Recent advances in technology have made it possible to edit both voice and actual video recordings more easily than ever. This includes the ability to say anything at all and have either the audio or the video (or both) be incredibly convincing.
First, audio editing:
Adobe has a new product called Voco which enables you to drag and drop audio recordings, type in new text and nearly instantaneously press play to hear very real sounding results that are difficult to decipher as fake. With just 20 minutes of audio recording of a speaker's voice, such as a politician, celebrity or even you, the computer can pretty much create any imaginable recording from your script. More about concerns with this new tool.
Even more startling, video editing:
As you can see for yourself in these videos, researchers are working on technology that allows them to map the facial expressions and movements of anyone from video footage and replace that with actual new edited footage created from a simple WebCam recording of another person. Basically this means anyone can be like a puppeteer. So you could take the video footage of a politician or celebrity and replace it with video of whatever you acted out in your recording. The preliminary samples demonstrating this technology online or certainly not seamless or indecipherable from something that would be authentic, but you can quickly realize the ramifications of this technology.
As you can see for yourself in these videos, researchers are working on technology that allows them to map the facial expressions and movements of anyone from video footage and replace that with actual new edited footage created from a simple WebCam recording of another person. Basically this means anyone can be like a puppeteer. So you could take the video footage of a politician or celebrity and replace it with video of whatever you acted out in your recording. The preliminary samples demonstrating this technology online or certainly not seamless or indecipherable from something that would be authentic, but you can quickly realize the ramifications of this technology.
As I wrote about last week, things are advancing faster than we can keep up with it so it's highly likely that within the next year or so this will be in use. As stated in the Radiolab podcast, not only will this technology soon to be made available, it will likely be available as an app on all of our phones, making it possible for anyone to use. Later in the episode they discussed the difficulty experts will have deciphering whether or not these files are real or fake, explaining how it can take days now to figure the authenticity of a single photograph thought to be altered with Photoshop. Audio and video will be even more difficult.
This certainly has far-reaching implications for our future. In education, we need to be aware of these latest technological advances and inform students of it. I'm not sure exactly how we will teach students to know whether a current video or audio recording is authentic, or even whether a historical clip from decades ago is legit, altered, or completely fake. It will be necessary to teach them to research the source of something as well as the reputation of that news service, website provider, host, and/or company. A few weeks ago I wrote about the need to teach ethics within computer science. Teaching ethics and strong moral values are definitely needed with advances like these voice and video editing tools in our near future!
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