The end of “seeing is believing”?

Great article in the New Yorker on the rise of advances in “synthetic video” and what that could imply for humanity. While Photoshop and similar editing tools have been around for a while, one has still needed a skilled person to produce a “fake”. But with the advance of ML and the easy availability of digital data that’s no longer true.

A couple of points that caught my eye:

• Modern digital cameras, meanwhile, often achieve higher resolutions by guessing about [~66% of] the light their sensors don’t catch
• Companies are using Blockchain to fight back – e.g. Truepic, a start up, uses Blockchain + attributes about the image / camera to verify whether a photo is original.

You can read the paper here; or see an example of an actor “impersonating” Obama here.

Great article — scary implications for our future.