Despite its potential to rupture the social fabric, deep learning is entirely redeemable, just like the kitchen knife or the nuclear reactor. The problem is how we wield it.

Despite its potential to rupture the social fabric, deep learning is entirely redeemable, just like the kitchen knife or the nuclear reactor. The problem is how we wield it

deepfake

is something that a machine has produced using deep learning and which contains false information.

Deepfaking is a significant ‘upgrade’ from photoshopping images as it transcends अतिक्रमण the limits of human skill. Here, machines iteratively process large amounts of data to falsify images and videos, sometimes in real time, and with fewer imperfections.

An ‘upgrade’ from Photoshop

हाल ही में कहां देखने को मिला ?

On May 28, the wrestlers protesting peacefully in New Delhi were tackled to the ground, arrested, and boarded in a van to keep them from disrupting the inauguration of the Parliament building. 

Shortly after, a photo appeared to show four of the beleaguered  परेशान wrestlers posing with wide smiles for a selfie in the van.

If you had believed the photo to be real, you might also have believed that the wrestlers had orchestrated / plan a clash with the police and that they wanted to be photographed while being ‘rough up आक्रमण या पीटना’. 

This is what the person who created the photo may have intended. Though it emerged later that this photo had been morphed / change, and was not a deepfake, creating such visuals has become child’s play. 

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morphed

change smoothly from one image to another by small gradual steps using computer animation techniques.

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Deepfake images and videos thus have an unsettling legacy

and examples

1 बराक ओबामा।   People worldwide have already used the technology to create a video of Barack Obama verbally abusing Donald Trump, hack facial recognition software, manufacture ‘revenge porn’, etc.

2  On May 22, a deepfake image purporting / appear false to show a towering column of dark smoke rising from the Pentagon received sober coverage from a few Indian television news channels. The image was soon found to have been machine-made.

chatbots that mimic intelligence

Alongside deepfaked images and videos, we have chatbots that mimic intelligence, but we can’t tell the difference when they make a mistake. 

This leads some to believe certain information to be ‘true’ simply because a machine gave it to them.

Then again, these tools have also been used for good

 Using deep learning, the ALS Association in the U.S. founded a “voice cloning initiative” to restore the voices of those who had lost it to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Deep learning has also been adapted in comedy, cinema, music, and gaming.

 Experts have recreated the voices and/or visuals of visual artist Andy Warhol, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, and rapper Tupac Shakur, among others, enhancing our ability to understand, and even reinterpret, history (although some of these attempts haven’t been free of controversy).

Redeemable technology

 . This is also the question that generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT has been forcing us to ask. The major technology companies behind ChatGPT et al seem to have been driven by ‘can we do this?’ rather than ‘should we do this?’, although not without exceptions.

. Solar geoengineering

Our still-evolving experience with solar geoengineering offers a useful, if also imperfect, parallel. 

Solar geoengineering involves modifying the climate to be favourable over one part of the planet, by blocking sunlight, but which invariably has planet-wide consequences. 

Many scientists agree that this is dangerous and have called for a moratorium on the use of this technology and for international cooperation led, if required, by a treaty.

what is required ? 

 laws that regulate its use and punish bad-faith actors, and keep the door open for democratic inputs to guide the future of such a powerful technology.

, is to become more scientifically, digitally, and public-spiritedly literate. Then, we will be able to look past an implausible photo and bring to light its concealed creator.

For now, among all the countries, China has responded strongest

 It has banned deepfaked visuals whose creators don’t have permission to modify the original material and which aren’t watermarked accordingly.

 The success of this policy is no doubt assured by the country’s existing surveillance network. 

Every measure short of this requires at least an ampoule of self-restraint. And that is rooted in the kind of people that we are.

source the Hindu