Mark Richards, one of Kyle Rittenhouse’s lawyers, argued that using an iPad to zoom in on a video should not be allowed because Apple’s AI creates “what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there.” Judge Bruce Schroeder totally bought into that possibility and ruled that the jurors were only allowed to view the video in its original size. Continue Reading →

Weaponizing Deepfakes

As part of a smear campaign designed to eliminate her daughter's cheerleading rivals, a woman in Bucks County, Penn., created deepfakes depicting her daughter's rivals naked, drinking, or smoking. Then, according to the Bucks County DA, she sent them to her daughter's coaches and to the victims of her attack with text messages urging the teenaged girls to kill themselves. Continue Reading →
Dinner
This past week, I sat with my friends to count our blessings and rejoice in the season of winter festivals. It will not surprise you to learn that we had some unexpected guests including the President of the United States. Not in person, of course, but he was “in the house.” I won’t bore you with the general split. You already know everything you need to know about the topic and what each side believes. But here’s what I didn’t know. The people who are most influenced by sockpuppeted, bot-influenced, social media-infused, AI-generated, deepfaked content are the ones who are the most certain that they are not influenced at all. Continue Reading →
Deepfakes
For about 200,000 years, we have relied on our eyes and ears to separate truth from lies and fact from fiction. Even if we ignore the rise of fake news (and how difficult it is to do anything about it), technology (like deep learning) is on the verge of making it impossible to know if what you are seeing and hearing is real or fake. This white paper contains an overview of deep learning technology and how it is being applied to create audio and video content that is indistinguishable from audio and video created with state of the art recording technologies. Continue Reading →
I do not exist
Facebook is getting into the dating game. Deepfakes are getting better and better. Put them both together and they present a potential reality as sinister as it is deceitful. Imagine online dating in a world replete with deepfakes. Continue Reading →
Google
Fifty attorneys general are joining an investigation into Google over possible antitrust violations according to the initiative’s leader, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. I understand both the desire and the need for our government to get a handle on the issues surrounding data privacy, but think about this… let’s say that the outcome is a Continue Reading →
Shelly Palmer on Fox 5
How can we protect the 2020 election from deepfakes? Shelly Palmer speaks with Kerry Drew and Robert Moses on Fox 5 New York's Good Day about what Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing to help solve the problem. Original Airdate: September 10, 2019 Continue Reading →