Fake news is about to get ‘real’ with new tech

There’s a podcast I listen to called Radiolab. It’s based in New York. A recent episode caught my attention because they sent a reporter to Seattle to talk to some smart people at Adobe and the University of Washington.

The topic? New breakthroughs in software that will allow people to make anyone say anything in their own voice. This is not a joke. Computer scientists have already written software that can listen to how you talk for about 40 minutes, then synthesize your voice to say anything they want. Other computer scientists are doing the same thing for video.

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The stated goal for the software is to help out the movie and commercial industry, but I think what we’re talking about here is a whole new frontier for fake news. Can you imagine a world where you could make former President Barack Obama say that he’s giving up on America and he’s going to play golf?

Well, take a listen to a statement that Obama never said. The video clip here eventually shows the voice actor controlling the president’s cadence and inflection. The quality of it sounds pretty good to me. How about you?

We live in a country where there were more fake news stories shared on social media than real stories during the last election cycle. A man drove to Washington D.C. to stop Hillary Clinton from running a child sex operation out of a neighborhood pizza parlor. That man showed up heavily armed and discharged his weapon before he figured out he had bought into a news story that wasn’t real. What happens when a troll in his basement can make anyone say anything?

When asked about the possible negative impact the software might have, the computer scientist at the University of Washington basically said, “It’s my job to create it, not to regulate it.”

How do we break out of the echo chambers that we are in? It’s tough. I do it, too.

I have my favorite sources that I go to. I nod along in agreement or laugh because they are preaching a gospel that I already believe. It’s fun to look down my nose at those “stupid people” that believe in fake news. I’m one of the smart ones, I tell myself. But aren’t the people I’m mocking saying the same thing about me?

By the next election, it might be possible to make an audio tape of Trump talking to Putin about sabotaging the election that never actually happened. It might be possible in the election after that to create convincing enough video to go along with the fake audio. Then what do we do?

When I was a kid, people would say, “Well, seeing is believing.” When you saw a photograph, you believed it happened because you “saw it with your own two eyes.”

Nobody says that anymore because of Photoshop. Now the same company that makes Photoshop is changing reality again. In the next decade, it’s quite possible that every piece of video will be open to debate as to whether it even happened or not.

Let’s hope we all develop some more skills about how to discern fake news.

“What Are We Talking About Here” can be heard every weekday at 4:50 p.m. and 6:50 p.m. on the Ron & Don Show on KIRO Radio 97.3 FM.