The First Fake is The Deepest

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Dear friends,

If there is one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s that the best way to avoid things you don't like is to call them fake. (H/T Trump.) The news that RBG fell down and fractured three ribs? Fake. (Please get well soon.) The rumor that we wore the same pair of pants four days this week? Fake. Pete Davidson proposing to Maggie Rogers on SNL? That one was actually fake, although felt plausible. Which, like...exactly! Every day, mind-boggling real stuff happens/real news is called fake/video footage -- previously a trusted source of truth -- is doctored.

These are not photoshopped images of the early aughts. These are not intricate Picnik collages. These are not pics of you photoshopped in between two Jonas brothers, or of you inexplicably copied and pasted next to yourself -- proving, once and for all, that you are your own deepest fake. These are deepfakes: realistic images/videos manipulated using AI. And they’re becoming a more urgent threat.

The Manly app, which apparently lets men give themselves unrealistic fake eight-packs, is not an example of a damaging deepfake (except if you are being catfished).

The ability to create this realistic video of Vladimir Putin speaking ominously in a coat, if it falls into the wrong hands, is.

This week, deepfakes were in the real news: Jim Acosta was stripped of his White House press pass after asking tough questions of the President at a briefing; Sarah Huckabee Sanders retweeted a clip of Acosta quasi-karate chopping a White House intern (taken from a conspiracy website!!) to justify the expulsion; and people started calling the video “doctored.”

The truth of this situation is more complicated. Well, not that much more complicated—the video was very clearly not an accurate portrayal of reality. Acosta barely touched the intern, and SHS retweeted something misleading that helped her administration’s case against a free press. But the video wasn’t that nefariously sophisticated: it was just a weird low-fi gif version of the original, which means it slowed down and sped up and dropped frames. Is this deep faking? Or a simple technical blunder (albeit one amplified by the literal White House)?

Does it matter? As Charlie Warzel noted in Buzzfeed, “The entire ordeal is a near-perfect example of a scenario disinformation experts have predicted and warned of, where the very threat of video manipulation can lead to a blurring of reality.” In other words, as the website IT World points out dramatically, Fakes Don’t Have To Be Deep To Be Dangerous.

Get ready for more reality to be blurred, more of the time! Frank Foer, in his alarming piece about video manipulation in the May issue of The Atlantic, drops a line that we think about often: “The collapse of reality  isn’t an unintended consequence of artificial intelligence. It’s long been an objective—or at least a dalliance—of some of technology’s most storied architects.”

Reading List of People in Large Publications Worrying Abt Deepfakes:

In the Age of AI, Is Seeing Believing? (New Yorker)

Video Doesn’t Capture Truth (The Atlantic)

Will Deep-Fake Technology Erode Democracy (NYT)

Deepfake Videos are Getting Real and That’s a Problem (WSJ)

MEMES FOR ELITIST TEENS

Mark Zuckerberg has apparently been engaging with Harvard students in their Facebook meme group. He joined the group this week and came in hot with lines such as: “This group is wonderful.”

Perhaps he is riding high due to the positive press his social network has received for playing a lesser role in eroding democracy during this election cycle. He also voted.

We wonder if he’s seen the research from Yale alleging that Facebook was actually started in 17th century France. We smell a The Social Network sequel with more periwigs!!

Loyal reader Ana C reminded us that this meme group move by Zuckerberg is not unprecedented -- Martin Shkreli pulled a similar maneuver when he joined a Columbia meme group in 2017. Wack man! Wack move.

MEAT IS IN THE AIR

Beloved podcast about women and crypto, Zigzag, released an episode this week called “Meat World Matters.” It was about interactions in real (meat) space, as opposed to cyberspace. Great episode and great title! Also, Sarah wrote about gathering in the 2018 meat world at a Daybreaker event. It was weird!

Thank u next

The midterm elections are over! Some amazing women won: Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women elected to Congress; Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first Native American women elected to Congress; and Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts' first black congresswoman. Also, Gretchen Whitmer, who won Michigan Governor (notable for her favorite song, “Good as Hell,” by Lizzo. Same.)

Updates on things we (and by extension, maybe you!) were following:

Prop C -- the homelessness tax on San Francisco tech companies, mostly -- passed with 60 percent of the vote. But since it didn’t get the ⅔ majority that some people say citizen-initiated tax measures need, it might face years of legal challenges. Also, the founder of Zynga called Prop C the “dumbest, least thought out prop ever.” To which we say, Café World was the dumbest, least thought out answer to Diner Dash.

Remember West Virginia’s blockchain pilot?! Apparently, 144 people in 30 countries used it, without a hitch. (Or at least, a reported one.)

Olivia Wilde -- who we loved in technological thriller Tron -- has a mom named Leslie Cockburn, who lost her race for a Virginia Congressional against a man who watches bigfoot erotica.

Laura Kelly, not to be confused with Lora Kelley, is now governor of Kansas! She beat the dreadful Kris Kobach. Lora says congrats!

TASTY BITES:

Suss: Over half of the crypto outlets this writer asked said they would accept money in exchange for giving press to a crypto startup (Breaker)

A Woman of the Web of the Week: Heather Hiles, who raised VC in NY because she felt SV investors were narrow in their view of what founders deserving of funding looked like (Inc)

Karen Hao wrote a guide to AI on the back of a napkin. Honestly? Helpful! (MIT Tech Review)

HQ2 might go to two places, which are coincidentally basically the two regions in which Lora and Sarah live. We are not that stoked!! (CityLab)

And while Amazon still allows the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, to sell their merch, Paypal announced today that they’d cancel the Boys’ accounts. (The Verge)

This video of Pokemon dancing to “Why Did You Do That” from A Star is Born shows us the best of what video technology can offer.

Keep it real,

Sarah and Lora