Deepfakes, Internet Art & Game of Thrones -- Talking Tech w/ Tara Vassefi & Sarah Jamison
This week, host Brian Wesolowski tackles "deepfakes:" images or videos created using fairly advanced technology that depict something that never really happened. In this episode we hear from Tara Vassefi of Truepic, a company that is working to address the implications of this serious issue.<br><br>After that, Brian brings in D.C.-based artist Sarah Jamison, who draws her inspiration from the digital media that permeates our life. Her work will soon be on display at CDT’s DC offices, so be sure to visit sometime this spring.<br><br>More on TruePic: https://twitter.com/truepicinc<br>More on Sarah Jamison: http://www.sarah-jamison.com/<br><br>More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
Top Keywords
- truepic 0.012
- deepfakes 0.007
- technology 0.006
- able 0.006
- mean 0.006
- basically 0.006
- blockchain 0.005
- series 0.005
- sarah 0.005
- tech 0.005
- cersei 0.005
- strategic initiatives 0.005
Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT.
T.
Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Waslowski, and it's time to talk tech. Today, we'll talk about the scary world of deepfakes, altered images or videos that appear very, very real. We'll hear how one company is trying to tackle this increasingly complex issue for human rights orgs and businesses alike. After that, we'll chat with a DC based artist who draws her inspiration from the digital media that permeates our lives. And it just so happens that her work will soon be on display at CDT's offices. When it comes to scary uses of technology, deepfakes rank pretty high. These are images or videos created using fairly advanced technology that depict something that never really happened. Think Barack Obama being president at the Gettysburg address or Ariana Grande singing at Live Aid. Nope. Didn't happen. And while these might be obvious fakes, it's not hard to imagine far more nefarious abuses, such as making a politician appear to say something she did not or putting an activist at the scene of scene of a crime. One company is working to address the serious issue of deep fakes, having created an app and a service to help identify them. That company is TruePic, and their Washington Director of Strategic Initiatives. Tara Vassefi joins us. Welcome Tara. Thanks so much for having me. We just had a wonderful conversation about Oman, which everyone should go to. It's a great country. Go visit it. But that's what we're talking about. So Tara, what are deep fakes? Give a better explanation than the one I just gave.
So I think your explanation is great. I would basically just describe them as completely fabricated videos that the human eye is not able to detect as, being fake. And, essentially, I would say that the best still to this day, the best thing that I've heard or read on deepfakes is a Radiolab episode from, July 2017 called Breaking News. And, basically, what it does is it just talks about the democratization of technologies that allowed for, something that was created for Hollywood, basically, where you had, you know, CGI experts and, other people in that space who had to manipulate video or be able to use this technology to make it look like, you know, Carrie Fisher is in Star Wars still. Right. Oh, it's madness. I know. Exactly. That that technology has become so democratized that now it's possible for pretty much anyone with, let's say, a computer that now it's possible for pretty much anyone with, let's say, a computer science background to be able to use this software and create these, videos that you cannot tell. A computer or a human cannot necessarily tell that they're fake. And the word deepfake itself is is actually it comes from the Reddit user who created the first, you know, post about, porn, basically, deepfake porn. But they're actually called generative adversarial networks. And
so I'm trying to get us out of using deepfakes, but it's just such a buzzword that It's hard to move past buzzwords. I mean, in tech policy, we use them all the time. One of the things you bring up, though, is the unintended consequences of technology. I think that's the creators of this could have had wonderful intentions, but then it's kind of thinking a few steps ahead for anyone creating any type of technology. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So why are they become why are they so hard to detect? What is it about them? I mean, you've kind of explained a bit, but is there a reason that there's, like, technically so hard to figure out?
I would say that, really, the technology is so advanced, and the and the speed and ease of innovation makes it such that, it's just like, once there is a tell, let's say, that would make someone be able to see that this is not actually a human or a video created by light, that then you can just train the AI to fix that tell. That's the point, is that the the AI is basically creating these videos. And the more images and video you feed into it, the better it gets at creating these impressions of human beings. So, you know, one of the examples that people always give is that people were noticing that deepfakes weren't blinking. And as soon as they noticed that, they just basically fed, you know, a bunch of images of video of, like, how regularly and the way that humans blink, and right away, they were able to fix that. So it's kind of a whack a mole with it when it comes to detection. And it's the better we get at detecting them, the better we'll get at at, you know, covering up the detects the tells.
So let's talk a little bit. This seems like a natural time to pivot a bit to what you do at TruePic. What is what do you all do, you know, to address this issue? It sounds like a really hard one. So what makes you all kind of unique and interesting? Yeah. So,
a bit about TruePic. Basically, TruePic was actually created for private enterprise, especially in the enterprise, especially in the in insurance space as a way of being able to have really authenticated images and video of things that one would want to claim, you know, some kind of insurance claim from. And then very quickly, the leadership saw that, actually, there is a lot of issues coming out because of fake news and misinformation and, you know, that the fact that you just see All these buzzwords. I know. Right? That, like, seeing isn't believing anymore, you know, that what you're seeing on the Internet just can't really be trusted all that much. And so recognizing that they kind of did this thing that I I haven't really seen another company that's been able to really, embed the social impact into their growth and development. It's not like a corporate social responsibility, you know, byproduct of their of their billions of dollars. It was early on, they base basically restructured the company so that there is a commercial side that's thriving and being used, by insurance and banking and lending and a bunch of other verticals. And then a social impact side, which is called strategic initiatives, where, basically, our our job on that team is to use the technology in mindful ways to see if we can address challenging use cases. And one of those use cases is deep fakes, where we're basically trying to see how, authenticated imagery and video can help to at least provide some kind of,
you know, counter to the threat of deepfakes. And when you're working on this, I imagine I mean, we already highlighted some of the ways situations where you'd use a deepfake for nefarious purposes. What are some of the things you've actually encountered, you know, in the real world as you've been helping on the social side?
So I'd say the area where we have probably the most usage currently is documentation of alleged war crimes in Syria. So, actually, the vice president of strategic initiatives started off, as a he was a diplomat working first under Samantha Power and then, Haley.
Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley. Thank you. That's so bad. You don't have to remember everything. That's still pretty good.
And, basically, his job was to, you know, look at the content that was coming out online as a result of the Syrian conflict and see what can policy can be pushed forward at the UN Security Council with this digital evidence, you could call it. And what he was finding was that it's just so easy to, you know, discredit online content because you don't know where it's coming from. It could be in Palestine or Yemen. This is this is at least, like, the the verbiage that was used. Sure. And so he was frustrated by this. And he went out and found TruePic because he was like, there's an app for everything. There has to be an app for this. And he approached the CEO on LinkedIn, actually, and was like, would you guys be interested in using this at the UN? And they were like, actually, yes, very much. And that's how the strategic initiative side really took shape. And it's still being used all over all over Syria for Wow. All kinds of documentation things, not just, not just documentation of alleged war crimes, but also, documentation of, you could say, you know, reconstruction efforts and being able to track, the movement of goods or cash. And so, yeah, that's one example. I another one that, I really love is it's being used by the Antiquities Coalition for cultural heritage preservation and especially by one of the, people who's in the entities that's in the antiquities coalition is called the Nubia Initiative, and they're just doing this incredible they're doing incredible innovative things that I don't even know if we were thinking of using it in that way where it's basically because of the immutability aspect of blockchain and the, power of images and video for various forms of preservation, they're just able able to document and really, create this immutable content
of a like, a culture that's not particularly well known or well preserved. That's very cool. Wow. That's really, really cool. Those are some great uses. And this, obviously, as you speak, you speak so passionately about it. I'm guessing it's because you have an interesting background. Tell us about it, kind of, you know, your background and how you got to TruePic and what you've done.
Well, I kind of fell into this digital evidence space while I was in law school. I worked here in DC, at my law school. There is this amazing organization called the War Crimes Research Office. And at the time, this was 2014. I know it seems like it wasn't very long ago, but in at least in the legal accountability space, people weren't really thinking very much about the utility of digital evidence, especially for legal Mhmm. Outputs. And so we had a institutional client who came, and they were like, we've been collecting all this information for a long time, and we don't know if it's gonna be useful in any kind of, you know, tribunal. And it turned out to be, you know, a lot of digital content. And so that kind of right away, I could tell, like, this is the thing that gets my heart racing faster than anything else. And so after law school, I worked at this, amazing human rights documentation organization called Witness. Yeah. And then fell into another amazing intrepid organization called, it's out of UC Berkeley's law school, and it's called the Human Rights Investigations Lab. And they're basically, like, the flags flagship entity for a place where, basically, what they're trying to do is collect digital content and verify it to be able to use it for some kind of legal accountability. That is so cool. I mean, you this sounds like the perfect gig for you now. Right? And that's what happened is I was there researching the latest technologies and how they're being used in courts, and I became obsessed with blockchain. And that's how I came I came across TruePic because Munir, my boss, wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal that said, use blockchain to hold Assad accountable. And I was like, how can you use blockchain if no one knows what it is, especially not judges? And then I looked into it, and I was like, oh, actually, you really can. And the and especially with the immutability of blockchain, it really does close chain of custody when it comes to this digital content. So it's a absolute game changer. Yeah. No. That's really I mean, I feel so blockchain is, like, another buzzword. Yeah. Changer. Yeah. No. That's really I mean, I feel so blockchain is, like, another buzzword at least. But it's one that it's, like, it's the solution for everything. But it sounds like this, at least, is part of the solution here potentially. Well, that's what I'm so so frustrated by this, like, buzzword using blockchain as a buzzword because I think it does have a lot of utility in in what it can unleash. And I think, actually, for technology in general, I what what gives me solace in in those in in working at a tech company and getting a closer look at how these things work is, I feel better about those statistics that say that, you know, 80% of current day jobs are gonna be replaced by robots in by 2030 because I that might be the case, but what I see is that technology is absolutely only going to work when it is embedded into human centric approaches to anything. And so blockchain is exactly that. Like, it can be very powerful if it's if it's meeting an absolute need that is driven by human approaches. So for for this, like, blockchain is one component. Like, the computer vision technology is actually, I would say, what TruePic really, is spending a lot of its time and resources on. Blockchain is just a very powerful way of being able to, make the the computer vision technology and authentication technology useful
for a variety of outputs, but especially something that requires a higher evidentiary standard in court. That's great. And I love human centric technology. We definitely want that, to exist more of, and it's something we focus on here at CDT. So back to TruePic a little bit. Do you think there's any ways you know, we brought this up. Are there any ways you think that this technology, this seemingly great technology, could be reversed or used in negative ways?
Yeah. So this is another thing that I feel like, as in my in our role on strategic initiatives where we're thinking about really challenging use cases of using the technology, it's really front and center in our approach to, everything that we're doing to be able to basically have the the lessons learned from Facebook and these other tech companies that started off with this great idea and seeing how it can just, you know, kind of snowball into, so you just wouldn't be able to envision how it could be used so badly or for such malicious purposes. And I think that that's definitely something that every tech company should be thinking about, especially ones that provide a powerful tool, like, I think TruePic does. So one of the things that, comes up a lot is obviously the security component of, you know, how if you can give this tool to anyone, then you wanna make sure that the security is very, very safe so that if any if, god forbid, there's, like, a very sophisticated state sponsored hacker or some other entity that's trying to get in and get some information about the users, especially, let's say, in war zones, then what can we do as a company to make sure that we're addressing that? And, basically, that's what we a lot of hiring on the team is designed to make sure that we're doing as much as we can on that front. Another thing that we think about is what I have been calling, and not everyone agrees with this these definitions, but I distinguish authentication from verification. So authentication is that this piece of content that you are seeing has not been manipulated. It is authentic in what we the information that we provide, as in geolocation, time, date, and the pixelation of the content has not been manipulated. What verification does is the example that I give is, you know, the, young, teenager boy who was wearing the MAGA hat. He was that you know, the confrontation with the Native American protester. That was a lot of video, a lot of content, and a lot of information. But the whole context of what was going on was not able to be gleaned even if you knew where it was and what time it was and that the video hadn't been manipulated. Gotcha. And I think in general, as a society, we're we're gonna have to get better at this. We're gonna have to get better at that verification side of just taking a second to really see, like, okay, how much can I actually glean and know as true from this content, and how much of it is gonna is gonna be, you know, further research, like Yeah? Seeing what other information you can get, what other witness information maybe from Twitter or whatever, and then also just in general, like, maybe take some time before you make a really strong decision about something. And that's what I think, like, we're just gonna have to get better at it as a society. What TruePic provides is is one small sliver of being able to say, okay. Well, at least what we can do is we can say that this content was taken at this time in this location and that it hasn't been manipulated. The concern is that we, as a society, we're not quite good at really being able to take just that and leave it at at that. Where what we do is we embed a lot of context that isn't necessarily Absolutely. Verified in any way. And and a lot of social media platforms are aimed at, like, here's the snippet, you know, share just that little bit of it, and it's hard to add context. Exactly. I like your advice. Do a little bit more work. Do a little bit more research and check things out. Digital resiliency. Like, as a society, our our brains are not designed to take in all the information that we're taking in. We need to adjust our brains. We need to adjust our resiliencies to taking in all this content, whether it's, you know, dealing with the secondary trauma issue Yeah. Or being able to know a little bit better how to trust sources that you are seeing. And then also, you know, the role that the whole of society plays in making sure that we are taking the onus off of the individual. So, like, one of the things that we've faced as a company and especially the strategic initiatives
team is we're going around talking to big tech,
you know, government agencies, etcetera, etcetera. And it is it is actually concerning. Like, I don't know how to how to make this clear. There is no grand strategy for dealing with misinformation and especially not deepfakes. There's a a kind of concerning lack of leadership. There's a lot of good ideas and really smart people and a little bit of empirical analysis. But other than that, we're all kind of shooting in the dark. Each individual entity or individual person themselves is, like, trying to figure out what to do about this. And I don't I'm I mean, my personal opinion is that Congress is a great place to house this conversation because they can, you know, solicit public debate and then act accordingly based on that public debate, whether it's legislation or appropriations. So that's something that I my role as Washington director is basically trying to engage with Congress on that. And they're intelligent. But, again, there isn't a huge amount of leadership, and it's quite concerning, especially in the context of what we're gonna be seeing for sure in 2020.
Yeah. In that space, I mean, certainly, we work in it. You see, a lot of people want the silver bullet. Just give me the answer now. Can't technology solve this? And as you said, there's a lot of different ways that this is going to need to be approached, and there's not that one one thing that will just be, like, boom, misinformation's gone. Boom, deep fakes are gone, unfortunately.
And if it's this challenging for a tech startup that's actually quite well positioned, you know, like, given the amount of traction we're getting and how powerful our technology is, then I can't even imagine how it must be for all the other people who have a a role to play in this. Well, Tara, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. Thank you for joining Tech Talk. People should definitely check out TruePic.
We'll have to have you back on because I feel as though we could keep talking for hours. Thanks so much for having me. CDT has a favorite artist here in DC. Her name is Sarah Jamieson. She was a speaker at last year's Future of Speech online event, and her art explores the omnipresent digital media in our lives, how we create it, interact with it, and how it goes viral. Some of Sarah's artwork will soon be displayed at CDT's offices here in DC, And she's here to tell us about her work. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you. Did you like that? I called you our favorite artist. You're my favorite artist. Yes. And I'm really excited to be able to see your work every single day that I come into this office soon. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you became an artist.
So I am from Virginia originally. Pretty I'd say about two hours outside of Washington, DC in Orange, which is a much more rural place, and moved to DC in 2006 to go to the Corcoran College of Art and Design Oh, great. Which I did. Graduated in 2010. And I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I don't know. There was never another route or thought that was something from
forever that I wanted to do. People should be so lucky to have that kind of, like, this is what I'm gonna be. This is what I'm gonna do. It's amazing. So, obviously, your work, as I mentioned, and I'm really impressed that I was able to say the word omnipresent without stumbling. I just did it twice. That's amazing. But it draws inspiration from digital media. It's all around us. Why is that? What how does this inspire you? Why did it inspire you to start doing some of the
art? I mean, it's really precisely that sort of having a handheld device that gives you access to the Internet all the time. It's just so inescapable. You know, you'll be on the Metrobus commuting and everyone's looking down at their phones, scrolling through their phone. You can see what they're looking at over their shoulder on their phone, and you have access to just so much of everything. I think that there's a lot of good that it comes with. Maybe finding niche communities you wanna be a part of but then there are sort of these I don't wanna get awful sounds really bad but you know there's the yeah. Out tag. Yeah. Out really bad. But, you know, there's the flip side People have said words things from now about tech. So Of all of that, and sort of the voyeurism that comes with it. The more I sort of thought about it and considered it, the more I thought it could be really interesting to explore things that so involve us in every part of our lives in a way that removes it from just glancing at it, scrolling through it, briefly interacting with it, to having it be present and in a different context
that could give you more time to sort of think over and ponder on it. Yeah. So the series that we're gonna have, on display here are part of the series because it is, a lot of works in the series is, your ubiquitous series as you call it. I love them, and they're kind of, I would say, meme mashups ish. You know, that's not all they are, but that's kind of what it's like, and, you know, kind of riffs on them a bit. Describe them. Describe some of your favorites.
So in this series, there's currently 54 drawings, I believe. And they're all at the size of I think it's a six s plus iPhone screen. When I started the series, that was the new new. And of course, now we're at iPhone. You're dating yourself. Well, you've just been working on the series for a while. That's okay. Yes. It's the sixth generation of the drawing series. But, it does. It draws on meme culture and sort of the things that you'd find on Reddit or Instagram or Tumblr or Facebook. And some of my favorites, gosh, combine, I think, those things in a way that is maybe a metaphor or sort of of a concise double entendre. I have one that won't be here because it has nudity in it. Nudity, profanity, politics. We cut all those. Yeah. But but they're amazing. One of my favorites is, an image of the infamous picture of Kim Kardashian from her paper magazine spread that was referred to as breaking the Internet. And it has the face of Elsa from Frozen on it. And there's a ton of history behind the image that was used in Paper magazine even predating, predating that photo shoot. But just thinking about how we represent the female form, sort of how it's fetishized in ways that are good and bad, but Frozen was an enormous phenomenon. Inescapable, something I knew enough about without having children myself, having never seen it myself. But, you know, knowing the plot line, seeing the faces, seeing it marketed to high heaven, and seeing that reflected also in sort of the treatment of not just Kim Kardashian, but sort of famous women writ large Yeah. And thinking about that, you know, what it means that we see these things all the time. And to me, they're both different faces of the same idea. And so when I put them together, sort of hoping to draw some of those parallels, not just for myself but for anyone viewing it. So I think that's probably my favorite one but that's something I hope to access in each piece in a different way. Yeah. I know a lot of the pieces,
I feel as though you keep looking at them and they may be like have components of memes that you've seen that that are out there, like that dog, you know, in the burning building where it's like, this is fine. And then, you know, but then you look at the other ways that you've mixed different images in there and you see something new every time, or at least I do. And which is why I really enjoy it. Funny thing about Frozen, I didn't realize until, like, just this year that Elsa really wasn't the main character. Right? I know. I mean, my goodness. How surprised. I know. So I was surprised. I also you also did a drawing that is not part of this series, but I would say plays off this kind of theme a little bit, featuring my very favorite Game of Thrones character, the one and only miss Queen Cersei. How excited are you for the final season? And tell me a bit about this one. What inspired this, work of art? Excited. Is she your favorite too? She is my favorite. Oh, she is? Oh. Yes. We've got two queens, team Cersei here. Yes. We probably are in the minority, I think. I think so too. She's very despicable. Doesn't mean we want to be her. We're just intrigued by her character, just to clarify. And probably very I'd say the most nuanced character,
the one who you sort of see how she arrived at where she is. Yeah. I mean, totally faulty decision making all along the line, but
I mean She likes wine too. I like wine. I mean, that's that's more where I'm going with it. You're just being too thoughtful.
In the in the series. I like that look. But that piece I created specifically for a Game of Thrones themed exhibition, which opens April 6 at Spoke Art in, California, San Francisco, opens April 6 at Spoke Art in, California, San Francisco, California. So the prompt of having it touch Game of Thrones was already there. And because she's my favorite character, she was the one I wanted to And I was thinking about, again, kind of her as a pop culture symbol and being that sort of stereotype of this very beautiful, but sort of treacherous, duplicitous, sexualized, in charge to some degree woman. And where else I saw that reflected Mean Girls, in the Regina George character who's the popular queen bee, beautiful, has it all character. And I'm a fan of both equally. Yeah. Both are very good. Yes. The best. I guess I love a mean girl. But the the burn book putting it in, I don't know. I assume everyone who's listening maybe has watched Game of Thrones. But the last season, right, concludes with her lighting up the wildfire, and she burns everything down. So the burn book was kind of a visual representation of her action for me, I guess. So in thinking of her as the Regina George of Westeros
is what brought me to make the piece. But I'm excited for this final piece. To see then how it plays out if we continue the Mean Girls thing. I mean, she'll get hit by a bus. Right? So oh my goodness. Yes. But Regina doesn't die. So that means that Cersei won't either. She'll just be humbled and join the little cross team. Right? Is that That that would be a twist if we actually see Cersei humbled. That is one thing I wouldn't actually predict for her character. But, maybe we'll we'll continue that. So what are some projects beyond that that you're working on right now?
So the series that I'm working on currently is one still within the realm of digital online topics narratives. But I'm angling more at, kind of the data collection privacy sharing angle. So I've only got two and a half done. I'm working on one currently, Patrick. You might have heard of him. He runs a little startup called Facebook. Oh, goodness. Yeah. And then the second one has a still from the the infamous Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial with binary text over it, that states please tell us why you dismissed this ad, which is language we're probably all familiar with when we click out of things, but it's specifically from Google Mhmm. Or rather Gmail. And the one I'm working on currently, I'm hoping it has kind of a 1984 Big Brother vibe, but it is, Jeff Bezos.
So Fascinating. These are some big names in there. And what what are you kind of as you look at it, what what do you hope your artwork conveys to people, as they look at these kind of overlays of of tech giants and data and privacy and all the issues around it?
Well, it's a big unwieldy question to kinda wrap my arms around. But I hope that for anyone looking at it, myself included, that I'm just reflecting a little bit on ways that we can be thoughtful about our data and what's out there and maybe what we can do as individuals or society writ large about, making sure that we're advocating for, I guess, in some ways, our our a lot of things are privacy, sort of issues of free speech. I mean, there's it's a huge unwieldy thing, but just considering what the Internet is and all of the implications of being on it and using it, I just don't I I think it's a good thing to be a little paranoid about it, and sort of unlocking that thought, I hope, when people look at the work. Certainly opened my brain.
So where should people find your work, follow you? Give it give it all your promos here. Okay.
They can visit my website at www.sarah-jamieson.com. And my one social media property is Instagram, and I'm at sarah jane jamieson.
Fantastic. Everyone should follow that. Sarah, incredible DC based artist. Stop by CDT's office soon to see her work. And we'll definitely have to have a happy hour with you here. So people should check their inboxes. Sarah, thank you so much for joining and, of course, talking about Queen Cersei. Thank you. That's it for this episode of tech talk. Be sure to stay engaged with CDT by following us on Twitter, adding us on LinkedIn, or liking us on Facebook. I'm Brian Waslowski. Thanks for listening.
