Jordan Peterson: The deepfake artists must be stopped before we no
longer know what's real
I can tell you from personal
experience how disturbing it is to discover a website devoted to making fake
audio clips of you — for comic or malevolent purposes
"Wake up. The sanctity
of your voice, and your image, is at serious risk" — Jordan
Peterson.National Post Photo Illustration
JORDAN PETERSON August 23,
2019 5:21 PM EDT
Something very strange and
disturbing happened to me recently. If it was just relevant to me, it wouldn’t
be that important (except perhaps to me), and I wouldn’t be writing this
column. But it’s something that is likely more important and more ominous than
we can even imagine.
There are already common
fraudulent schemes being perpetrated by both telephone and internet. One known
as the “Grandparent Scam” is particularly reprehensible, first because it is
perpetrated on elderly people who are, in general, more susceptible to tech-savvy
criminals and second because it is based on the manipulation of familial love,
trust and compassion. The criminal running the Grandparent Scam calls, or
emails the victim, pretending to represent a grandchild who is now in trouble
with the law or who needs money for a hospital bill for an injury that can’t be
discussed, say, with parents, because of the moral trouble that might ensue.
They generally call late at night — say at four in the morning — because that
adds to the confusion. The preferred mechanism of money movement is wire
transfer — and that’s a warning: don’t transfer money by wire without knowing
for certain who is receiving it, because once it’s gone, it’s not coming back.
Now what if it was possible
to conduct such a scam using the actual voice of the hypothetical victim?
Worse, what if it was possible to do so with voice and video image,
indistinguishable from the real thing? If we’re not at that point now (and we
probably are) we will be within months.
In April of this year, a
company called Coding Elite exposed an artificial intelligence (AI) program
that took a substantial sample of my voice, which is easily accessible on the
YouTube lectures and podcasts that I have posted over the last years. In
consequence, they were able to duplicate my manner of speaking with exceptional
precision, starting out by producing versions of me rapping Eminem songs such
as Lose Yourself (which has now garnered 250,000 views) and Rap God (which has
only garnered 17,000) as well as Rock Lobster (1,400 views). They have done
something similar with Bernie Sanders (singing Dancing Queen), Donald Trump
(Sweet Dreams) and Ben Shapiro, who also delivered Rap God. The company has a
model, the address of which you can find on their YouTube channel, which allows
the user to make Trump, Obama, Clinton or Sanders say anything whatsoever.
I happen to think Rap God is
an amazing piece of work, and when I first encountered my verbal avatar belting
out the lyrics I thought that it was cool, in a teenage tech-geek sort of way.
And I suppose it was. This caused quite a stir on the net in April, with media
companies such as Forbes and Motherboard (a division of Vice) noting that the
machine learning technology only required six hours of original audio (that is,
actually generated by me) to produce its credible fakes, matching rhythm,
stress, sound and prose intonation.
Recently, however, a company
called notjordanpeterson.com put an AI engine online that allows anyone to type
anything and have it reproduced in my voice. It’s hard to get access to or use
the site, at the moment, presumably because it is currently attracting more
traffic than its servers can handle. A variety of sites that pass themselves
off as news portals — and sometimes are — have either reported this story
straight (Sputnik News) or had a field day (Gizmodo) having me read, for
example, the SCUM manifesto (hypothetically an acronym for Society for Cutting
Up Men), a radical feminist rant by Valerie Solanas published in 1967. Solanas,
by the way, later shot the artist Andy Warhol, an act, driven by her developing
paranoia. He was seriously wounded, requiring a surgical corset to hold his
organs in place for the rest of his life. TNW takes a middle path, reporting
the facts of the situation with little bias but using the system to have me
voice very vulgar phrases.
Some of you might know — and
those of you who don’t should — that similar technology has also been developed
for video. This was reported, for example, by the BBC, as far back as July
2017, when it broadcast a speech delivered by an AI Obama, that was essentially
indistinguishable from the real thing. Similar technology has been used,
equally notoriously, to superimpose the faces of famous actresses on porn
stars, while they perform their various sexual exploits. Movies have also been
reshot so that the main actor is transformed from someone unknown to someone
with real box office draw. This has happened, for example, to Nicolas Cage,
primarily on a YouTube site known as Derpfakes, a play on “deepfakes,” which is
what the video recordings created fraudulently by AI have come to be known.
More recently Ctrl Shift Face, a YouTube channel, posted a video showing Bill
Hader transforming very subtly into Tom Cruise as he performs an impression of
the latter on Dave Letterman’s show. It’s picked up four million views in a
week. It’s important to note that this ability is available to amateurs. I
don’t mean people with no tech knowledge whatsoever, obviously — more that the
electronic machinery that makes such things possible will soon be within the
reach of everyone.
It’s hard to imagine a
technology with more power to disrupt. I’m already in the position (as many of
you soon will be as well) where anyone can produce a believable audio and
perhaps video of me saying absolutely anything they want me to say. How can
that possibly be fought? More to the point: how are we going to trust anything
electronically mediated in the very near future (say, during the next
presidential election)? We’re already concerned, rightly or wrongly, with “fake
news” — and that’s only news that has been slanted, arguably, by the bias of
the reporter or editor or news organization. What do we do when “fake news” is
just as real as “real news”? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else,
for any reason that suits them?
And what of the legality of
this process? It seems to me that active and aware lawmakers would take
immediate steps to make the unauthorized production of AI deepfakes a felony
offence, at least in the case where the fake is being used to defame, damage or
deceive. And it seems to be that we should perhaps throw caution to the wind,
and make this an exceptionally wide-ranging law. We need to seriously consider
the idea that someone’s voice is an integral part of their identity, of their
reality, of their person — and that stealing that voice is a genuinely criminal
act, regardless (perhaps) of intent. What’s the alternative? Are we entering a
future where the only credible source of information will be direct personal contact?
What’s that going to do to mass media, of all types? Why should we not assume
that the noise to signal ratio will creep so high that all political and
economic information disseminated broadly will be rendered completely
untrustworthy?
I can tell you from personal
experience, for what that’s worth, that it is far from comforting to discover
an entire website devoted to allowing whoever is inspired to do so to produce
audio clips imitating my voice delivering whatever content the user chooses —
for serious, comic or malevolent purposes. I can’t imagine what the world will
be like when we will truly be unable to distinguish the real from the unreal,
or exercise any control whatsoever on what videos reveal about behaviours we
never engaged in, or audio avatars broadcasting any opinion at all about
anything at all. I see no defense, and a tremendously expanded opportunity for
unscrupulous troublemakers to warp our personal and collective reality in any
manner they see fit.
Wake up. The sanctity of
your voice, and your image, is at serious risk. It’s hard to imagine a more
serious challenge to the sense of shared, reliable reality that keeps us linked
together in relative peace. The deepfake artists need to be stopped, using
whatever legal means are necessary, as soon as possible.
(NOTE: As of August 23, the
website notjordanpeterson.com posted the following announcement: “In light of
Dr. Peterson’s response to the technology demonstrated by this site, which you
can read here, and out of respect for Dr. Peterson, the functionality of the
site will be disabled for the time being.”)
Jordan Peterson is a
professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist
and the author of the multi-million copy bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos. His blog and podcasts can be found at jordanbpeterson.com.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-deep-fake
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