Free Republic

Dozens of prominent U.S. and state government officials, advocacy groups, and executives from big tech companies gathered in New York last month to participate in an important simulated election exercise. The war game exercise imagined a fictional crisis in which AI-generated photos and videos are released on social media immediately before the 2024 election. The images appear to show election officials in Florida dumping ballots, in an apparent attempt to manipulate the election’s outcome. If a deepfake election crisis does occur — and there are good reasons to think it will — Trump’s enemies will be ready to take advantage....

As technology has advanced, AI-generated deepfakes have become more convincing, says disinformation researcher Eileen Culloty.Disinformation caught many people off guard during the 2016 Brexit referendum and US presidential election. Since then, a mini-industry has developed to analyse and counter it. Yet despite that, we have entered 2024 - a year of more than 40 elections worldwide - more fearful than ever about disinformation. In many ways, the problem is more challenging than it was in 2016. Advances in technology since then are one reason for that, in particular the development that has taken place with synthetic media, otherwise known as...

A group of 20 leading tech companies on Friday announced a joint commitment to combat AI misinformation in this year’s elections. The industry is specifically targeting deepfakes, which can use deceptive audio, video and images to mimic key stakeholders in democratic elections or to provide false voting information. Microsoft , Meta , Google , Amazon , IBM , Adobe and chip designer Arm all signed the accord. Artificial intelligence startups OpenAI, Anthropic and Stability AI also joined the group, alongside social media companies such as Snap , TikTok and X. Tech platforms are preparing for a huge year of elections...

SNIPWhile the number of votes swayed by the leaked audio remains uncertain, two things are now abundantly clear: The recordings were fake, created using artificial intelligence; and US officials see the episode in Europe as a frightening harbinger of the sort of interference the United States will likely experience during the 2024 presidential election.“As a nation, we are woefully underprepared,” said V.S. Subrahmanian, a Northwestern University professor who focuses on the intersection of AI and security.Senior national security officials in the US have been gearing up for “deepfakes” to inject confusion among voters in a way not previously seen, a...

SAG-AFTRA deplored the AI-generated graphic images of Taylor Swift that went viral on X (formerly Twitter) this week, calling the content “upsetting, harmful, and deeply concerning” in a statement issued on Friday. “The development and dissemination of fake images — especially those of a lewd nature — without someone’s consent must be made illegal,” the union said, while also calling support to Congressman Joe Morelle’s Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act to combat the practice. “As a society, we have it in our power to control these technologies, but we must act now before it is too late. We support...

New York CNN — Pornographic, AI-generated images of the world’s most famous star spread across social media this week, underscoring the damaging potential posed by mainstream artificial intelligence technology: its ability to create convincingly real and damaging images. The fake images of Taylor Swift were predominantly circulating on social media site X, previously known as Twitter. The photos – which show the singer in sexually suggestive and explicit positions – were viewed tens of millions of times before being removed from social platforms. But nothing on the internet is truly gone forever, and they will undoubtedly continue to be shared...

New satellite images of Gaza show the extent of the destruction caused by Israel's intense aerial bombardment of the territory over the past three weeks. The pictures, released by Maxar Technologies, compare detailed images captured from space earlier this week with images from before the recent conflict began. They show three areas in the north of Gaza where aerial attacks have left dozens of tower blocks completely destroyed or badly damaged as well as large areas of tightly packed buildings reduced to piles of grey rubble.

Obama says he's been target of 'deepfakes,' predicts next election cycle will be rife with false infoFormer President Barack Obama suggested in a new interview the development of "digital fingerprints" to combat misinformation and distinguish between true and misleading news for consumers.Obama sat down with his former White House senior adviser David Axelrod for a conversation on the latter's podcast, "The Axe Files," on CNN Audio. During the interview, Axelrod noted he's seen "misinformation, disinformation, [and] deepfakes" targeting Obama."As I've told people, because I was the first digital president when I left office, I was probably the most recorded, filmed,...

Deep fakes are often very humorous but can be scary when you realize that you cannot trust what you see with your own eyes on any video these days. https://youtu.be/THOXG-5rSk8

Wow. I am not sure how to post a Tweet here, but I just saw a remarkable (fake) Tom Cruise tweet. It was remarkable. Starts with a close-up of "Tom". Then zooms out, to watch him put on a pair of sunglasses, make a shot, then he comes back to the camera in another close-up where he again removed the sunglasses, and says "sports and tictoc fans" of you like this, just wait until you see what's next.

https://youtu.be/Q2mN21t2p_8

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China. The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents. The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also...

@RealWayneRootI just verified again. Spoke to high level source who watched Hunter’s laptop. Thousands of filthy disgusting disgraceful images & videos of Hunter having sex w/young gals. “Sickening” he said. But obviously while all looked young & many looked underage, no ages stamped on faces

Something very strange and disturbing happened to me recently. If it was just relevant to me, it wouldn’t be that important (except perhaps to me), and I wouldn’t be writing this column. But it’s something that is likely more important and more ominous than we can even imagine.There are already common fraudulent schemes being perpetrated by both telephone and internet. One known as the “Grandparent Scam” is particularly reprehensible, first because it is perpetrated on elderly people who are, in general, more susceptible to tech-savvy criminals and second because it is based on the manipulation of familial love, trust and...

“Deepfakes” refers to media that has been altered by artificial intelligence to make it appear that a person is doing or saying something that, in fact, that person has never done or said. The technology first began appearing a few years ago, with crude deepfake tools allowing users to make it look like celebrities were recorded engaging in sexual activities they actually didn’t take part in. But deepfakes are now moving past the porn realm and into the criminal world where bad actors are using the tech to impersonate CEOs, Axios reports. However, for now, it appears criminals are using deepfake...

I know what you’re thinking: I hope someday there will be a really scary and easy way to create fake videos and misinformation—in which it appears that people are saying words that they never originally said. Rest assured, this Philip K. Dick dystopian nightmare… is now a reality. Scientists from Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research have developed a software that will allow you to edit and change what people are saying in videos—and pull it off to create a realistic-looking fake.

Still don't think deepfakes will be a problem? The tech is getting so good it's scary. Can you tell the difference in these videos between the fake and the real thing? A horrible version of Trump went viral in Belgium and caused mass outrage. So what happens when the tech is spot on? https://youtu.be/NWhyTk7cZdI

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...

A quiet wager has taken hold among researchers who study artificial intelligence techniques and the societal impacts of such technologies. They’re betting whether or not someone will create a so-called Deepfake video about a political candidate that receives more than 2 million views before getting debunked by the end of 2018. The Deepfake technology in question first gained notoriety in December 2017 when a person going by the pseudonym “DeepFakes” showed how deep learning—a popular AI technique based on neural network computer architecture—could digitally stitch the faces of celebrities onto the faces of porn actors in pornography videos. Since that...