Fake News? "Breaking News"! Wait to you hear what's coming up.

[Fla Dem]

I listen to a podcast called RadioLab out of WNYC (PBS). This episode, "Breaking News" absolutely sent shivers down my spine. There is technology either currently available or in development to "photoshop" audio and audio/video.

What is currently available, at least commercially, is Adobe software that can take an audio of comments made by someone, let's say Pres Obama and seamlessly change the words in the speech or comments. Anyone listening to the edited comments would not be able to tell the words had been manipulated. The changed version could then be used to promote propaganda and fire up whatever faction they're targeting.

While that's scary. There is also technology being developed that can change both audio AND video. So again a speech Pres Obama makes; not only can the audio be changed, but the video would be in total sync with the manipulated audio. You could watch a video of an Obama speech on TV and not know if it was the actual speech or one that had been changed.

At some point in the very near future, probably by the next Presidential election cycle, there will be a ton of "News" that you will not be able to tell if it is real or fake.

I've explained this in really simplistic terms. I'm not a techie. So if you want more information, listen to the podcast. Link provided. It's terrifying to think of the consequences. It's an interesting podcast and presented in a non-techie way so even I understood.

Link to Podcast.....

<iframe width="600" height="130" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="https://www.wnyc.org/widgets/ondemand_player/radiolab/#file=%2Faudio%2Fxspf%2F784333%2F"></iframe>

[Zoonart]

1. Somehow...we have to

invent a technology that indelibly "water marks" video. Some embedded code that can't be erased bu photoshoping.

[Liberal In Texas]

4. Burn in time/date on screen.

Can't be removed. And will show if there has been editing. That's why it's used for legal video depositions.

[SonofDonald]

2. Newspapers

I read them everyday, after the Fbook debacle last summer I don't trust anything on supposedly "friendly" media, it's getting kinda scary when you can't tell reality at first glance, I don't worry about myself but more about what the already spoon fed nutjobs will be seeing.

They'll just get worse now.

And if you've watched a movie or two lately it's obvious they can create anything already that sure looks real.

[hunter]

3. Television news is already worthless.

In print and photography it's always been possible to make stuff up. Photographs have been manipulated for propaganda and advertising purposes from the earliest days of photography.

I quit television news a long time ago.

My distrust of it goes back to a public appearance of Ronald Reagan I attended during his second term.

What I saw was an old man who didn't know where the hell he was or what he was doing there. When they put him in front of the camera some of his acting skills kicked in and he managed to say a few lines with the trademark Reagan pseudo-sincerity. And that was it. There wasn't any more to him.

Of course those few lines were what the television news showed and the local papers reported.

It seems to me there's part of the human mind that is unable to distinguish television (and to a lesser extent, radio) from reality, even in people who are quite certain their own critical thinking skills are able to discern fiction from fact.

That's what makes television news so dangerous. Print media is static, and that makes it easier to judge the veracity of it. You can go right back and reexamine nuances you may have overlooked in the first reading.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

5. This technology isn't exactly new...

Film studios have been doing this since the 90s (Forrest Gump was the big one). What is new is Adobe's app, which makes it more accessible.