Seeing Hasn't Been Believing For Some Time

As you may have been reminded recently, the second person to walk on the moon was Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr., who accompanied Neil Armstrong in the lunar module during the Apollo 11 flight in July of 1969.  A common problem faced by the lunar astronauts was what to do with the rest of your life afterwards, and one thing Aldrin did was to make public appearances about his astronaut career.  On Sept. 9, 2002, Aldrin showed up at a Beverly Hills hotel expecting to be interviewed on camera for a Japanese children's television program.  Instead, waiting for him was one Bart Sibrel, a sometime documentary filmmaker who has made a career out of promoting the idea that NASA's moon landings were all faked in a secret CIA-operated studio.  Sibrel, accompanied by his own film crew, aggressively tried to get Aldrin to swear on a Bible that he had landed on the moon, and when Aldrin declined to do that in front of cameras and told Sibrel to leave him alone, Sibrel called him a "thief, liar, and coward" and reportedly backed him against a wall and poked him with the Bible.  In response, the 72-year-old Aldrin punched the 250-pound Sibrel in the jaw, but no charges were filed. 

Sibrel has made a career out of claiming that all the visual evidence (as well as physical evidence in the form of moon rocks distributed around the world) showing that men have been to the moon was essentially an elaborate "deepfake."  The word was not invented in 1969, but the concept of lying is as old as humanity.  For reasons of his own, Sibrel thinks (or at least appears to think) that NASA and the CIA concocted an extremely elaborate lie and backed it up with artificially-generated visual evidence. 

In 1969, there was no such thing as advanced computer graphics that could take images from different sources and combine them seamlessly to make it look like, for example, actor Tom Hanks was in the same room with President John F. Kennedy, as the movie "Forrest Gump" showed in 1994 in one of the first films that took advantage of computer-generated imagery (CGI).  Well, the great democratizing force known as IT has now brought the simpler kinds of digital fakery to the masses.  Some people are worried that simple tricks such as speeding up or slowing down authentic videos will cause more trouble than the sophisticated deepfakes that even experts have problems detecting. 

A recent Associated Press article describes how U. S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was made to appear physically impaired by simply playing back a recording of her at a slower speed.  While some such tricks are pulled purely for satirical purposes, digital forensics expert Hany Field worries that unsophisticated voters will be fooled by them nonetheless.  He called the doctored Pelosi video, which got over two million views on Facebook, "a canary in a coal mine," and expects the 2020 election year will see many more such crude trick fakes, which one could call shallowfakes.

According to some studies quoted in the article, some groups of voters (older ones and "ultra-conservatives," whatever that means) tend to trust videos more and will retweet, and otherwise treat as credible, videos that younger and less conservative people will quickly recognize as having been altered.  I have seen this sort of effect myself as I have watched an otherwise sensible and well-balanced woman of my acquaintance lap up stuff on Facebook that I consider arrant nonsense, on occasion. 

It's possible that such people hold all Facebook information in a different category in their minds from things that people they trust tell them in person, and that it's a sort of entertainment more than a serious search for the real truth.  But all this lies in the uncertain realm of what may influence voters, which includes everything from the weather to the state of one's health.  And as such, we can only speculate on its effects.

Two possible ways mentioned by the news article to mitigate any negative effects of shallowfakes are so-called "downranking" by social media outlets such as Facebook, and adding fact-checking information to suspicious-looking videos or information such as labels saying "This video has been altered from its original state."  The problem with this is that it puts the social-media operators in the role of censor, or at least editor.  And depending on the political character of the shallowfake and the political leanings of the censor or editor, someone is sure to cry "Foul!" at such actions, or at least point out equally egregious shallowfakes on the opposite end of the political spectrum that haven't been censored, edited, or labeled as such.  That is a quagmire that organizations like Facebook may not care to wade into, and I'm not sure they should.

One thing is for certain:  the video-altering genie of cheap and easily available software is not going back into its bottle.  And any thought of government regulation or censorship moves us in the direction of dictatorships like China, where members of minority groups such as Uighurs get sent to what amounts to concentration camps simply for trying to get in touch with other Uighurs on social media. 

So perhaps the answer is a better-educated electorate.  Civics education in this country is reportedly in terrible shape anyway, as many history texts seem to concentrate on everything bad our forefathers did (excuse me, should I say "forepeople"?  No, I shouldn't.).  I do recall one lesson I learned from a high-school history book, which was that after the famous purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union where whole rafts of bureaucrats were executed at Stalin's whim, new editions of history books carried photos of the Great Leader from which certain undesirables had been airbrushed away, without comment.  I was warned in the 1970s against that sort of thing happening, and so today we should warn our high-schoolers against the danger of both deepfakes and shallowfakes.  But after that, it's up to them to judge—and to vote.

Sources:  The Associated Press article about deepfakes and shallowfakes by Beatrice Dupuy and Barbara Ortutay, dated July 19,was carried by many news outlets, including the Longview (Texas) News-Journal at https://www.news-journal.com/ap/politics/deepfake-videos-pose-a-threat-but-dumbfakes-may-be-worse/article_20f82829-5abd-5e83-8456-2630fc4b097b.html.  The Aldrin-Sibrel incident is described in the Wikipedia article "Buzz Aldrin."

Digital Clones: Coming To a Hologram Near You

When you see the face of a familiar actor on screen, you probably assume that somewhere, some time, the actual human being presented to you via technology was really in a studio in front of a camera, speaking the lines you hear.  It is only when we remember that motion pictures are designed to produce illusions that we realize the words we hear may be another actor's voice-over, the background may be green-screened in, and even the actor's face could have been digitally retouched, or even created from scratch with sophisticated software.  Thinking about these things distracts from the enjoyment of the movie, so usually we don't.  But if you saw a person looking, moving, and sounding exactly like Humphrey Bogart acting in a movie made in 2015, say, it would be hard to ignore the little detail that Bogart died in 1957.  

The 1994 film "Forrest Gump" digitally placed the live actor Tom Hanks in archival footage of famous deceased persons such as John F. Kennedy, but what I'm talking about is the reverse:  hauling John F. Kennedy out of the grave to make him play a role in, say, a new Judd Apatow comedy.  And here's where we get into some ethical qualms.

In a recent New Yorker article, the digital exploits of University of Southern California computer scientist Paul Debevec are described, from his early work reverse-aging Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) to his current attempts to preserve holographic versions of Holocaust survivors for use in a permanent museum display.  If the latter project is successful, visitors will be able to pose questions and a three-dimensional representation of the person, accurate down to such details as shadows that fall naturally according to the room lighting prevailing at the time, will answer the questions via artificial-intelligence technology.  In effect, Debevec will have resurrected the dead, although to a strictly circumscribed sort of life.

           

For the last few decades, progress in digitally-enabled technologies that initially depend on huge amounts of computer processing have followed a consistent path.  First, a new technique is developed at great expense, often paid for by the military or government agencies, and demonstrated in a limited way.  Next comes commercialization, with large institutions and corporations being first in line to use it.  And finally, advances in hardware and software lower the cost enough to make it affordable to a reasonably large number of average citizens.  Debevec fully intends for his super-accurate simulation and illumination technology to follow this well-worn path, so we ought to give at least a little consideration to its ethical implications.

The fact that Debevec is labeled a scientist obscures the reality of what he is doing when he takes Angelina Jolie's picture from hundreds of different angles to make a digital clone of her to perform a film stunt too dangerous for stunt doubles to do:  he is being an artist.  And the ethical rules for artists doing art are different from the rules for scientists doing science.  From what little I know about the way art is regarded in Western cultures today, there aren't any ethical rules that are generally observed, unless you count legal strictures such as bans on child pornography and copyright laws.  I suspect if Judd Apatow tried to make a digital clone of John F. Kennedy to do the kind of disreputable things that actors in his films typically do, he might hear from the Kennedy estate via a process server.  But the legal treatment of public figures differs from the way the rights of a private citizen are treated.  Courts have held that as long as the image of a public figure is not being used for commercial exploitation, it is okay to portray it in a work of art.  After death, a person's estate can still control the use of the person's image for commercial purposes, and this would undoubtedly include a Debevec-style holographic image.  So when Debevec was asked if he had considered resurrecting Marilyn Monroe, for instance, he said that Monroe's estate was unwilling, and so he dropped the idea.

On the other hand, when ConAgra, the firm that makes Orville Redenbacher popcorn, approached Debevec to simulate the recently deceased popcorn king for a TV commercial, Debevec readily agreed.  So, two years after Redenbacher died in 2005, viewers saw a digital version of Redenbacher, still promoting his popcorn.  But when critics started referring to "Orville Deadenbacher, the popcorn zombie" the ad disappeared.  This was not a violation of ethics so much as it was a violation of good taste, and I'm not talking about popcorn.

Highly realistic holographic images of people, alive or dead, are simply the latest advance in a sequence that began 40,000 years ago, when someone blew paint through a stencil onto the wall of the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain to form the earliest known cave paintings.  Sculpture, portraits in oils, photography, motion pictures, and CGI (computer-generated images) followed, and it is only our inordinate addiction to novelty that makes us think there is something fundamentally different in Debevec's hyper-realistic representations of the human form.  Art is one of the most notable activities that separates humans—the only rational animal—from other animals, and the fact that Debevec's form of art involves rationality of a scientific and technological kind does not make it any less an art form.  And art can be put to both the holiest and the most debauched of uses. 

As our power to create increasingly realistic-looking digital human forms grows and the technology to do this spreads, we can only hope that artists will rediscover that truth, beauty, and goodness are their true subjects.  Most of the art world refuses to acknowledge this fact, which is the real basis for the ethics of art.  But no amount of technological advance will change that situation.  That change cannot take place in server rooms, or in the theories of computer scientists.  That change can take place only in the heart.

Sources:  The article "Pixel Perfect: the scientist behind the digital cloning of actors" appeared in The New Yorker's Apr. 28, 2014 issue on pp. 32-38. I referred to http://www.onlineartrights.org/issues/depictions-real-people/depictions-real-people, and the Wikipedia articles on Orville Redenbacher and cave painting.