cam that you can buy at Best Buy or wherever for ten dollars it turns on looks at your face figures out the geometry of your face then does the same for whoever is in the pre-recorded video and then in real time allows who's ever on the webcam to puppeteer or control the face of whoever is in the video now let's imagine for a second that somebody has their hands on both these technologies the facial reenactment as well as the vocals in ptosis suddenly that person has the ability to make it look like anyone [Music] is saying whatever it is they want that person to say yeah let's just think of some examples here I guess Russia could release a video of Hillary Clinton saying I in fact was very happy that those folks were killed in Benghazi the right-wing extremists could release a video of Barack Obama saying got yeah I'm not American and I am Muslim left-wing extremists could release a video of Steve Bannon reading from mine comp from memory or just spewing it from memory we're on the edge of entering a moment where any politician their supporter or some third party actor is going to be able to prove whatever narrative it is that they want to prove I will say before we get too worried that the technology is not perfect yet it's pretty good but it's not perfect for the radio show I work for Radio lab we actually got our hands on some early versions of both of these pieces of technology and made a video clip of Barack Obama saying something that he never said so let's take a quick look at that now on the backend now of my presidency now that it's almost completed although there are all kinds of issues that I care about the single most important thing I can do is wait no because our parties have moved further and further apart and it's harder and harder to find common ground so you know when I said in 2004 that there were no red states or blue states for the United States of America that was wrong all right so not perfect right but for a group of people with absolutely no technological know-how and because of journalistic ethics weren't allowed to pay anybody a penny I don't think it's that bad and more than that let's consider the fact that these things are only going to get better they're only going to get better and they're about to be in the pockets of everyone in this room because although these technologies are not yet out on the consumer market from the folks I talked to we're looking at six months to a year before you can go into the App Store and for $0.99 or $4.99 download some versions of these programs and so that brings us back to sort of the dance I was mentioning at the top of this that well we are constantly chasing authenticity our politicians are chasing after whatever it is that will scratch that itch for us and so I think the question is no longer how is fake news going to play out in the 2020 presidential election but rather how are we gonna react to option number one worst-case scenario is we elect someone into office based on completely false information or actually I guess worse than that would be prior to that happening someone releases a video of Kim Jong Un's saying that he has fired a nuclear missile at the United States the federal government unwittingly responds believing it to be true and sets off a nuclear exchange that was never meant to happen the second option which is an option that I actually had to sort of puzzle over whether I even believed it possible or not because I'm not super optimistic about this is that we all no longer blindly accept these mediums as authentic we no longer believe that everything we see in here is true we have to get a heck of a lot smarter and we have to critically engage with every single piece of audio and video we come across and if we're able to do that we will be able to rob these technologies of some of their power if we can do that then at least for a while will require our politicians to find the next thing that makes us feel like they're real thanks so much you

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Views: 14,118

Rating: 4.6300578 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Ethics, Future, Software

Id: mHtbTyQuX1A

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017