Fake media is coming for our memories

Fake media is for our memories

Faked photos are easy to create false memories. What happens when there is a fake video?

Brian Resnick@B_resnick

April 20, 2018, 9:00am Eastern time

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Fake media is for our memories

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Seeing is believing. And because of this fact, we’re in trouble.

Due to advances in the field of artificial intelligence, can now be convincingly map someone’s face on the body of another person in the video. As aja Romano VOX explained that this method is becoming more common in pornography: the head of the actress can be mapped onto the body of porn Actresses. These “deepfakes” can be obtained from free software, and they differ from photoshop past. It’s live action — and terribly real.

On Tuesday, buzzfeed published a demonstration with the participation of actor Jordan peele. Using FakeApp, the same tool used in celebrity face replacement porn, the website buzzfeed took an old video of President Obama and replaced in the mouth drank, as he performed an impression of Obama. It is a terrifically powerful dog with a forceful message: “this is a dangerous time. Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we believe from the Internet”.

(Here’s another disturbing example from the University of Washington.)

To combine audio with video fake fake and it’s not hard to imagine a future in which a faked video insanely hard to distinguish from the truth. Or a future where a fake video, the President calls the riot or brings down the market. “We are not so far from the collapse of reality,” as recently Franklin Foer summed up in the Atlantic.

But I’m afraid that it is not only our present and future reality, which may crash, it’s our past. Fake the media can manipulate what we remember, changing the past effectively seeding the population with false memories.

“The potential for abuse is so severe,” says Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine, who for the first time, the bulk of research in false memory formation in 1990-ies. “When you put people in such a powerful visual presentation, how they out of their minds?”

We have no psychological studies directly looking at the ability of AI-faked video to implant false memories. But the researchers studied the malleability of our memories for many decades.

That’s what they know: the human mind is incredibly susceptible to the formation of false memories. And this trend can be kicked into Overdrive on the Internet, where false ideas spread like viruses among like-minded people. Which means the AI-enhanced forgery on the horizon, only instilling false memories even easier.

How fake the photo is rewriting our memory

Do you remember this image? This ex-U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former President of Iran.

I hope You don’t remember this picture, because it never happened. This is a photo montage.

Fake media is coming for our memories

Back in 2010, when slate asked about 1000 readers whether they remembered seeing in the photo, approximately 21% of the respondents answered in the affirmative. Another 25 percent said that they remembered that event occurred, but could not remember specifically seeing the photo.

Slate also gave his readers some space to write their feelings about the photo. “I thought Obama was right, disregard Ahmadinejad so blatantly it would be a mistake,” wrote one reader, Recalling the feeling that, of course, never entered his head.

Inspired by the work of Loftus’s, slate’s William Saletan has created a test that presented readers with photos from the actual event plus one of the five randomly selected fake events.

One of the photos showed Senator Joseph Lieberman vote “guilty” during the impeachment of President bill Clinton (Lieberman voted “not guilty”). The other showed President Bush on holiday with baseball player Roger Clemens during hurricane Katrina. (Bush spent a chunk of time after Katrina at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, but not with any baseball players.)

Every fake picture of a provoked false memories, at least 15 percent of the respondents. In General, 50 percent of the participants reported that they believed that the event depicted in the false photo happened. Project slate drew the attention of Steven Frenda, a psychologist Los Angeles, which often cooperates with the London eye. Frenda and his colleagues took the data slate and analyzed further.

Here’s what they found: people were more likely to say that they remember the fake picture when it fits their political worldview.

Fake media is coming for our memories

“Conservatives were more likely to believe that Obama welcomed this hostile foreign leader,” says Frenda. And liberals were more likely to remember to ride Bush with Clemons. “When people are faced with events that are free with their political views or preference, they are likely to mistakenly believe that these events actually happened,” he says.

Think about what this means. Doctored photos can change how we remember history. And not only our memory for facts, but even our memories of what we saw with our own eyes. This means that unscrupulous individuals can prey on our political preferences, to change our understanding of world events. And remember that it was the readers of slate, which, presumably, people who like to keep up with current events.

Even if the people lying on the examination in order to seem clever, the photos may still be implanted in memory. “When people lie or dissemble, sometimes, that he distorts their memory,” says Frenda. “Therefore, they will sometimes turn on his lies or exaggeration that this is what they think, what they really remember.”

Frenda and his colleagues published this conclusion in 2013, in the journal of experimental social psychology. And this issue — false memories of political events is not directly reflected in the scientific literature (although the paper in 2010 to find similar results). But this conclusion fit with what we know about political psychology: we’re more likely to remember the facts that support our team.

“In 2013,” Frenda said, “the potential for abuse, [or] digital doctoring of images, and now video,” wasn’t that hot topics. Now, “there are many things to worry about.” And there is reason to believe that false the video will be an even more powerful way to change how we remember the past.

Why we form false memories, and how

Fake media is coming for our memories

Human memory works like a videotape or digital recording. When we remember, we can’t turn our minds to a moment in time and relive this moment.

Instead, build a memory.

It’s a complicated thing to understand. When we call in mind, we must piece it back together from disparate pieces of information that exist in our minds. Part of what gets in our memories-it’s true. But there is a laziness in our memories. In the reconstruction of our memories, our brain often grab the easiest bits of information to remember. And the information that we have learned since the event will be added to fill the gaps in memory.

Our memory is not like a videotape. A more useful metaphor is that it is as a video editor and work for a period of to milliseconds. In his mad rush, editor of the compounds in bits of truth with the fact that the filler is handy. And what is convenient, often our biases, or new information at all.

That’s why simple sentences, like saying the car “ran” instead of “hit” after watching the video of the accident will lead people to remember the accident being more severe than it was. Or why our memories, feelings, significant historical events like the O. J. Simpson murder — generally reflect what we think today, not what we felt then. Just the process of remembering one thing can make us forget another.

Acquaintance is too critical. The more familiar we are with the idea, the more likely it is to get stuck in our memory as the truth. Studies show the more often a lie is repeated the more likely it is to be forgotten. And we tend to forget the source of information, Frenda explains. Seeing the falsified history is not a credible news online, possible later “a distorted impression that you actually saw it on CNN,” he says.

We can misremember all the events that never happened

False memories don’t just Fudge the fine details. You can also falsely remember all the events.

What happened in the survey slate. But the researchers also found that this may occur in studies where false information from a trusted source. We believe in the family, and forged letters from relatives may lead people to believe that they were once lost in a shopping Mall as a child, or that they had committed a crime when they were younger. And we hope, photo: experiments that use altered photos in memory of the implant, as a rule, more effective than those that do not.

That’s what really sucks: we are confident in his misrememberings. “After we updated the memories we don’t remember that we did it,” Linda Levin, University of California, Irvine psychologist studying memory and emotion. “We have the illusion that we remember things as they happened.”

We are biased for a sense of continuity, despite the fact that our memories are changing all the time. Video editor in our brains quietly seals up the seams.

This is true even for the most intense events in memory. In the days after 9/11, psychological researchers interviewed thousands of people across the country, asking them simple questions: “where were you when it happened?”, and then followed more than 10 years. Even as the memories of participants for day shifts, as the details they remembered were changed, they remained extremely confident that they remembered the truth.

Today, the scientific discussion on this topic around, how prevalent false memory formation (critics argue that the messages on the full implantation of false childhood memories are not pumped), and how to more accurately determine the memory.

And the researchers suggest several reasons why evolution favored us with such a malleable memories. One is that it allows us to be creative. We can imagine that future might look by merging memories with new information. Another is that saves us effort. We don’t need to remember every detail of our lives.

The third hypothesis emphasizes the danger of false memories in these polarized times: they help us to form a cohesive sense of reality with our groups.

Bill Hurst studies of collective memory in a new school. His work describes the process of talking to each other makes us selectively remember, forget, and create false collective narrative.

“All these [memory] distortion will allow us to develop a common understanding of the past,” says Hurst. “And because you and I both have a General idea of the past, it will lead to the General opinion, which strengthens collective identity.”

Social media is fertile ground for us to acquire really strange false memories. Consider the case Shazaam truthers.

We also have the opportunity to influence the memory to each other and to build a new version of reality as we go.

In 2016, the New State magazine published a story about the community of reddit users who are fans of movies from the 1990s starring comedian Sinbad (remember him?). The film is called Shazaam, and Sinbad plays the clumsy Genie adventure with two young children.

The play, however, was not the typical essay on ’pop ‘ 90s nostalgia culture. It turns out that Shazaam movie never existed, and yet many of people new writer statesmen Amelia Tayt says can’t be convinced otherwise. And they were truly upset the film does not exist. “It feels like part of my childhood was stolen from me,” one believer told her.

Here is one of the possible causes of these redditors believed in the movie so much: the Reddit forum. Social media gathered like-minded people. “Any type of proof is going to strengthen your memory for something, whether it is true or not, and your confidence in your memory,” Frenda said. Shazaam all these truthers riffs from each other, giving each other subtle suggestions for the formation of a false narrative that exists in their minds.

This is a clear example of how, in a polarizing world, we are increasingly telling different stories from our neighbors, because we are connected to separate channels of information.

Fake video is even worse than the fake photos

Fake media is coming for our memories

Let’s put it all together. False memories smolder when they make sense to our political philosophy, when it is familiar and is repeated ad nauseam, when we trust the source of information and if this information is confirmed, and share and discuss with like-minded people.

Where else do all these things? Social media. Fake stories tend to move faster that people on these platforms than the truth, fueled by surprise and bias.

And what happens when the doctored audio and video is added to the mix? (Shudders.)

All the research on false memories was held with fake photos or written documents. Since it’s so new, no one has studied the impact of video deepfake, but Levin and Loftus suspect this will be even more convincing. “This man here, in the midst of this situation, to say and do these things,” said Levine. If the video is seamless, it will be convincing. And “it is legitimately worrying,” she says.

Loftus agrees: “having a [fake] video, and the wealth is just going to exacerbate the false memory potential,” she says.

“The collapse of reality,” is not predetermined. But there is good reason to feel uncomfortable.

We still don’t know how to inoculate people against the formation of false memories. In fact, it does not seem that anyone is immune to their formation. And all around us the seeds of false memories were sewn.

A recent survey found 44 percent of Republicans believe that President trump to cancel “Obamacar”. This may be because the law was confusing to follow, as it ping-ponged through Congress. Or because there is some truth in this part of the health care law was weakened. Or because the Republicans no longer trust the media. In any case, please know that the cancellation did not happen.

But what happens when, in the future, there is a video trump signing a fake insurance policy fake cancel? Or fake clip leading TV channel CNN announced the breaking news of the cancellation? And these fake videos to prove impossible to resolve from the Internet?

Gloomy imaginary scenarios are endless. Loftus was one of her own: especially the corrupt police of doctoring the video, the suspect confessed to the crime. In these scenarios, she says, the suspect may even believe it. “I would like to say something optimistic,” she says.

But it’s still possible that our worst fears about this kind of “the collapse of reality,” as Foer put it, may not come to pass.

Quite possibly a fake video and audio will not be experienced enough to have an impact. Maybe people can learn to detect it. Or maybe someone can design algorithms to squash it. Perhaps the tech giants will be vigilant in the ban of these fakes. Or maybe we will grow so accustomed to lies that they do not believe that anyone — concept technologist-Aviv, the Jews of Turkey was described as “the reality of apathy” in an interview with buzzfeed.

We can hope that just as our memories of the past diverge, there will always be historians receive permanent registration straight down.

But I fear that our country and our media is fractured politically, the discrepancy in our memories and understanding of the facts, too, will grow worse. In 40 years, will be less, we agree on the facts of history?