An update to the onset of the “fabricate everything” era: videos of politicians saying things they never said.
This video has an immediate “wait a second, what’s wrong with this picture?” vibe to it. If my alien kidnappers scanned my memory and determined that the thing I most trust in the universe is Barack Obama’s image and voice, and tried to reproduce it in an effort to brainwash me, but my memory didn’t have all the data they needed about his actual body language when talking, this is what would they would create. The mouth moves, but the rest of the image is still. It’s like a high quality ventriloquism act. Obviously fake.
So the technology is not perfected. Still, how many more election cycles do you think we'll get through before it is? Will we be lucky enough to get through 2024?
Earlier this year Trump claimed that the recording of him boasting about sexual assault, with all the delicacy of a high schooler boasting about having gotten to second base to a transfixed audience of seventh graders, was not actually him talking. It is really beyond the scope of my imagination right now to think about what we'll do when claims like that are credible. And I think we're not that far away.
Can you or anyone else who knows anything about the LSTMs used to produce these videos reassure me?