Free Republic

..CNN and MSNBC were gushing with relief that Joe Biden got through his acceptance speech without any glaring gaffes except the nonsensical final line, conservatives were gobsmacked by the sheer vacuousness of it. >snip< But was Joe’s speech broadcast to us live, and just as delivered? He was not in front of a live audience; he was behind a podium on a bare stage with all the flags and colorful background added digitally using the same technique – blue-screen - that TV weathermen use to stand in front of a weather map. He was clearly reading every word from the...

A Republican candidate running for a St. Louis-area House seat has published a 23-page document outlining a conspiracy theory that the footage of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man whose death in police custody has ignited weeks of protests, was staged to inflame racial tensions. “We conclude that no one in the video is really one person but rather they are all digital composites of two or more real people to form completely new digital persons using deepfake technology,” Winnie Heartstrong, who is running against Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), wrote. The document, which Heartstrong claims was written with the aid of...

Last month during ESPN’s hit documentary series The Last Dance, State Farm debuted a TV commercial that has become one of the most widely discussed ads in recent memory. It appeared to show footage from 1998 of an ESPN analyst making shockingly accurate predictions about the year 2020. As it turned out, the clip was not genuine: it was generated using cutting-edge AI. The commercial surprised, amused and delighted viewers. What viewers should have felt, though, was deep concern. ~snip

Experts say deepfakes will be used to swing the 2020 election. deepfake video featuring an actor made to look and sound like the comedian Joe Rogan surfaced last week, stunning for its audio and visual accuracy. And Rogan was a great choice: He’s put out hundreds of hours-long video podcasts. There is a lot of material to work with. If you’re not yet aware of what a deepfake is in the first place, it’s a way of using artificial intelligence to create fraudulent audio or video that sounds and/or looks like a particular person. In this case, we’re seeing a...

A fake video of President Trump shooting, stabbing and brutally assaulting media personalities and political opponents was played at a conference for his supporters at his Miami resort last week, the New York Times reported Sunday. Donald Trump Jr., former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) were all scheduled to speak at the three-day conference hosted by American Priority at Trump National Doral Miami. Sanders and a person close to Trump Jr. told the Times that neither one saw the video. The Hill has reached out to DeSantis's office. The video, which includes...

Google has announced it has released a data set containing 3,000 deepfake videos it has created. Google hopes the release of the videos will allow researchers to develop ways to combat malicious deepfakes, giving them, news organizations, and the public ways to identify “synthetic” videos—that is videos manipulated by or entirely created using computers. Deepfakes at first came onto the scene in 2017 and were mainly used in crude, falsified porn videos. The technology originally allowed for people with limited computer skills to easily paste the face of, for example, an actress onto a porn star’s body. But since then...

Voice mimicking software imitated a company executive’s speech and tricked an employee into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. The managing director of a British energy company, believing that his boss was on the phone, wired more than $240,000 to an account in Hungary this March, French insurance company Euler Hermes told the outlet. The insurer declined to name the company. The managing director told the Post in an email that the request was “rather strange,” but the voice was lifelike to the point that he felt he had no choice...

In 2019, you don’t have to be just afraid of hackers who may leak your closely guarded private photos. A newly developed artificial neural network only needs to be fed a normal picture to replace your clothes with what's under them. An anonymous ‘technology enthusiast’ has created an app which is able to undress a fully clothed person within a couple of clicks, triggering concerns over the ethics of such technology and non-consensual photo sharing. The app in question is called DeepNude – a play on the new term deepfake – an AI-assisted technology that superimposes faces onto other bodies...

Pornography online attracts millions of erotica-hungry people ready to see sex on-demand. You can simply ask your phone to show you anything you desire and there it is: any time, any place. With the advent of deepfake porn, the possibilities have expanded even further, with people who have never starred in adult films looking as though they’re doing sexual acts on camera. Experts have warned that these videos enable all sorts of bad things to happen, from paedophilia to fabricated revenge porn. What are deepfakes? Deepfakes are videos and images that use deep learning AI to forge something not actually...

One minute YouTube video features a motion video mix of Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Lawrence. His face is grafted onto Jennifer Lawrence's head. His facial expressions almost perfectly mix with the speech of Jenn Lawrence. It all works with her dynamic facial turns as she made an Hollywood award-related speech in the video. While the quality of this amateur work product is very high, Freepers will probably consider a similar GoldenShower product made against a political enemy by a government with an unlimited budget. Further development of this tech is inevitable and a politically-minded public should adjust its mindset...

Washington (AFP) – If you see a video of a politician speaking words he never would utter, or a Hollywood star improbably appearing in a cheap adult movie, don’t adjust your television set — you may just be witnessing the future of “fake news.” “Deepfake” videos that manipulate reality are becoming more sophisticated due to advances in artificial intelligence, creating the potential for new kinds of misinformation with devastating consequences. As the technology advances, worries are growing about how deepfakes can be used for nefarious purposes by hackers or state actors. “We’re not quite to the stage where we are...

Lawmakers and experts are sounding the alarm about "deepfakes," forged videos that look remarkably real, warning they will be the next phase in disinformation campaigns. The manipulated videos make it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, as artificial intelligence technology produces fake content that looks increasingly real. The issue has the attention of lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill. “It is almost too late to sound the alarm before this technology is released — it has been unleashed … and now we are playing a bit of defense,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) told The...

Scary: What would happen if a hostile foreign power could harness the technology to be able to produce high-quality audio and video of people saying things they never said or doing things they have never done? What kind of an impact could that have on, say, our democratic and electoral processes? It would be devastating and could perhaps even destroy the tenuous civil society that remains after years of Democrats attempting to sow distrust in our systems by claiming elections were “stolen” either by Russians or sinister Republicans. And yet, thanks to artificial intelligence, the day when an adversary can...

AUSTIN, Texas — U.S. leaders say Vladimir Putin used a familiar cyber playbook to “muck around” in the midterm elections last month, but intelligence officials and key lawmakers believe a much more sinister, potentially devastating threat lies just down the road — one that represents an attack on reality itself. Policy insiders and senators of both parties believe the Russian president or other actors hostile to the U.S. will rely on “deep fakes” to throw the 2020 presidential election cycle into chaos, taking their campaign to influence American voters and destabilize society to a new level. The eerie process, which...

WASHINGTON – New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot what is phony. Lawmakers and intelligence officials worry that the bogus videos — called deepfakes — could be used to threaten national security or interfere in elections, including the U.S. midterms...

Researchers are showing off a creepy new software that uses machine learning to allow people to add, delete or change the words coming out of someone's mouth. The work is the latest evidence that our ability to edit what gets said in videos and create so-called deepfakes is becoming easier, posing a potential problem for election integrity and the overall battle against online disinformation. ..." In order to produce video fakes, scientists combined several techniques. First, they scan a target video to isolate phonemes spoken by the person — those are the sounds that make up words, such as "oo" and...

Evan McMullin doesn’t want you to know who his donors are. The failed Never Trump presidential candidate has stayed in the public eye as a sort of attack dog against President Trump and other Republicans, while keeping secret the names of the donors paying him to do so. McMullin’s recently founded non-profit organization, Stand Up Republic, jumped into the Alabama Senate race this week with a $500,000 ad buy against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. One of the ads features a man saying Roy Moore “makes Republicans and us Christians look bad.”

Reid Hoffman, a billionaire who was allegedly involved in a false information campaign in Alabama, played a crucial role in developing software capable of creating “deepfake” news articles, sources confirmed.Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggests he distanced himself from OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements about the direction researchers were taking the group. One of the big tech billionaires responsible for financing a project creating “deepfake” news articles is a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and Democratic donor.  The liberal billionaire who allegedly backed a misinformation campaign during the midterm elections played a significant role in funding a group responsible for creating a...