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James Cameron Warns of 'The Dangers of Deepfakes' (bbc.com) 83

Posted by EditorDavid from the rise-of-the-machines dept.
Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares this transcript of James Cameron's new interview with the BBC — which they've titled "The Danger of Deepfakes."

"Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point," James Cameron says... James Cameron: Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point. I've worked at the cutting edge of visual effects, and our goal has been progressively to get more and more photo-real. And so every time we improve these tools, we're actually in a sense building a toolset to create fake media — and we're seeing it happening now. Right now the tools are — the people just playing around on apps aren't that great. But over time, those limitations will go away. Things that you see and fully believe you're seeing could be faked.

This is the great problem with us relying on video. The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it's exposed as a fake. We've seen situations — you know, Arab Spring being a classic example — where with social media, the uprising was practically overnight.

You have to really emphasize critical thinking. Where did you hear that? You know, we have all these search tools available, but people don't use them. Understand your source. Investigate your source. Is your source credible?

But we also shouldn't be prone to this ridiculous conspiracy paranoia. People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked. And the more radical a finding, the more peer review there is. So good peer-reviewed science can't lie. But people's minds, for some reason, will go to the sexier, more thriller-movie interpretation of reality than the obvious one.

I always use Occam's razor — you know, Occam's razor's a great philosophical tool. It says the simplest explanation is the likeliest. And conspiracy theories are all too complicated. People aren't that good, human systems aren't that good, people can't keep a secret to save their lives, and most people in positions of power are bumbling stooges. The fact that we think that they could realistically pull off these — these complex plots? I don't buy any of that crap! Bill Gates is not really trying to microchip you with the flu vaccine! [Laughs]

You know, look, I'm always skeptical of new technology, and we all should be. Every single advancement in technology that's ever been created has been weaponized. I say this to AI scientists all the time, and they go, 'No, no, no, we've got this under control.' You know, 'We just give the AIs the right goals...' So who's deciding what those goals are? The people that put up the money for the research, right? Which are all either big business or defense. So you're going to teach these new sentient entities to be either greedy or murderous.

If Skynet wanted to take over and wipe us out, it would actually look a lot like what's going on right now. It's not going to have to — like, wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves. All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity.

I mean, I could be a projection of an AI right now.
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James Cameron Warns of 'The Dangers of Deepfakes' More

James Cameron Warns of 'The Dangers of Deepfakes'

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  • It's the year 2038 (Score:5, Funny)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @04:50AM (#62201549)
    I wake up in the morning, sun shining, my two perfect kids ready to be driven to school by large automated car, climate change solved and I even managed to outlive Elon Musk. My beautiful wife wakes up next me, I go down the stairs of my lovely house while telling the car to get ready with a voice command and I look at my coffee maker- Something is wrong. The coffee maker is all wrong... it's not responding to my voice. There's no buttons. How do I work this? Troubled I go into the garage and find it... empty. The car isn't there, vanished. Where is that large automobile? I go back inside to see the wallpaper has changed, the whole house has changed into nothing but a shack barely worth keeping a shotgun in. This is not my beautiful house. I yell for my wife to come, please find me; she comes downstairs but it isn't her. This is not my beautiful wife. It's James Cameron. She was a deepfake all along, it was all deepfakes. My once in a lifetime chance at happiness, I had let the days go by, but it has all gone into the blue again.

    • That sounds pretty similar to the plot of some movie I forget the name of, where the guy turned out to actually be on drugs or something? Hollywood has been releasing so much poorly written crap lately I can barely keep up.

    • sounds like the VR system that we all will have embedded in our brains at birth borked.
      How do we really know that what we see, touch, smell, taste and hear is real?
      Are we the subjects of a gazillion player video game run from Vogon?

      Meanwhile, in the real world, some of us will eschew all that VR, automated car bovine excrement and continue to think that Elon, lord high almighty Musk is nothing more than a snake oil sales droid dropped on us from a galaxy far, far away!

      If you believe a word of what I have wr

      • Re:It's the year 2038 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Åke Malmgren ( 3402337 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @08:37AM (#62201983)
        I don't like the "living in a sim" theories, because any sim would require more atoms to build than it could simulate, meaning we're living in a fake universe less vast and complex than another universe, meaning the world is built on potentially infinite complexity rather than emergent complexity, which is pretty much what many religions believe God(s) to be.

        • I don't like the "living in a sim" theories, because any sim would require more atoms to build than it could simulate

          You assume the "real" universe is made of the same stuff as the simulated universe. There is no reason that needs to be true.

          You also assume the entire universe is simulated rather than just the neural input to the observer.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by t0qer ( 230538 )

            At first I was going to disagree with you, but then I started thinking about baked in textures vs shaders. Baked textures require a value for each pixel, while procedural shaders, or just plain shaders calculate the surface value based on math.

            Granted baked textures are faster only requiring T&L unit, but if we're living in a simulation, it's not like we get an FPS count, from our perspective time moves normally, but from the universes perspective, it might take days to render 1 frame of time so the am

          • Even if the outside is built on other stuff, it must contain more information than the inside, which leads us tot he same infinity issue. If the input is to make sense, it can't be made up on the fly, it must be internally consistent over eons. The sensory input to a scientist analyzing the isotopes in a rock must ultimately come from when the contents were blasted out of a supernova. You can't simplify anything and hope humans won't eventually notice, and you can't make it up as you go along.

            • You can't simplify anything and hope humans won't eventually notice

              Some will notice while others will dismiss their observations as psychosis.

        • One interesting bit of weak evidence I saw for the simulation hypothesis is that, if it only needs to simulate stuff that someone is observing and nothing more, then, assuming an upper limit processing speed, one would expect the simulation to run slower where there's a lot of stuff being simulated, and faster where there are few things being simulated. Well, that's exactly what we see: the more stuff (atoms, mass) there is in a place, the slower it "runs".

          Why this happens is also explained by General Relat

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      For those who read this and did not pick up on the pop culture reference: Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime [google.com]
      • Well if anything will separate the wheat from the chaff, those that immediately had the song stick in their head are now easy to distinguish on slashdot now. :-) once in a lifetime doesnt even get a lot of play on 80s retro stations. So only we who lived it are likely to pick up on it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Burdell ( 228580 )

      That's what happens when the water flows underground and you let it hold you down.

    • And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
      And you may find yourself in another part of the world
      And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
      And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
      And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

      Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
      Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
      Into the blue again after the money's gone
      Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

      And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
      And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
      And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
      And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

      I had to post the lyrics to Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads to show how much of a parallel your story compared with an early 80s song.

    • Of all the Y2038 bugs that could pop up from the timestamp overflowing, those are some of the strangest.

    • Time to pick up that shotgun and become a psycho killer.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by unimind ( 743130 )
      Same as it ever was!

  • No big change (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beepsky ( 6008348 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @05:50AM (#62201663)
    I already don't believe most of the stuff I see in the news or on the Internet, so it won't change much for me.
    Journalism is dead, now we just have outrage bait

    • Re: No big change (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rantrantrant ( 4753443 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:20AM (#62201721)
      Mission accomplished. The whole point is to make you not believe anything. That way, the rich & powerful can do whatever they want with impunity... Well, the rich & powerful that aren't complete idiots like Rudy Guiliani & Boris Johnson.

      • The rich and powerful have always done whatever they want. What's the point of being rich and powerful if you can't do what you want?

        • Well, this little thing called democracy is supposed to put limits on that. At them moment, we're not doing a very good job so we aren't very democratic yet. How about if we democratise more of the things in our lives. The work place would be a good start.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

            With what ethic foundation would we democratice private property?

            Or are you one of those people who nood vigorously and with glee when some schmuck spouts we need a new world order that does away with private property?

            Democratizing things only does you any good if the people involved actually put some care into that democracy... You can have democracy all you want, if the public isn't on the streets and making sure every last shred of corruption gets dragged into the light and severly punished, it's nothing

        • I know, so many examples. Weinstein, that guy in South Carolina Murdaugh, Lance Armstrong drugged for a long time before being caught, the car dealer guy in austin who paid to have a one night stand knocked off in TN, it is dizzying. I am not one to buy into conspiracies, but weinstein in particular made me realize with power you can get away with much for a very long time. Most these super wealthy/powerful have an nda waiting at the door if they are looking for a plumber. No entry until a signed triplicate

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Even if Boris Johnson gets kicked out of his job as Prime Minister, there won't be real consequences for him. One of the worst death tolls in the world, tens of billions given to cronies, and long term economic decline, all on his watch. It's not like there is any chance of him going to jail or having to pay a fine.

        Some countries do have laws that can send politicians to jail if they misbehave.

        Johnson will get his portrait on the staircase at No. 10, and a cushy job as a lobbyist or speaker. Will probably g

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by polyp2000 ( 444682 )

      Where was it you first read or heard
      "Dont believe anything you believe on the internet" - ill give you a clue, it wasnt the internet.

      Heres some truth about #BBC the nations LEAST trusted news service and broadcaster.

      1) It admitted that it would not expose Prime Minister Boris Johnsons lies , reasoning "it would undermine public faith in democracy"

      2) On a very prominent so called and public debate program it hired actors to pretend to be opinionated members of the public. In one case hiring an actor to prete

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A lot of the nonsense falls apart if you take a closer look at how plausible it is.

      You check for some of the most common logical fallacies that are frequently used in propaganda (possibly out of order, because I don't have the statistical data to assign accurate weights to any of these): ad hominem, false dichotomy, association fallacy, tu quoque, false equivalence, relative privation, straw man, weak man, shifting burden of proof, argument from ignorance, bandwagon, ad hoc/post hoc, moving goal posts, et

    • I already don't believe most of the stuff I see in the news or on the Internet, so it won't change much for me.

      Journalism is dead, now we just have outrage bait

      But see that is the real conspiracy at work. Sow total distrust in everyone and everything and propogate the belief that nothing will ever change so why bother agitating for anything different, just shut up and go with the flow that the Masters decide.

  • Easy remedy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rantrantrant ( 4753443 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:23AM (#62201731)
    How about forewarning the public about the latest faking techniques by giving comedians the first opportunities to play with them & publish the results? Both entertaining & for the public good. How about it?
  • Couldn't publishing sources (CNN, Reuters, etc.) tie their credibility to the stuff the publish via a blockchain (possibly NFTs) that are recognized by web browsers much in the same way Certificates of Authority are trusted? Hopefully such trust could rise above the www noise, or be filtered out. Nothing will ever stop the A(nalog)-hole. A blockchain might apply for published video content just as much as website content.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      Couldn't publishing sources (CNN, Reuters, etc.) tie their credibility to the stuff the publish via a blockchain (possibly NFTs) that are recognized by web browsers much in the same way Certificates of Authority are trusted?

      Why do you trust Certificates of Authority? What do you know about the people who issue them? I know I have no control or oversight of them so as far as I can tell they are issued in exchange for money (or by governments) and have zero inherent credibility.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It wouldn't help anyway. The video spreads like wildfire and most of the people watching it ignore the "Facebook has determined this video is fake" tag.

        It's not that it's hard to prove stuff is fake, it's that it's hard to make the people who are fooled by it care.

    • That would be fine if you were worried about random people hacking web pages, but for it to be worth anything you have to trust those sources to begin with. Why would you believe that they hadn't been fooled by faked material in the first place?

    • Blockchain adds no value there. Digital signatures will do that job just fine.

  • > And conspiracy theories are all too complicated. People aren’t that good, human systems aren’t that good, people can’t keep a secret to save their lives, and most people in positions of power are bumbling stooges.

    Ah, I see the logical fallacy!

    The “people” on top ARE NOT HUMANS! They’re Reptilian Draconins from the Alpha Draconis star system.

    I am NOT making this shit up.

    https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/201... [osu.edu]

  • We managed fine back when there weren't videos and photographs had to be posed. If deep fakes become prevalent we'll just have to manage like we did back then.

    Indeed, deep fakes offer a number of benefits. If it's common for people to generate deep faked porn then no one will have their life ruined because an ex (or carelessness) caused a leak of a sex tape (just lie and claim it's a deep fake). Yes, it feels icky to imagine someone is watching porn based on someone who looks like you but some people alr

  • ... pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity.

    That movie was called The 5th wave (2016).

    The deep-fake is that the other half of the country has a plague, so the survivors must identify the infected (with their new AR-equipped googles) and murder them. It's not as clean as a neutron bomb and not as messy as military invasion or fission bombs but it's a very, very cheap way to own a country. With tribalism dominating so many countries, including some first-world ones, this is very plausible.

    The idea of an apocalpse (zombie or other) from engineered

  • > People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked.

    The science community, sure. And look at how well people are listening to that community and to others actually knowledgeable about anything. You can't get the Dunning-Krugerites out there to pay attention for 30 seconds to listen to driving directions they asked for and you think they'll actually

  • How am I supposed to know if that interview wasn't a deep fake? I'm on level 3 of this inception. bitch.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ...didn't Michael Crichton point this out in 1992? https://www.goodreads.com/book... [goodreads.com]

  • "So good peer-reviewed science can't lie."

  • You have to really emphasize critical thinking. Where did you hear that?

    No kidding.

    "I hear he was beat to death with a fire extinguisher! [allsides.com]"

    "Those monsters!"

  • "Bill Gates is not really trying to microchip you with the flu vaccine! [Laughs]" Clearly not. He is using bottled water for that.
    • Any chip small enough to fit through that tiny ass vaccine needle would be striped of its basic elements and reabsorbed by my bloodstream. Assuming the natural clotting response did not knee-jerk and case a stroke/heart attack/pulmonary embolism.

  • The Twilight Zone addressed this in 1960 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by olddoc ( 152678 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:24AM (#62202315)
    The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street had a plot where aliens did what Cameron mentions in the last line of the post. Instead of deepfakes, the aliens randomly turned power or machines on and off and pitted people against each other and stirred up a lot of foment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The episode was written by Rod Serling and he closes with this narration, "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."
  • With most people, if you don’t know something, you can make up whatever you want and call it truth.

  • So the Titanic didn't sink? (Score:3)

    by kackle ( 910159 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @11:01AM (#62202427)
    "In screens we trust." [amazon.com] The problem is as it's always been: stupid people. That is, the ignorant who won't bother checking beyond their latest screen swipe. And how does one vet a chain of Internet strangers?

  • ...about his shit-products being misidentified as films.

  • Sounds like someone needs to build a deep fake id algo that can scan images / videos in browser and give a confidence score on realness. This would actually have some interesting potential affects; possibly one is people not doctoring photos at all so that they receive higher confidence scores. We're getting to the point that the human eye just isn't enough to detect realness -- time to science.

  • Who cares what celebrities think? This is who politicians turn to for advice about technology? No wonder we are in a pickle.

  • The simple-minded stories that hollywood has propagated are the musical accompaniment to the brainwashing that is carried out by propaganda sources. To some extent, it's the mind-numbing simplicity of James Cameron movies that drags people away from the sort of reading that might lead them to Occam's razor and leads them to talk radio.

    I'm not stating a cause and effect, but hollywood and talk radio (especially "conservative" media) work synergistically to dumb people down.

    Just for using the term Occam's raz

    • Why can't anyone use the razor properly. "When everything else is disproved, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the cause."
      Which really means you have to disprove some stuff, starting with the most likely scenario. The disproving being paramount. It does not mean "the simplest explanation is the correct one" or even usually the correct one. If you haven't tried to disprove it, it might as well have been aliens. (The third most unlikely thing to disprove.)

  • Anyone who have ever worked as a project manager laughs at these elaborate conspiracy theories... The idea that you can get thousands or even millions of people work towards a single goal without anyone going off script is ridiculous... Even getting a 10 man team to work towards a single goal for a 5 month project without having daily meetings to talk about progress, blockers, and requirements is not going to work... let along all the people in an office or all the people in an organization the size of our

    • But...but...but... that's because the illuminati needed those secrets leaked to cover up some other screw-up.

      And just to remind everybody not to let this be a victim of Poe's law.

  • Check this blockchain project out by some guy: Proof of Humanity [proofofhumanity.id] provides a whole lot of videos of people giving you all the data necessary to create a deepfake. Want an example? Check this random one [proofofhumanity.id] picked off the page. Yay, blockchain....
  • Videos should have encrypted meta data in each frame created by the hardware (camera).
    Your favorite video player should verify the meta data with the manufacturer and warn you if the video stream isn't the original.

    The meta data being encoded in the actual pixels would make it difficult to create a spoof by using a camera to create a "valid" video from a fake video by re-filming it.

    Sure, most video is going to be software encoded for the internet, but when it truly matters, someone can prove their vide
  • Is there really anyone who needs to be told that having fakes that are indistinguishable from real are a bad thing? I thought that went without saying.

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