A senior Trump advisor shared a video that seems to show an NBC reporter badmouthing Republican presidential candidates. It appears AI was used to imitate the reporter’s voice.
Unfortunately I think we’ve been living in it for awhile already. All you need to do is say a thing with a big enough platform and the people decide if they want to believe it or not. They don’t care if it’s factual, they just care who’s saying it.
I would say before we were in the misinformation age. I think I’d call this coming stuff the disinformation age. Disinformation existed before, but this is another level. Creating totally new information to mislead people is somewhat different that misrepresenting what happened.
Libel, fraud, and trademark infringement are not protected by the 1st amendment.
The question would be if an average person viewing the video would know that it was fake or if they would believe that the reporter had actually said those things.
If the average person would be misled about their reporting, NBC certainly has a case against the video’s use.
I can’t create a deepfake of Donald Trump saying that he loves Hitler and plans to continue his agenda if he wins the election “for the lolz” and post it online without facing serious legal consequences, even if I am protected in doing the same with a cartoon version of him voiced by a parody impersonation.
Parody and satire are done by someone else. Kinda like your example of SNL. It’s very very clear that when Will Ferrell was impersonating Dubya, it wasn’t actually him. When Weird Al sings about his bologna, no one actually thought it was The Knack.
This is AI, putting a live person’s voice into their own mouth, saying words they never said. That should be immediately apparent as obviously different to parody and satire.
Defending this as OK behaviour is willful ignorance and reeks of one particular political party that seems to rely on lying directly to it’s constituents as a main promotional tactic.
You actually are protected to do that, assuming it’s clear to the viewer it’s being used with humorous intent to be critical of Trump. Even the current congressional legislation on this topic carves out exceptions for digital manipulation and construction for parody, satire, and criticism.
If you’ve watched the video, I’m surprised you don’t find it an obvious attempt at humor.
Here is the video. It is actually pretty funny. I hate Trump as much as the next lemming, but this really is an obvious parody once you watch the whole video. I think NBC is complaining not because of the parody, but because the fake voice-over is too good and sets a bad precedent. It shows how good the tech is and how it could be used more subtly to create fake news (not that there aren’t already many ways to do that).
Exactly. This isn’t about hating Trump, it’s about a potentially powerful tool becoming basically free, with the potential to ruin the ability to trust our own eyes and ears.
I laughed, at first, but now I simply feel fear for the future where anything could be a lie. And if everything’s a lie, nothing is the truth. Much of the world stands in a terrifying post-truth political reality as AI begins to take off to enable it.
I have that same feeling in my gut. I imagine we’ll need to create AI to find and counter the AI being used to create the fake news? It feels like an arms race that could escalate quickly.
Agreed. It’s clearly intended to be funny. The fact that people are losing their minds about this and think it should be legally actionable are a) wrong, and b) terrifying me, because this is clearly parody and protected by the first amendment. I hate Trump too, but that doesn’t mean we should seek to set legal precedent that limits the ability of people to make fun of the political process. Sheesh. That goes nowhere good.
It’s not really that obvious that it’s a parody. You’re right about the voice-over being too good and it’s a very very dangerous precedent.
I’m actually really worried about the complete inability for viewers of media to know what’s real and what’s fake given how good the tech is. I know not to trust almost anything on the internet, but so many people don’t know that.
There’s probably a good case for NBC to sue over this.
The video in question, shared by a top Trump adviser, opens with authentic footage of NBC News senior Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake previewing the debate for the network. It soon cuts to video of each candidate as a voiceover — in Haake’s voice — makes disparaging comments about the candidates.
“This is Ron DeSantis: An establishment RINO that wears insoles in order to look taller,” the voiceover says. “And this is Nikki Haley: Nobody really gives a shit about Nikki Haley.”
I guarantee you there are a significant number of Trump fans to whom it wouldn’t even occur that an NBC news correspondent wouldn’t intentionally say ‘shit’ on a national news broadcast.
The second part may very well be true, the Trump campaign team could likely get off scott free using the Tucker Carlson defense. The first part is nonsense though. A fake video that makes someone look like an asshole is absolutely defamatory.
Using AI to literally put words in someone else’s mouth when they have a public reputation and a job that centers around that reputation is called defamation. A judge or jury would only need to determine if the reporter actually said those words live, which has already shown to not be the case, then determine damage to their reputation and how much to reinburse them for said damages.
Since you have no public reputation, I can claim you’re retarded and it’s not defamation. Learning the difference is important.
Damages to their reputation as a professional? Which would lead to loss in viewers, which would lead to loss in advertising revenue, which can be a LOT of money.
Newspapers, publishers, and television stations have the highest success rate in defamation cases in the US. 16 out of 41 defamation cases in the last two decades have ended in a conviction. While this is under half, if you focus specifically on the categories I mentioned before it suddenly becomes 11 out of 20, which is a (albeit thin) majority of cases. The odds are pretty good, especially since the defendant in this case has a track record of being shitty to the people who will decide a case.
No way. On one side you have a crazed cult of emotionally driven, “poorly educated”, violent dolts who refuse the truth while seeking any possible outrage against their non-crazy “enemies”.
Not sure if it’s an even fight. There’s actual video of Trump saying any number of disgusting (or even non-republican things, like that time he proposed to take people’s guns without due process), and it’s not affecting his support.
Yeah, in the specific case of Trump. Someone much more savvy at not screwing up/not getting caught is bound to use the excuse successfully eventually.
That’s what happens when you let the already rich and powerful control the entire system: they get away with anything up to and including “shooting a guy in the middle of Fifth Avenue”.
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