Advances in technology will inevitably mean that, just as people now edit pictures at home on their PCs to make fakes for fun, they will soon be able to do the same with video. In the relatively near future, it will be impossible to trust any picture, movie or soundbite. If this doesn't frighten you, it's because you haven't really thought about it.
Who hasn't had fun playing with photos on their PC at home? Who hasn't used Photoshop or whatever to touch up an old photograph to get rid of scratches and creases? Who hasn't scanned a photograph and edited it to remove an ex-spouse from a happy scene_ Well, you get the point. It's fun and easy to play around with digitised photographs and the power of a typical home PC is already sufficient to let anyone do this. How much more fun would it be if you could do the same thing with video?
Even an amateur like me has no trouble plugging my video camera into my Macintosh and firing up iMovie, editing some clips and producing mini-movies for friends and relatives. Hence, when I discovered that researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have managed to generate realistic videos of people saying things they never said, I began to look forward to next generation home video editing software with a mixture of fascination and sheer horror.
In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese (a language she does not speak) sufficiently well to consistently fool view ers. Now, while the technique is currently crude and only works on "talking heads" video, the software, which uses AI to figure out what the person should look like while saying something, is bound to get better, faster and cheaper.
This is a far cry from the problem that George Monbiot recently highlighted in this paper of fake newsgroup postings masquerading as real ones: it's one thing to have corporations trying to manipulate the masses while hiding behind bogus individual identities, but quite another to release bogus news clips into the wild. Even news organisations have trouble in determining what is actually news or not: look at the recent and much-reported error by the Beijing Evening News (circulation 1.25 million), which carried a story from the American satirical website the Onion under the impression that its spoof story on the transfer of Congress from Washington was true.
If someone could create, on their home computer, utterly convincing video footage of Osama bin Laden doing something un-Islamic, then how would either his friends or his foes know whether it was real or not?
In fact, as I have noted before, how will anyone know whether anything is real or not? Will they look to some "higher authority" to verify material for them and pronounce on its veracity, will they use education and critical faculties to assess the probability of a story being true, or will they look to their tribe for feedback and validation? I suspect the latter.
Reinforcing the theory that people buy newspapers that contain the news they want to read, technology will ensure that every tribe in the world will find their own world view reinforced. They will believe the video, photos and news stories that support their own prejudices and they will ignore video, photos and news stories that do not, dismissing them as fakes.
The plausibility or otherwise of the material is irrelevant. There are people who will believe anything and it doesn't matter whether it's that Nasa never went to the moon, that thousands of Jews stayed away from the World Trade Center on September 11 or that 120-million-year-old maps have been discovered in Siberia. If I can cobble together video to support David Icke's theory that the royal family includes extraterrestrial lizards, then would this convince you that his theory is true or not? This impending "truth" levelling certainly confirms the suspicions of those who rejected the early utopian projections of freedom and democracy online.
The glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel may well come from the democratisation of the technology. Since anyone will be able to manufacture any "news" they want to, and since the internet will provide an instantaneous and free means to disseminate it, then the concept of news itself will be devalued. Rather than believe everything, people will believe nothing. They will then begin to look more for analysis of the news to help them make sense of it and some merging of traditional mass media and (heavily branded) blogging will provide a framework for this to take place: blogging may be an unusually important part of mass media's future.
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