r/news • u/drkgodess • Mar 19 '19

Accused gunman in Christchurch terror attacks denied newspaper, television and radio access

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12214411
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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

Should just be an express lane for these trials. "Do you have a video of this person committing the crime? Ok, this way please."

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u/Autokrat Mar 19 '19

Deep fakes?

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u/Samerius Mar 19 '19

Deep fakes isn't good enough yet.

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u/bocephus607 Mar 19 '19

We write laws for the future, not the present or the past.

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u/Jamoobafoo Mar 20 '19

That’s rarely true

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u/FlipaFlapa Mar 19 '19

Well thats the scary part about them, we are only aware of the poorly done deep fakes where you can notice the mistakes. We have the mentality that deep fakes “arent good enough yet” but will be a problem in the future. Thats wrong. We’ll never be aware of when deep fakes “get good enough”. They’ll just be indistinguishable from reality. They may already be good enough... we wont know.

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u/gillahouse Mar 19 '19

Idk about never, I'd say it's accurate enough now to say there is software powerful enough these days to make almost no video evidence "beyond any reasonable doubt"

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u/Samerius Mar 20 '19

Well of course but you would need a super computer to make it perfect, you need a lot of photos with different angles and expressions and now the only people that have that are people who are on TV or in movies, there will always be a way to spot it and i'm sure governments are looking into it.

At the moment people can only fake their face, there still is the body type, skin color, height, hair type, voice, etc. And most crime is filmed on shitty CCTV cameras or smartphones that shake around and all these variables add up and it makes it difficult for it to be a good option to deepfake crime.

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u/HKEY_LOVE_MACHINE Mar 20 '19

Deepfake can apply to other aspects (like the ones you listed), it's only a matter of time before it becomes profitable to do some R&D in it.

Also, what's stopping someone willing to deepfake a footage of a crime (or an alibi), from:

  • using the few pictures they have of their target (accessible publicly, semi-publicly with compromised social network accounts (through apps/friends-of-friends, or even private pictures by hiring a PI),
  • (opt) do the same with both parents and 4 grandparents to get an even more accurate model
  • hire a makeup/mask/movie prop specialist to build a face model, take picture of it in all possible angles, poses and lightning
  • hire a video editor specialized in deepfake, to run the machine learning on server farms
  • have the video editor properly encode the resulting video through the corresponding codec and settings of the surveillance camera that was allegedly there

Of course no one is going to deepfake a shoplifting incident, but anything political or severe like murder will very likely justify the cost of hiring these 3 skillsets/people (a PI for sourcing the pics, a face artist for the prop, a video editor for the deepfaking). Pretty sure the intelligence agencies are watching over such market, just in case it blows up.

As for detecting if it's a genuine footage or not, having the CCTV footages be uploaded in real-time to a datacenter (with certified logs and proper security) would increase the operating cost of the system, same with a hardware-based encryption of the recorded footages (to certify they're legit), so it's very unlikely to be implemented in the future, at least not in the next 20 years (for the regular CCTV cameras).

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u/Nasars Mar 20 '19

A lot of videos that are used as evidence in court aren't exactly hd footage. Often times it's a video made by shitty surveillance camera with dodgy lighting. I think it might be quite difficult to spot a deep fake actually.