deep fake Archives - Bennallack

A few decades ago, someone or other caught the imagination of nerds by warning about ‘grey goo’ – a sludge of self-replicating nanobots that once they got going would eventually submerge the planet beneath depthless layers of their endlessly churned-out carcasses.

That or they ate the world to the core with their ceaseless reproduction.

Either way, not so much Terminator as a silicon Sperminator.

Now, you might protest that I’ve been a bit vague with my introduction. Who exactly said this? When? Where?

But let’s face it – this is the direction we’re headed.

I vaguely remember the details. Either I’ll have to Google it or you will. And right now – mostly to make a point – I can’t be arsed.

You knock yourself out though if you like. I’ll wait…

…you’re back already? I suppose some of us slip down the Net’s rabbit holes more easily than others, eh?

Anyway, back to grey goo.

No goo zone

Or maybe not as grey goo hasn’t happened yet. So far the only unnatural junk piling up on the planet is what we humans put there.

Yes, okay, mud in some forms is a sort of carbon-based life’s grey goo. I’m thinking rich peaty loams and forest canopy floors. Oil sands.

And yes, we could have a long chat about the evolution of grey goo that eats grey goo and where that would all go in a billion years.

But this isn’t the article for such diversions.

My point is we’ve escaped Goo-meggedon so far. At least in the physical world, which still matters the most but won’t before the century is out.

Let the goo times flow

Back over in Not Real Life however – the light-fast world of data and compute and 4Chan LOLs and our future – things aren’t going so well.

Just two months ago I wrote that soon we’ll have to demonstrate our identities to prove we’re not AI-bots. To authenticate our humanity on everything from Twitter to (eventually) talk radio phone-ins.

But by ‘soon’ I mean I was thinking a few years. Not months.

However ChatGPT has put the vanguard of machine learning into the public’s hands with a global gusto. And the resultant cacophony of coverage and wonder has even outdone Dall-E and Stable Diffusion and the other image-focused AI systems’ debuts earlier this year.

Indeed no sooner than you can say “a gun is a dangerous weapon, don’t point it at anything important and treat it with respect” people are already flooding Internet forums created for human pronouncement and consumption to post ChatGPT’s (stupendous) verbal vomit.

To give just one example, Liam Tung of ZD Net reports:

Stack Overflow, a site where developers can ask and answer coding questions, has temporarily banned the use of text generated from ChatGPT, a chatbot released by Open AI last week.

ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model.

People have quickly discovered that, while it answers prompts in a “human-adjacent” way, there can be flaws in the answers it gives.

Basically, keen Stack Overflowers (I guess? I’m not a local) have been spamming the site with ChatGPT-created content. Which is a problem when even the bot’s creator, OpenAI, stresses its precocious child can deliver “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”

Liam Tung – who may or may not be an organic life form himself – continues sagaciously:

This appears to be a key cause of its impact on Stack Overflow and its users who are seeking correct answers to coding problems.

Additionally, because ChatGPT generates answers so quickly, some users are supplying lots of answers generated by it without parsing them for correctness.

Oh Liam! In just a few casually typed out / generatively predicted words there, you’ve raised so many questions about the future of knowledge, civilisation, blogging for early retirement, and getting a robot to do one’s schoolwork.

But it’s a common kernel at the heart of all that which we’ll be choking on today.

The goo goo trolls

You see, what has struck me most forcefully in the past fortnight is the sheer volume of data these things are going to create.

So far it’s just everyone and his dog. But soon it will be everyone and their robot. Then their robot’s robot. And so on.

Listen carefully! Do you hear a tap-tapping?

Yes, it’s the sound of Lithuanian troll farms and Texan entrepreneurs alike bashing out code and sending forth bots to drown us all in this calorie-light info-crud in order to earn a few dollars from Google’s Adsense. Or perhaps to tilt us to vote this way or that.

Look, I don’t know their nefarious plans. I’m one of the good guys.

But even as I’ve been pecking away for hours like every other curious pigeon on ChatGPT’s levers in the hope of another crumb of dopamine, it struck me that humanity’s death by AI might be even dumber than I previously suspected.

True, I’ve led the field among very obscure pundits in warning that just getting rid of 90% of low-level knowledge jobs could be more than enough to rupture society. At least for a few decades and a civil war or two.

In other words we don’t need a post-singularity-level evil and scheming AI to explain why, with regret, the human race has to go, as it dangles us over a bubbling vat of metaphorical sulphuric acid.

No, just a cheap and dumb-ass bot that can be copied-and-pasted over the world’s office employment might do the trick.

But what’s clear from even these early skirmishes with ChatGPT is an even more insidious risk – the danger of our emerging ‘other’ reality being rapidly flooded with data goo. ‘Plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical’ gunk – or even mostly right but still exceeding mediocre verbiage – that crowds out what little signal is left in a world that already seems to be turned up to 11 on the noise front.

Holly goo lightly

Of course there will be solutions. Every platform already has its own Deckardian countermeasures seeking to resist or destroy this stuff.

But the models will improve. And it will be ever harder to tell their output from a real person’s most precious shared thoughts.

At best it’s yet another arm’s race that you and I will increasingly be viewing out of a passenger window rather than the cockpit, while software does all the heavy-lifting.

Leaving us wondering if we’re on a nice getaway flight to someplace warm, or actually cooped up inside a missile heading for impact.

Or else I guess it breaks the Internet and we go back to fire and parchment and worrying about the wolves.

(But no we won’t go back. As I wrote previously we’ll sign-in as provably real people and fence this stuff out. But we’ll have to do that, for as long as we can. Nobody wants the wolves again.)

Hah! Stick those 1,153 words in your natural language model’s pipe and smoke them. I won’t go down without a fight.

**Hayden Christensen** in 2010 and good luck to him.

I have a long-running disagreement with a friend about Deep Fake technology and what we’d currently call meme or TikTok culture.

Within some number of years – whether 20 or 1o0 – I believe everyday consumers will be able to seamlessly insert anyone they want into an existing film in place of the original actors.

There are already lots of iPhone apps that will do this clumsily for a face for ten seconds or so.

But I’m envisaging a more complete removal, insertion, and touch-up job. One that can have you wandering around looking for the Lost Ark instead of Harrison Ford, or for the perfect pair of Jimmy Choo heels instead of having to see Sarah Jessica Parker have all the fun.

I believe when this is possible, everyone will have fun doing it.

However my friend considers it “pointless” and in contrast argues “nobody would want to do that”.

I suggest my friend pays more attention to social media.

A disturbance in The Force

But sure, like all these things the novelty will soon wear off.

For two years in a row my mum was in hilarious uproar just from sticking family faces onto the dancing elves of a digital Christmas card.

Now not even she – the biggest fan of that flash in the pan – can be arsed.

However one can speculate about more finessed implementations of the same technology.

By way of example… egged on by Obi Wan Kenobi, I’m re-watching Star Wars in chronological order on Disney Plus.

And to my shock I’m finding the prequels far less terrible than I’d remembered.

Even – whisper it – mostly pretty good. They’ve not just withstood the test of time. They’ve grown stronger for it.

Maybe it’s that 20 years later the stakes are much lower. Or maybe it’s because a dozen Star Wars spin-offs later, we’re all less reverential.

But today, The Phantom Menace’s pod race is clearly a franchise highlight. The various worlds pop.

For whatever reason even Attack of the Clones is almost watchable.

Almost, because… Hayden Christensen. And Natalie Portman. And the porn film level dialogue. And the wooden 1920s stage-y standing around stating their characters’ development.

All that is still something you have to hold your nose through, like a whirl of broccoli puree in what would otherwise be a wondrous Strawberry Sunday of a movie.

The re-write stuff

Is this awfulness because of George Lucas’ famously dire dialogue?

We’ve all heard how Harrison Ford apparently quipped: “George! You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”

Yet the original Star Wars films made Ford and his wise-cracking Han Solo famous – despite or just maybe because of Lucas.

Ewan McGregor wrings out pearls from Lucas’ placeholder bantha fodder in the prequels, too.

But sadly, Christensen does not.

Now to be fair to him he does come across as an arrogant, illogical, surly and deeply unlikeable teenager – which is mostly how I find late adolescents males these days. So given his character’s arc, perhaps it really was all superb acting on his part.

Even so, the verbal ping-pong-played-underwater-in-treacle between him and Portman pretty much sinks Clones as something you’d do for fun, as opposed to something you’d do because you had to atone for wanking in the confession booth.

Which made me wonder… what about if we could just edit him and Natalie P out of Star Wars?

Replace them?

And release not a Director’s Cut but a Viewer’s Revision?

Saving Private Hayden

At last some tangible upside from humanity’s march towards doom!

Anyone not paying attention to the threat from Deep Fake technology should study the polls concerning people’s views about Trump losing the election, Russia and Ukraine – heck even 9/11.

True, a lot of these dedicated reality denialists already wave aside video and audio proof as fake news.

But the average waverer in the street still mostly believes their eyes.

Within a decade or two, that will change. (Unless we can agree some kind of mandatory encoding for anything tampered with using software, which would be almost everything you see, and perhaps force the encoding on to a verification blockchain, say, so that anyone can it look up. But that’s for another day).

Batten down the hatches when Deep Fake wins over the doubters.

The End of Democracy aside, though, the tech could at least fix Attack of the Clones as a side benefit amid the apocalypse.

Take out Christensen and Portman.

Put in, well almost anyone, even a couple of those aforementioned porn stars. But preferably some sassy actors with a bit of chemistry.

Get Phoebe Waller-Bridge to rewrite the dialogue.

Boom! Suddenly Clones is a great movie.

Would you like Peter Sellers with that?

This kind of digital wart removal will become commonplace, I imagine. At first illegal, but later captured and sanctioned by IP owners whose business model is already mostly remixing someone dead’s bright ideas from 50 years ago, ad nauseam.

In the short-term then, we get a better Star Wars.

But what does it mean for the long-term?

Would movies and other cultural releases be V0.9s – betas – and then be patched for years afterwards?

What about once you throw generative AI into the mix? Would there ever be any big franchises again?

Would studios A/B test 100 versions of the same film with a dozen different actors and avatars before releasing the highest scorer?

Even this is just tip of the iceberg stuff.

Most people today still really don’t guess at how fast and furious the future is going to be.

Post-publication update: Here’s Kermit the Frog envisaged in various movies by the DALL-E natural language driven AI.