Fake News Spawns Fake Videos

Does the saying "I'll believe it when I see it" still hold true with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence software?  What used to take hours upon hours of editing to create a fake video now only takes a couple of hours and can be managed by software that is readily available to the consumer.  "Home-computing hardware is now cheap enough for this sort of thing to be done by anyone" according to Bay Area artist and engineer Alexander Reben.

The technology is so advanced that it's hard to discern the fake videos from the unaltered videos.  Take for example a video that was created by a research team at the University of Washington.  They obtained fourteen hours of President Obama's weekly addresses and used them to train a neural network to sync his lips to the audio.  The result is a video of President Obama lip syncing to an audio compilation of him.

Engineers are not only writing algorithms to combat fake news, now they are dealing with fake videos. [1 image, 1 link, 1 quotation, 169 words]