Really Deep Fakes

Tyler Lovelace

tslovelace1@gmail.com / tl915117@ohio.edu

This may just be the best press Lori Loughlin has had in a long time. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUphMqs1vFw

Humor is such a strange, subjective thing. As shown in the lecture this week, I would love nothing more than to live in a world where every movie is a Nicholas Cage movie or where Ron Swanson was everywhere you look. Some content creators, like Dr. Fakenstein on YouTube, create these humorous clips meant to subvert expectations and provide levity in an all too challenging world. Sadly, not everyone has such light-hearted intentions. As we also saw in this lecture, people are using these advancements in nefarious ways. The question becomes, like many of our readings this week also asked, where does photo manipulation cross the line from content enhancement to falsification?

This is an easy line to draw with things like deepfake. They are often so outrageous and humorous that they are easily identifiable. While the expressions match very well, it is easy to see where they sometimes bleed into the background like in the video above. Additionally, you will never see a fully high-definition deepfake because, while technology has advanced drastically over the years and seems to continue to leap forward by the second, we have not yet reached a stage where graphical fidelity can match reality. As an avid fan of the video game medium, some truly fantastic, near photo-realistic things that have been produced in the last few years. Even movies have begun more consistently relying on computer-generated graphics overlaid on top of actual footage. Some films, like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, had me fooled for a while when I was in the theater - until I remembered that the actor portrayed and recreated had passed in 1994. 

Whenever something has begun to delve too deeply into manipulation, the ethical discussion ramp up. I have not found a deepfake that has fooled me yet, because even though life is full of (and defined by) little imperfections, computers are not able to mimic the rules of imperfection that have become almost second-nature for us to interpret. They can be used comedically, but should never be used for false advertising or official use. The news should not be filled with doctored images or videos, as the element of faith and trust need to be consistent for those liberties to remain true to their standards. Again, I think that magazine covers and advertisements can manipulate images (like removing water droplets), so long as they only enhance the image that was taken without invalidating their meaning. However, TIME, History, and other news related magazines and any reputable news agency should never allow an image that has been doctored, touched, shaded, or in any way manipulated to uphold that tenet of truth.

These technologies will do nothing but advance more and more. We even have a small part to play in some machine learning of how to detect, and possibly recreate, elements in certain images. The common security measure CAPTCHA has had its uses altered over the years and has even been known to fool itself. The Verge spoke about this history and how it may influence our future in technology of photo manipulation and also artificial intelligence.