all right so uh back in October of 1910
a guy by the name of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was running for state senator
in the great state of New York and our
buddy Frank he was having some troubles
because he wasn’t really a known entity
at the time uh and despite the fact that
in New York City where he was living uh
he was known and popular by Democratic
donors and the Democratic electorate
upstate he was either not known or sort
of reviled reason being he was seen as
this Silk Stocking city slicker who
couldn’t possibly imagine the the plight
of the working man and just couldn’t
represent the the citizens of upstate
New York I’m so he had to figure out
like what the heck am I gonna do about
this and after lots of thinking he came
up with this sort of revolutionary idea
which will sound funny now but this idea
was you know what I’m gonna go campaign
in a car and the reason that was
revolutionary was because there are very
few cars on the road at this time
probably about the same amount then as
there are self-driving cars on the road
now so imagine like I don’t know who
Indiana’s state senator is but driving
around in a self-driving car you’d think
like this guy’s kind of a piece of work
so anyways he comes up with this plan
he’s like this is gonna allow me to
shake hands with more and more people
who’s gonna be great however when he
brought this proposal to his aides they
were like Franklin you can’t do this is
a terrible idea because there’s so few
cars they’re seen as these luxury items
that only the rich and wealthy have and
it’s going to further ingrain the very
idea that you were trying to dispel here
that you are a city slicker with a bunch
of money and he pushes back and says no
no no no no I I will overcome that just
let me do this thing so on a Sunday on a
sunny morning I in early October he
along with his driver who was a piano
tuner and knew the back roads of upstate
New York very well from going to house
to house to tune the pianos they hopped
in a red car with no roof and started
winding their way through
the dusty backroads of upstate New York
and what they did was they yielded the
right away to every horse and buggy that
that they came across and more than that
every time they passed a field with a
farmer in it
Franklin would get out in his
three-piece suit and expensive leather
shoes and trudged through the barley or
wheat or corn or whatever it was go
shake the hand of the homesteader the
farmer and say I hope I can count on
your vote on November 8th and when
November 8th finally did come it turned
out that it had worked he had managed to
talk to enough people and sort of
present himself to enough people to
dispel these feelings that he was out of
touch and when the ballots were cast and
counted it turned out that he had
received enough from upstate to win win
the election and became a senator in New
York City excuse me in New York State
now what I love about this anecdote is
it seems to capture sort of perfectly
what it takes to win an election
particularly a national one now a
hundred years plus in the future and
that would be number one being able to
harness a new technology in a way that
allows you to reach out and connect with
more people than your opponent and more
importantly than that to be able to do
so in a way that feels authentic history
is rife with examples of this sticking
with FDR for a moment he went on to do
his fireside chats which I’m sure you
have all heard about in American history
class where he would go into essentially
every living room in America and talk to
people as if he was sitting right there
JFK understood the power of television
better than anyone before him and was
able to broadcast himself into living
rooms across American make people feel
like he was right there Barack Obama
more recently really took hold of mass
emailing big data and social media in a
way to connect with young people like
nobody ever had and most recently
whether you love him or hate him Donald
Trump
we have to give him that he really
harnessed the 24-hour news cycle and
Twitter better than anyone before him
and I think what you see and all these
examples are is a man who is connecting
with thousands or millions of people
well at the same time making those
people feel like he is just speaking to
them and I think this is what sort of we
long for as Americans in our politicians
we want somebody to feel authentic
no it’s probably news to nobody in this
room that there’s been sort of a rash of
we could call them inauthentic news
stories circulating throughout America
over the past year year and a half or
some speaking of fake news and the
reason that these two juxtaposing ideas
I think have been in my head is because
I’m worried that we that we are on the
precipice of a new technology two of
them actually that are going to enable
politicians to betray this thirst for
ident or this thirst for authenticity
that we have and maybe even worse sort
of undermine what’s at the fundament of
our democracy so these two technologies
I’m talking about were originally
introduced to me by a writer for Vanity
Fair a guy by the name of Nick Bilton
and the first one is something called
vocal synthesis so whether you know it
or not you all have very likely
interacted with vocal synthesis it is
what a allows Siri on your iPhone to
speak back with you or speak back at you
also Stephen Hawking he’s one of the
most famous folks who has used vocal
synthesis for a very long time to
facilitate his ability to speak and well
this technology has been around for a
long time the way it has historically
worked is you got to bring a voice actor
into a studio sit him down for hours or
tens of hours and have them read
thousands of these little nonsense words
words that then after these dozens of
hours of recordings are done an engineer
has to go into the studio chop all those
recordings up into tiny tiny tiny pieces
and then label what they are put them
into a database with all the proper
labels and then when you or I or whoever
has access to this text-to-speech
program can type in whatever they want
and it will make sort of a robotic
sounding version of a human saying
whatever the heck it is you wanted to
say this technology however in just the
past year has sort of entered its
adolescence and like all adolescents or
good adolescents it’s beginning to
mature very quickly and one
think about specifically is a program
that adobe the folks that make Photoshop
just showcased about a year ago it’s
called voco and their hope is that voco
will do two audio what Photoshop has
done two images
so essentially what it can do is I don’t
mean to pick on you but let’s say that I
I’m a radio reporter I stick a
microphone in your face for 20 minutes I
ask you some silly questions and you
just sort of talk at me for 20 minutes I
could take that audio file feed it into
voco VOCA will spend about three seconds
automatically doing all of that slicing
and labeling and databasing and then in
a little text box that pops up in the
program I can type whatever I want and I
can make you say in your own voice
indistinguishably whatever the heck it
is I want to make you safe so let’s say
I don’t know what’s something you
probably really dislike we’re in Indiana
like go Buckeyes go like would that be
something that would or go Badgers I
don’t know who’d is Indiana now like but
anyway is a problematic right it’s not
too difficult to imagine the negative
consequences of this but uh just just to
drive the point home let’s take a quick
look at this I’m gonna do some context
just in case instead of kissing her
you know I’m automatically attracted to
beautiful I just started kissing them
it’s like a magnet when your star they
let you do it you can’t do anything
whatever you want
his legs elegance easily no I want to
play okay so that of course is uh the
now-infamous
Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump
back in 2005 bragging about sexually
assaulting a woman on top of the fact or
maybe or I guess what I want to point
out is and what’s worth noticing is that
everything vilde that he said he said
before he in fact got off the bus and so
if this sort of technology was pervasive
at the time that this video came out
it’s hard to imagine him not saying it’s
fabricated I never said that
somebody made me say that
and that means we’re about to enter a
moment where anyone will be able to
plausibly deny anything that’s ever been
recorded of them saying or maybe worse
someone will be able to make some make
anyone say whatever they want and we
won’t really know whether they said it
problematic but let’s imagine for a
second that that video camera had been
on the bus it was trained right on
Donald Trump’s face as he spewed these
these misogynistic thoughts he we’d get
him then right like there’s no way we’re
working around that well let’s take a
look at technology number two that I’m
thinking about here if we can see that
on the video screen we present a novel
real-time facial reenactment method that
works with any kimono a web cam since
our method only uses RGB data for both
the source and target actor we are able
to manipulate YouTube videos in real
time ok as you’ll notice here the man on
your right eye is controlling the face
of George Bush this is something known
as facial reenactment or facial
animation software and the way it works
is in real-time it allows for with just
this the program in a standard web cam
that you can buy at Best Buy or wherever
for ten dollars it turns on looks at
your face figures out the geometry of
your face then does the same for whoever
is in the pre-recorded video and then in
real time allows who’s ever on the
webcam to puppeteer or control the face
of whoever is in the video now let’s
imagine for a second that somebody has
their hands on both these technologies
the facial reenactment as well as the
vocals in ptosis suddenly that person
has the ability to make it look like
anyone
[Music]
is saying whatever it is they want that
person to say yeah let’s just think of
some examples here I guess Russia could
release a video of Hillary Clinton
saying I in fact was very happy that
those folks were killed in Benghazi the
right-wing extremists could release a
video of Barack Obama saying got yeah
I’m not American
and I am Muslim left-wing extremists
could release a video of Steve Bannon
reading from mine comp from memory or
just spewing it from memory we’re on the
edge of entering a moment where any
politician their supporter or some third
party actor is going to be able to prove
whatever narrative it is that they want
to prove
I will say before we get too worried
that the technology is not perfect yet
it’s pretty good but it’s not perfect
for the radio show I work for Radio lab
we actually got our hands on some early
versions of both of these pieces of
technology and made a video clip of
Barack Obama saying something that he
never said so let’s take a quick look at
that now
on the backend now of my presidency now
that it’s almost completed although
there are all kinds of issues that I
care about the single most important
thing I can do is wait no because our
parties have moved further and further
apart and it’s harder and harder to find
common ground so you know when I said in
2004 that there were no red states or
blue states for the United States of
America
that was wrong all right so not perfect
right but for a group of people with
absolutely no technological know-how and
because of journalistic ethics weren’t
allowed to pay anybody a penny I don’t
think it’s that bad
and more than that let’s consider the
fact that these things are only going to
get better they’re only going to get
better and they’re about to be in the
pockets of everyone in this room because
although these technologies are not yet
out on the consumer market from the
folks I talked to we’re looking at six
months to a year before you can go into
the App Store and for $0.99 or $4.99
download some versions of these programs
and so that brings us back to sort of
the dance I was mentioning at the top of
this that well we are constantly chasing
authenticity our politicians are chasing
after whatever it is that will scratch
that itch for us
and so I think the question is no longer
how is fake news going to play out in
the 2020 presidential election but
rather how are we gonna react to option
number one worst-case scenario is we
elect someone into office based on
completely false information or actually
I guess worse than that would be prior
to that happening
someone releases a video of Kim Jong
Un’s saying that he has fired a nuclear
missile at the United States the federal
government unwittingly responds
believing it to be true and sets off a
nuclear exchange that was never meant to
happen
the second option which is an option
that I actually had to sort of puzzle
over whether I even believed it possible
or not because I’m not super optimistic
about this is that we all no longer
blindly accept these mediums as
authentic we no longer believe that
everything we see in here is true we
have to get a heck of a lot smarter and
we have to critically engage with every
single piece of audio and video we come
across
and if we’re able to do that we will be
able to rob these technologies of some
of their power if we can do that then at
least for a while will require our
politicians to find the next thing that
makes us feel like they’re real thanks
so much
you
a guy by the name of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was running for state senator
in the great state of New York and our
buddy Frank he was having some troubles
because he wasn’t really a known entity
at the time uh and despite the fact that
in New York City where he was living uh
he was known and popular by Democratic
donors and the Democratic electorate
upstate he was either not known or sort
of reviled reason being he was seen as
this Silk Stocking city slicker who
couldn’t possibly imagine the the plight
of the working man and just couldn’t
represent the the citizens of upstate
New York I’m so he had to figure out
like what the heck am I gonna do about
this and after lots of thinking he came
up with this sort of revolutionary idea
which will sound funny now but this idea
was you know what I’m gonna go campaign
in a car and the reason that was
revolutionary was because there are very
few cars on the road at this time
probably about the same amount then as
there are self-driving cars on the road
now so imagine like I don’t know who
Indiana’s state senator is but driving
around in a self-driving car you’d think
like this guy’s kind of a piece of work
so anyways he comes up with this plan
he’s like this is gonna allow me to
shake hands with more and more people
who’s gonna be great however when he
brought this proposal to his aides they
were like Franklin you can’t do this is
a terrible idea because there’s so few
cars they’re seen as these luxury items
that only the rich and wealthy have and
it’s going to further ingrain the very
idea that you were trying to dispel here
that you are a city slicker with a bunch
of money and he pushes back and says no
no no no no I I will overcome that just
let me do this thing so on a Sunday on a
sunny morning I in early October he
along with his driver who was a piano
tuner and knew the back roads of upstate
New York very well from going to house
to house to tune the pianos they hopped
in a red car with no roof and started
winding their way through
the dusty backroads of upstate New York
and what they did was they yielded the
right away to every horse and buggy that
that they came across and more than that
every time they passed a field with a
farmer in it
Franklin would get out in his
three-piece suit and expensive leather
shoes and trudged through the barley or
wheat or corn or whatever it was go
shake the hand of the homesteader the
farmer and say I hope I can count on
your vote on November 8th and when
November 8th finally did come it turned
out that it had worked he had managed to
talk to enough people and sort of
present himself to enough people to
dispel these feelings that he was out of
touch and when the ballots were cast and
counted it turned out that he had
received enough from upstate to win win
the election and became a senator in New
York City excuse me in New York State
now what I love about this anecdote is
it seems to capture sort of perfectly
what it takes to win an election
particularly a national one now a
hundred years plus in the future and
that would be number one being able to
harness a new technology in a way that
allows you to reach out and connect with
more people than your opponent and more
importantly than that to be able to do
so in a way that feels authentic history
is rife with examples of this sticking
with FDR for a moment he went on to do
his fireside chats which I’m sure you
have all heard about in American history
class where he would go into essentially
every living room in America and talk to
people as if he was sitting right there
JFK understood the power of television
better than anyone before him and was
able to broadcast himself into living
rooms across American make people feel
like he was right there Barack Obama
more recently really took hold of mass
emailing big data and social media in a
way to connect with young people like
nobody ever had and most recently
whether you love him or hate him Donald
Trump
we have to give him that he really
harnessed the 24-hour news cycle and
Twitter better than anyone before him
and I think what you see and all these
examples are is a man who is connecting
with thousands or millions of people
well at the same time making those
people feel like he is just speaking to
them and I think this is what sort of we
long for as Americans in our politicians
we want somebody to feel authentic
no it’s probably news to nobody in this
room that there’s been sort of a rash of
we could call them inauthentic news
stories circulating throughout America
over the past year year and a half or
some speaking of fake news and the
reason that these two juxtaposing ideas
I think have been in my head is because
I’m worried that we that we are on the
precipice of a new technology two of
them actually that are going to enable
politicians to betray this thirst for
ident or this thirst for authenticity
that we have and maybe even worse sort
of undermine what’s at the fundament of
our democracy so these two technologies
I’m talking about were originally
introduced to me by a writer for Vanity
Fair a guy by the name of Nick Bilton
and the first one is something called
vocal synthesis so whether you know it
or not you all have very likely
interacted with vocal synthesis it is
what a allows Siri on your iPhone to
speak back with you or speak back at you
also Stephen Hawking he’s one of the
most famous folks who has used vocal
synthesis for a very long time to
facilitate his ability to speak and well
this technology has been around for a
long time the way it has historically
worked is you got to bring a voice actor
into a studio sit him down for hours or
tens of hours and have them read
thousands of these little nonsense words
words that then after these dozens of
hours of recordings are done an engineer
has to go into the studio chop all those
recordings up into tiny tiny tiny pieces
and then label what they are put them
into a database with all the proper
labels and then when you or I or whoever
has access to this text-to-speech
program can type in whatever they want
and it will make sort of a robotic
sounding version of a human saying
whatever the heck it is you wanted to
say this technology however in just the
past year has sort of entered its
adolescence and like all adolescents or
good adolescents it’s beginning to
mature very quickly and one
think about specifically is a program
that adobe the folks that make Photoshop
just showcased about a year ago it’s
called voco and their hope is that voco
will do two audio what Photoshop has
done two images
so essentially what it can do is I don’t
mean to pick on you but let’s say that I
I’m a radio reporter I stick a
microphone in your face for 20 minutes I
ask you some silly questions and you
just sort of talk at me for 20 minutes I
could take that audio file feed it into
voco VOCA will spend about three seconds
automatically doing all of that slicing
and labeling and databasing and then in
a little text box that pops up in the
program I can type whatever I want and I
can make you say in your own voice
indistinguishably whatever the heck it
is I want to make you safe so let’s say
I don’t know what’s something you
probably really dislike we’re in Indiana
like go Buckeyes go like would that be
something that would or go Badgers I
don’t know who’d is Indiana now like but
anyway is a problematic right it’s not
too difficult to imagine the negative
consequences of this but uh just just to
drive the point home let’s take a quick
look at this I’m gonna do some context
just in case instead of kissing her
you know I’m automatically attracted to
beautiful I just started kissing them
it’s like a magnet when your star they
let you do it you can’t do anything
whatever you want
his legs elegance easily no I want to
play okay so that of course is uh the
now-infamous
Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump
back in 2005 bragging about sexually
assaulting a woman on top of the fact or
maybe or I guess what I want to point
out is and what’s worth noticing is that
everything vilde that he said he said
before he in fact got off the bus and so
if this sort of technology was pervasive
at the time that this video came out
it’s hard to imagine him not saying it’s
fabricated I never said that
somebody made me say that
and that means we’re about to enter a
moment where anyone will be able to
plausibly deny anything that’s ever been
recorded of them saying or maybe worse
someone will be able to make some make
anyone say whatever they want and we
won’t really know whether they said it
problematic but let’s imagine for a
second that that video camera had been
on the bus it was trained right on
Donald Trump’s face as he spewed these
these misogynistic thoughts he we’d get
him then right like there’s no way we’re
working around that well let’s take a
look at technology number two that I’m
thinking about here if we can see that
on the video screen we present a novel
real-time facial reenactment method that
works with any kimono a web cam since
our method only uses RGB data for both
the source and target actor we are able
to manipulate YouTube videos in real
time ok as you’ll notice here the man on
your right eye is controlling the face
of George Bush this is something known
as facial reenactment or facial
animation software and the way it works
is in real-time it allows for with just
this the program in a standard web cam
that you can buy at Best Buy or wherever
for ten dollars it turns on looks at
your face figures out the geometry of
your face then does the same for whoever
is in the pre-recorded video and then in
real time allows who’s ever on the
webcam to puppeteer or control the face
of whoever is in the video now let’s
imagine for a second that somebody has
their hands on both these technologies
the facial reenactment as well as the
vocals in ptosis suddenly that person
has the ability to make it look like
anyone
[Music]
is saying whatever it is they want that
person to say yeah let’s just think of
some examples here I guess Russia could
release a video of Hillary Clinton
saying I in fact was very happy that
those folks were killed in Benghazi the
right-wing extremists could release a
video of Barack Obama saying got yeah
I’m not American
and I am Muslim left-wing extremists
could release a video of Steve Bannon
reading from mine comp from memory or
just spewing it from memory we’re on the
edge of entering a moment where any
politician their supporter or some third
party actor is going to be able to prove
whatever narrative it is that they want
to prove
I will say before we get too worried
that the technology is not perfect yet
it’s pretty good but it’s not perfect
for the radio show I work for Radio lab
we actually got our hands on some early
versions of both of these pieces of
technology and made a video clip of
Barack Obama saying something that he
never said so let’s take a quick look at
that now
on the backend now of my presidency now
that it’s almost completed although
there are all kinds of issues that I
care about the single most important
thing I can do is wait no because our
parties have moved further and further
apart and it’s harder and harder to find
common ground so you know when I said in
2004 that there were no red states or
blue states for the United States of
America
that was wrong all right so not perfect
right but for a group of people with
absolutely no technological know-how and
because of journalistic ethics weren’t
allowed to pay anybody a penny I don’t
think it’s that bad
and more than that let’s consider the
fact that these things are only going to
get better they’re only going to get
better and they’re about to be in the
pockets of everyone in this room because
although these technologies are not yet
out on the consumer market from the
folks I talked to we’re looking at six
months to a year before you can go into
the App Store and for $0.99 or $4.99
download some versions of these programs
and so that brings us back to sort of
the dance I was mentioning at the top of
this that well we are constantly chasing
authenticity our politicians are chasing
after whatever it is that will scratch
that itch for us
and so I think the question is no longer
how is fake news going to play out in
the 2020 presidential election but
rather how are we gonna react to option
number one worst-case scenario is we
elect someone into office based on
completely false information or actually
I guess worse than that would be prior
to that happening
someone releases a video of Kim Jong
Un’s saying that he has fired a nuclear
missile at the United States the federal
government unwittingly responds
believing it to be true and sets off a
nuclear exchange that was never meant to
happen
the second option which is an option
that I actually had to sort of puzzle
over whether I even believed it possible
or not because I’m not super optimistic
about this is that we all no longer
blindly accept these mediums as
authentic we no longer believe that
everything we see in here is true we
have to get a heck of a lot smarter and
we have to critically engage with every
single piece of audio and video we come
across
and if we’re able to do that we will be
able to rob these technologies of some
of their power if we can do that then at
least for a while will require our
politicians to find the next thing that
makes us feel like they’re real thanks
so much
you
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