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Ever since the political purges of the old Soviet Union, faking and modifying photographs has been used for political gain. Since 2017, Deepfakes are the latest, and most convincing, versions of these efforts. No longer limited to still images, they typically use existing images and videos along with a machine learning technique called a “generative adversarial network” (GAN).

Deepfakes have been used to create fake celebrity videos, revenge videos, re-mixing movies so that the main actor is always Nicholas Cage, to fake news and malicious hoaxes. Apps to help you do this (FakeApp, etc) are available today. Here is one of better recent examples of this:

Until recently though, generating one of these clips required a lot of neutral photos, videos, and sound recordings to train the neural net. Samsung, however, has devised a method to train, and get fairly good results, using a model with an extremely limited dataset. One as small as just a single photo:

Obviously this has profound implications. While mostly used for comedy purposes, in just a few short years, making a fake video went from just a comical treatment to pretty convincing. It’s certain that in a few more years, spotting them with the naked eye might not even be possible.

It’s not unlikely that a last minute video clip could be released on election day to tarnish a competitor in a swing state. While it might be spotted relatively quickly, it might spread and gain enough traction in 8 hours to swing a state, and even a national election.

Here’s a video on the subject from Ted.

In a world where you might be working with people from the EU in the morning, on your own code all day, then passing off to Korea/China in the evening, distributed development teams are everywhere.

Unfortunately, distributed teams are also very difficult to manage and keep wellbeing and moral high. Google has some tips for you and your team:

http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/distributedworkplaybooks.pdf

I’ve written about this growing trend before and there are indications it is happening in other countries.

In Japan, half a million people live isolated in their bedrooms, unable to face the outside world. These modern-day hermits are known as the hikikomori. Since April 2018, the Japanese government has been conducting a nationwide study in a bid to fully understand this strange phenomenon.

There are finally some fruits of this studies and some programs that are really working. It appears many of those suffering from this condition remain so because of fear that compounds to the point they are afraid of the outside world. Afraid to meet others. Even afraid of speaking.

I, however, take issue with the reporter that cause this all ‘disturbing’ or ‘frightening’. These are sick people that need help for sure, but what they crave is a sense of belonging and human contact without the skills or help to know how to do it.

I personally believe the proliferation of technology that replaces genuine
human contact with simple online presence are creating gulfs in our human need for real belonging, connection, and meaning. As evidence of this, it’s usually not until those suffering are connected with a real human being to help them out.