Synthetic Media
Vivian Schiller and I ran a session this past week at betaworks Studio about synthetic media. It was a private event for members and guests and off the record, so I can’t share in detail, but it was a fascinating discussion, with an amazing breadth and depth of people — I want to share some high-level thoughts about what I learnt and came away with.
What is Synthetic media?
Synthetic media is the term we use at betaworks to describe algorithmically created or modified media — the nefarious version of this are deepfakes. We have been thinking about this for a while now and have started to invest around our thesis. While this might seem futuristic, it’s not. Over the past five years, we have seen text, images, videos and pose control all reach a tipping point where algorithmically created versions are indistinguishable to human observation. And while most of the use cases today of this technology relate to media it’s important to note, as someone repeatedly highlighted, that this has direct implications to our legal system, since media — pictures, videos — are so often used in law as accepted truth.
This future is here now and we need to start to discuss it and consider its impact on everything from media and, fact-checking to “evidence” introduced in trials. So much of our functioning civic systems rely on the assumption that what you see, hear or observe in media is in fact what happened. That is no longer the case, technology is taking a photoshop brush to the world.
The deck we used to prime the debate is at the bottom of this post. In it, you can see examples across media types of the technologies and the transitions. We also wrote a related article back in 2015 about Media Hacking — how Russian bots were infiltrating Twitter and other media to spread ‘fake news’ — synthetic media is among other things, a complex subset of media hacking.
It’s complicated …
This is not a simple matter of ‘bad’ or ‘good’. There are deepfakes, but there is also a lot of self-expression and creativity happening with this technology. Snap has an entire generation entranced with algorithmically modified filters and the technology that is now coming is just a step beyond that. Take the examples below.
On the left is an algorithmically created GIF taking Obama mike drop, that a soon to be released app turned into an animated 3D form, with my head inserted. On the right is university research on realistic expression manipulation with a simple mouse. The left is fun; the right is disturbing. There cannot be a one size fits all response to synthetic media. Understanding the state of technology was one goal of the meeting, but beyond that what we really wanted to do was dig into the complexity and repercussions.
Several possible “futures” emerged in the discussion, here are four to consider
I learnt a lot from the discussion, one way to think about the future that I find useful is to consider different possible futures. Below are four of the possible futures that emerged in the discussion.
Chaos: A possible future is that the fragmentation of trust in media that we have today — which is essentially a tribal distrust of the human interpretation of events — extends to the actual media. Chaos, skepticism and tribalism will dominate and we revert to a pre-consensus society where everything has to be determined “locally”.
Revert to trusted hierarchies: A different future is that the distrust created out of synthetically modified media will result in “official” platforms or media outlets playing a key role in verification and trust will revert to them. Verification is going to be expensive — increasingly so — so certain sources could become “officially” trusted and the rest become a mass of entertainment and social fun or identity-based manipulated media. You could argue that this is where we were fifty years ago with few trusted outlets however given the inherent network effects, massive power would accrue to a few, hierarchical systems. It’s a reversion to the power of vertical media.
A market evolves where watermarking, digital signatures become the means to verify the veracity of media: A possible future, and one that is already emerging, is one where digital watermarking and decentralized tools are used for verification. Paper currency was discussed as an example of a product that had a high cost of counterfeiting, yet provides legal tender. In a comparable fashion, blockchain technology like non-fungible tokens are reversing the assumption of infinite digital replication. A robust market for these technologies could emerge, this is happening within the blockchain community and it could reach scale.
The mirror: This was a fascinating and dystopian future that I hadn't considered. What if someone built a meta tracking tool that observed all events providing a reference set for “truth”. Media that is produced is then “checked” against that reference set. This “mirror” is Jeremy Bentham panopticon on steroids. There is also a crowdsourced version of this — imagine if all the photos in the world of a particular place and time were stitched together and that was used as the reference set. There remains the problem of who will watch the watchman, or the stitcher.
The actual future will likely be a mix of the possible futures outlined above — blended with others. We need to understand these futures, discuss them, and develop moral frameworks for what is useful, what isn’t and what boundaries do we as a culture want to impose on this technology. And in this process we need to apply skepticism — blindly adopting this technology with the promise that we will figure it later will result in chaos.
One stark conclusion that discussion left me with was how critical agreed truth is to our civilization. Consensus is vital to a functioning democracy and consensus relies on a society ability to agree on a common set of facts. Technology is rapidly changing our ability to determine this as humans.
Sessions at betaworks Studios are weekly discussions for members and guests — the calendar is available on the Studios website.
The slide deck we used for the discussion:
