Hot take: I used to think deepfakes were just for celebrity face swaps

I was totally wrong about that. A guy in my local photography club showed me a deepfake of our club president giving a speech we never recorded. It was so good it freaked me out. Then he broke it down step by step over 3 days at our meetups. The trick was syncing voice samples from just 5 minutes of audio. Now I believe anyone can fake a believable video with the right tools. Has anyone else had a moment where a demo shifted your view on what's possible?

3 comments

3 Comments

dylan_brown3011d ago

Oh man that reminds me of something bigger I've been noticing lately... it's like every single thing we used to think was real is getting a little shaky. Like I was at a diner last week and this older guy was arguing with a waitress about a conversation they supposedly had three days before. He was dead certain. But the waitress pulled out her phone and showed him the security cam footage from that day - he was eating alone, didn't talk to anyone. The guy just sat there quiet. It's not even just deepfakes anymore, it's like our brains are already bad enough at remembering stuff and now the tech is catching up to that weakness. Makes me wonder what other "obvious" things are gonna get flipped upside down in the next couple years.

jakewhite10d ago

Dude that diner thing is wild. I had something similar happen last month, my buddy swore we saw a guy get hit by a car at an intersection. I was there too and I didn't remember it at all. We watched the street cam footage later and nothing happened. Brains are just glitchy hardware I guess.

max_brown9d ago

@dylan_brown30 our memories are actually way more reliable than you're giving them credit for.