What are your thoughts on these two upcoming media technologies?

Awesome. This way, you can finally have full motion, accurately voiced hardcore pornography of your favourite Celebrities. Gone will be the days of badly photoshopped fakes and low quality leaks.

I haven’t heard too much about these new technologies, but I don’t believe that any fears of any technology are as overblown as the (sometimes) ongoing hype, in some circles, about chip implant technology. The religious right is always freaking out about implants being the Mark of th Beast talked about in the Book of Revelations. So, we’ll have to see how this new tech plays out with rational people.

I thought this VoCo puppetry was already being applied in the States, since last January.
Only have no clue as to who’s pulling the strings. ~

This new technology scares me.

I mean, we already have to take things with a grain of salt. CGI has been an enemy of authenticity, as far as videos posted online. Every time I see a UFO video, I have to assume that parts of, or the entire video are fake.

Remember. Brandon Lee died filming ‘The Crow.’ But they CGI’d him into the scenes that weren’t shot yet. That was back in the 90’s. It looked pretty convincing.

Unfortunately, we should be suspicious of all media these days.

It seems to me that these are a good example of technological “game-changers” and how their effects tend go through several phases as they go from ideas and secrets to new imperfect and rare things, to more common, to common, to being available to everyone, with non-obvious effects on how they impact people.

We’re at the beginning of these moving from rare/unknown/limited to common/known/capable. I expect they have probably already been used in ways few people know about, possibly to great effect because people only recently realized it is possible and not as hard as they might have assumed.

There is a huge potential shift for these because we are used to being able to believe what we see to some degree. People used to believe in detailed still photos. Then they realized those could be faked. By 2001, even knowledgeable home computer users could fairly easily manipulate some videos, and it was common for media companies to do so. But even now, most people don’t expect that a video of someone talking with a detailed view of their face for a prolonged period could be changed to make their words and facial expressions quite different without it being relatively detectable. But it now is, and people are starting to realize that. But still, even single pictures and short video clips can be taken as symbols of people’s entire personalities.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the potential for this to lead to a reversion to something more like the situation in the past, before there were video cameras in nearly every phone and public place, because video evidence will no longer be nearly as believable as before. The easier it becomes to alter and create video, the less it can be trusted or used as evidence. It might even make paparazzi obsolete, because anyone with a little knowledge will be able make a realistic video of anyone doing anything that is indistinguishable from an actual one.

The transition will take a long time and have limits, and there will do doubt be some infamous and dramatic exploits. I expect there probably already have been. Politics seems like the most obvious area of impact, since video of a politician expressing certain opinions in certain ways, making faces, confessing to things, etc, could easily destroy one’s public perception, particularly in the Land Of Fools. Criminal evidence and social/career sabotage seem like other areas where lots of damage will be done before skepticism of video catches up to technology.

e.g. if you couldn’t know if any of these were real or not, but they looked very real:

* Anonymous email with video of your spouse saying shit about you, or loving someone else.

* Video showing politicians thinking they’re in private confessing to scandals, crimes, treason, hypocricy, making crazy/nasty faces, etc.

* Video to a boss seeming to show an employee betraying the company.

* Video of expert witnesses or scientists or scientists undermining their own credibility.

* Incriminating video sent to law-enforcement.

Etc.

Eh, these kinds of technologies have been around for awhile. Any given audio, video or photograph can be doctored in a skilled set of hands. It’s pretty much always been that way. Shit, people started doctoring photographs about five minutes after photography was invented.

@MrGrimm888 “Remember. Brandon Lee died filming ‘The Crow.’ But they CGI’d him into the scenes that weren’t shot yet. That was back in the 90’s. It looked pretty convincing.”

Actually I think, more to the point, they basically cut-and-pasted his image from footage already shot into the necessary scenes. I mean they had CGI back then, but at that time it was pretty much limited to the huge mega-blockbusters like Jurassic Park. They didn’t have anywhere near the budget for that kind of shit on The Crow. In fact the production’s reckless cost-cutting measures to stay within their meager budget directly contributed to Brandon Lee’s death.

^I’m not sure I understand your point…

Well The Crow was a very low budget production.Eventually, in order to stay within their budget, the production crew started cutting corners. One of the things they did to save money was to send the weapons master home early (at the time it wasn’t, by law, required for him to be on-set). The day Lee was shot on set they had been firing live rounds earlier (a common practice to get good up-close shots of guns firing). The particular gun that Lee was shot in was carelessly placed back in with the rest of the guns on set still loaded with live ammunition. A weapons master would have checked the any guns being used on set before filming a scene, but since he had been sent home that day no one on set even thought to check the gun that was later used in the fatal scene.

Since then a weapons master is required by law to be on set anytime firearms are going to be used in any capacity in a shoot. In fact, I believe that, now, the weapons master is the only person allowed to handle the firearms aside from the actors (and even then the actors are only allowed to handle the firearms while the scene is filming, the weapons master must take possession of the firearm immediately after the camera stops rolling).

^I’m sure you are factual, I just can’t connect this knowledge to my point. I was just saying that with outdated technology, similar things could be achieved. No, it wasn’t perfect. I think I read that they even dropped whole scenes because it just wouldn’t look right. But they pulled off a few scenes , I think with his face over a stunt double? .....

Just saying that we should already be suspicious of video authentication…

Now that is really scary. Anything digital can be hacked, so Adobe’s “digital stamp” means nothing. Somebody will figure out a way to defeat it.

Thanks you everyone for your responses! Sorry I haven’t been obviously active on this thread. I did read all of the comments, and I’ve been thinking about the question myself. I guess I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, so I hesitated to chime into the discussion again once it got going.

I still feel a mix of feelings. Everyone raises interesting points. For a part of me, the change does seem dramatic and somewhat scary because of how easy and convincing it would make video and audio doctoring.

Another part of me believes, like others, that we’ve already learned to be increasingly skeptical of other mediums, and that it would simply translate. @Zaku your point about this being a “return” to a past without such documentation is interesting, how our trust of these kinds of evidence is fairly new. Some brought up that, at least in skilled hands, this kind of doctoring is already doable. I don’t know much about that, so it’s useful to know. Both the podcast and the demonstrations led me to believe that these technologies were vast improvements over old techniques… but then again, they were presented by parties who all had an interest in differentiating the products as much as possible from predecessor technologies (for the sake of sales, or recognition, or narrative, etc.)

And then another part of me feels sad, because this won’t just make it easier for people to manufacture falsehoods, it may also make real events caught on camera be less believable. I’m thinking most recently about the footage showing police abuse and brutality on minority groups, largely because of all the discussions going on about groups like Black Lives Matter. Sure, statistics can show trends of unequal treatment, and yes, people can continue to describe their experiences… but there’s something emotionally persuasive about being thrown into that experience with a video, without the abstraction of numbers on graphs, without the plausible deniability of that ‘just being someone’s opinion of events.’ It feels like we’re just now seeing the social power this kind of information sharing can have. I guess I’m saddened by the thought that, depending on how these technologies pan out, that power might be short lived?