Do You Know These People?

Video Transcript:

Hello everyone, Shahzad Bukti here. So before we start the video, I want you to look at this image here, this compilation of celebrity faces. And I want you all just to see how many people you recognize, okay? How many of these celebrity faces do you recognize or that you've seen before? And I'll give you all a couple of seconds. Okay, so how many of you recognize maybe one or two of these faces? How many of you recognize maybe four or five? Well you shouldn't have recognized any because every face here does not exist and is a fake, created by an artificial intelligence computer system. And there are thousands more just like it, potentially millions, all coming out of some new research being put forth by Nvidia, which is the technology company most notable for the graphics cards and processors inside of your computer when you play video games. And it would appear that Nvidia who is obviously working with Uncle Sam and they all do, they are using AI to create people out of thin air. And it's become quite disturbing to some people. Now some of you may remember that this past summer there was, well, what is called an image generator that hit the web where you could basically draw a crude doodle of a face and after which this AI or artificial intelligence would turn it into a photo realistic looking human face. And so it was part of something called the PIX to PIX project and it was powered by a next level machine learning technique called Generative at Bacerial Networks. And so now Nvidia has developed a system that employs GAN to create far more realistic faces. Now before we go further just to show you a few examples of this PIX to PIX project, where again you can draw anything, it can be a face, it can be a picture of a shoe or an animal or a building and this system will turn it into something that almost looks like it was snapped by a camera. So here you're seeing where someone crudely drew a shoe, a slip on woman shoe and over here you can see that the AI system not only identified the correct coloring but also the texture, the lighting and made a very realistic copy. What was most impressive to me was well first there's two. This one here what appears to be a kitten that someone has crudely drawn and next to it something that again I would think was real or came from a real photograph had you not told me that it was created off a doodle. And then finally what's probably the most amazing to me is that we have this drawing here that looks like it was made using nothing more than Microsoft paint which is then rendered into a realistic image of a building that looks like it came right off a New York City corner. And so this is the technology that is being implemented in this new fake face generation research. And so Nvidia released a video of their Gan in action again Gan stands for Generative Adversarial Network and in this video that was released a couple of months back these artificial intelligence created faces are both absolutely remarkable and incredibly airy. If the average person didn't know that the faces were machine generated they would easily be fooled into believing they were living people as I did before I knew what the video was for and indeed this sort of blurring of the line between the human and the machine generated has been a big topic of discussion within the realm of AI and it's got a lot of people disturbed a lot of people think it's cool which on one level it is it's interesting it's cool but again we know that when technology like this comes out usually either the CIA the NSA the government usually always has the hands in the back pocket of these companies and will take this deck and they will abuse it they've done it before they'll do it again and so there's a question of what are the applications for software like this other than creating fake people for dubious reasons. I mean I don't even want to think of the applications this could be used for whether it be creating patcies or making up individuals to serve as victims of fake tragedies putting people that are not real into photographs that could then be later used as false evidence I just don't want to think of it and who knows how long they've already been using this technology before letting it out of the public and if you thought this was disturbing it gets much worse trust me they are a number of AI's that are using something called deep learning techniques to also produce human sounding speech Google for instance has something called wave net which can now copy human speech almost perfectly. There's also a startup called Libert and it has an algorithm that is able to synthesize a human's voice using only one minute of audio. Now just think about that using only one minute of audio this thing can copy your voice and you know immediately when I heard that it made me think back to a film that came out in the 80's many of you probably don't know many of you may be do but it was called tango and cash and it was sort of this action but it caught film that had silvestre still on and Kurt Russell and there was one point in the film where Kurt Russell discovers that there's this audio tape of him on there talking about some pretty dubious things he realizes that it's a computer generated voice and in the film it's used to frame him seeing some very intimidating things and so that's the first thing literally that I thought of when I heard that they were able to synthesize your voice so imagine the government or the state has the power to take a small amount of audio of you talking and before you know it you're listening to a recording of what sounds like you is talking like you but that is saying some very scary things that you didn't say and now imagine the applications of that and so other dubious ways that this technology can be used is not only creating takes but editing real-time videos and erasing things now many of you may remember this but around 8 years ago a video came out online displaying something called diminished reality and what this was was a piece of software that you could load into a camera that would be able to remove objects from a video in real time as in while you're recording and so we all know about augmented reality it's used today but back then this German software company created something called diminished reality now we've seen similar for photos but this software can neatly delete any object from a life full motion video and you're seeing examples of that here whether it's a person whether it's an inanimate object a chair basically anything you select this thing will remove and the effect is achieved using an image synthesizer that reduces the image quality first removes the object and then increases the image quality back up and all of this takes place within 40 milliseconds fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice a needle and as the camera moves the system maintains the illusion through tracking algorithms and guesswork and the video and images that you're seeing here were just the first rough cut from eight years ago and look how amazingly scary it is now the only real application up to that point for diminished reality as it's now called was maybe used back in the days of Hollywood and still used today but they would edit out things in motion pictures like wires for instance you've got a guy swinging on wires they raised them out in post and make it look like the guy is flying well this does the same thing only in real time and while you could say it may be a helpful tool in movie editing the hard truth is that it's not really being used in Hollywood and after this came out eight years ago we've heard very little about the software since and it's thought by many people that it too has been licensed to or just straight up taken away and is now being utilized by the government for some really dubious stuff and again you could only imagine the applications of something like this in order to completely erase anything that you don't want to show up in a video so let your clock take on that all this technology has not been created for your benefit rather most of it is produced to harm you and only for the benefit of those in power always keep that in mind may god bless you