It gives YouTube the justification to remove videos that may not be technically rule-breaking otherwise. Though, I do imagine proving that a video is AI generated will quickly become functionally impossible.
Still, I believe you are wrong despite your statement ringing true. You are conflating different reasons as to why people may want to generate AI videos. The nefarious motive may be nothing more than profit ('cheaper than paying actor') as opposed to malice('we want to defraud people'). There are all sorts of reasons as to why self-disclosure is not a bad start including the fact that if it turns out you lied, you can be removed without it being a question of freedom of speech and so on.
Yes, but it also creates a straightforward method for triggering a TOS violation if an unlabelled AI video is detected, allowing YT to remove deceptive videos and ban bad actors without adding more subjective editorial decisions into the review process.
It would be hard, for example, for a political party to claim that this policy selectively discriminates against their viewpoint.
Nope, not pointless: you remove bullshit excuses. "Everyone knows it's AI! I didn't mean to deceive anyone, honest!"
This is also why we have to do the insufferable corporate training on how not to do bribery, sexual harassment, etc. It's not that HR thinks you don't know, it's that HR knows that if they don't make everyone take the training then bad actors can successfully avoid/delay consequences by pretending to not have known. I think of these things like jury duty: a civic duty that is slightly obnoxious in and of themselves but very important for the functioning of the overall system.
>Some examples of content that require disclosure include: [...] Generating realistic scenes: Showing a realistic depiction of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.
This sounds like every thumbnail on youtube these days. It's good that this is not limited to AI, but it also means this will be a nightmare to police.
Exactly, and many have done exactly the same kind of video using VFX. What's the difference?
These kind of reactions remind me of the stories of the backlash following the introduction of calculators in schools...
I'm sorry, but using a calculator to get around having to learn arithmetic is not even close being the same thing. Prove to me that you can do basic arithmetic, and then we can move on to using calculators for the more complex stuff where if you had to could at least come to the same value as the calculator.
People using VFX aren't trying to create images in likeness of another existing person to get people to buy crypto or other scams. Comparing the two is disingenuous at best.
Using VFX for realistic scenes is more involved. VFX requires more expertise to do convincingly and realistically, in the thousands of hours of experience. More involved scenes require multiple professionals. The tooling and assets costs more. An inexperienced person, in a hundred hours of effort, can put out 10ish realistic scenes with leading edge AI tools, when previously they could do 0.
This is like regulating handguns differently from compound bows. Both are lethal weapons, but the bow requires hours of training to use effectively, and is more difficult to carry discreetly. The combination of ease, convenience, and accessibility necessitates new regulation.
This being said, AI for video is an incredibly promising technology, and I look forward to watching the TV shows and movies generated with AI-powered tooling.
> Using VFX for realistic scenes is more involved.
This really depends on what you're doing. There are some great Cinema 4d plugins out there. As the plethora of YouTube tutorials out there clearly demonstrate, multiple professionals, and vast experience, are not required for some of the things they have listed. Tooling and assets costs are 0, in the high seas.
Until Sora is widely available, or the open source models catch up, at this moment it's easier to use something like Cinema 4d than AI.
What if new AI tools negate the thousands of hours experience to generate realistic VFX scenes, so now realistic scenes can be made by both non-AI VFX experts and AI-assisted VFX laymen?
Do we make all usages of VFX now require a warning, just in case the VFX was generated by AI?
I think this is different to the bow v gun metaphor as I can tell an arrow from a bullet, but I can foresee a future where no human could tell the difference between AI-assisted and non-AI-assisted VFX / art
I believe this is evidenced by the fact that people can go around accusing any art piece of being AI art and the burden of proving them wrong falls on the artist. Essentially I believe we are rapidly approaching the point of it not mattering if someone uses AI in their art because people won't be able to tell anyway
Society is simply revisiting a conversation about doctored photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
The last word on this subject was not written in the 1920s, it's good to revisit old assumptions every century or so, when new forms of media and media manipulation become developed.
The first pass on it is unlikely to be the best, or even the last one.
This is a very inaccurate depiction of copyright. It originally only lasted around 20 years with the option to double it. Then it was reformed over and over across history to create the monster we have today.
Copyright has been revised, overhauled and redefined multiple times over the past few centuries. You couldn't have picked a worse example.
Here's an obvious question that came up (and was resolved differently in different jurisdictions) - can photographs be copyrighted? What about photographs made in public? Of a market street? Of the Eifel tower? Of street art? Can an artist forbid photography of their art? An actor of their performance? A celebrity of their likeness? A private individual of their face? Does the purpose for which the photograph will be used matter?
At what point does a photograph have sufficient creative input to be copyrightable? Is pressing a button on a camera creative input? What about a machine that presses that button? Only humans can create copyrightable works under most jurisdictions. Is arranging the scene to be photographed a creative input? Can I arrange a scene just like yours and take a photo of it? Am I violating your copyright by doing it?
There's tens of thousands of pages of law and legal precedent that answer that question. As a conversation, it went on for decades, with no simple first-version solution sticking.
"made using AI" is such a fuzzy all-encompassing term that this feels like it will turn into another California Prop 65 warning scenario. Pretty soon every video will have a disclaimer like:
WARNING: This video contains content known to the State of Google to be generated by AI algorithms and/or tools.
Ok, beauty face filters are not included. How about character motion animations? How detailed does the after effects plugin need to be before it's considered AI? Can we generate just a background? Just a minor subject in the foreground? Or is it like pornography, where we'll recognize it once we see it?
I fear AI tools will soon become so embedded in normal workflows that it's going to become a question of "how much" not "contains", and "how much" is such a blurry, subjective line that it's going to make any binary disclaimer meaningless.
You might be interested in Adobe’s “Content Credentials” [1] which seemingly aim to clarify exactly what processing has applied to an image. I don’t like the idea of Adobe being the gatekeepers of image-fidelity-verification but the idea is intriguing and it seems like we’ll need something like this (that camera makers sign onto) to deal with AI.
EDIT: I think these should also include whatever built-in processing is applied to the raw sensor data within the camera itself.
We need to fix the title. It's not just AI -- it's any realistic scene generated by VFX, animation, or AI. The title of the blogpost is "How we're helping creators disclose altered or synthetic content" -- it shouldn't say AI on the Hacker News title.
> Generating realistic scenes: Showing a realistic depiction of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.
Does the Wizard of Oz tornado scene need a warning now? [0] (Of course not, but it may be hard to draw the line in some places.)
This is great. Really well-thought out policy, in my opinion. Sure, some people will try to get around the restrictions, especially nefarious actors, but the more popular the channel, the faster they'll get caught. It also doesn't try to distinguish between regular special effects and AI-generated special effects, which is wise.
Without enforceability it'll go the same way as it has on Pixiv, the good actors will properly label their AI utilizing work, while the bad actors will continue to lie to try to maximize their audience until they get caught, then rinse and repeat. Kind of like crypto-scammers.
For context, Pixiv had to deal with a massive wave of AI content being dumped onto the site by wannabe artists basically right as the initial diffusion models became accessible. They responded by making 'AI-generated' a checkbox to go with the options to mark NSFW and adding an option for users to disable AI-generated content from being recommended to them. Then, after an incident of someone using their Patreon style service to pretend to be a popular artist, selling commissions generated by AI to copy the artist's style, they banned AI-generated content from being offered through that service.
I think that for now they're just going to use it as a means of figuring out what kind of AI-involved content people are ok with and what kind they react negatively to.
Personally, I've developed a strong aversion to content that is primarily done by AI with very little human effort on top. After how things went with Pixiv I've come to hold the belief that our societies don't help people develop 'cultural maturity'. People want the clout/respect of being a popular artist/creator, without having to go through the journey they all go through which leads to them becoming popular. It's like wanting to use the title of Doctor without putting in the effort to earn a doctorate, the difference just being that we do have a culture of thinking that it's bad to do that.
I think that the idea is mostly to dictate culture. And I like the idea, not only for preventing fraud. Ever since the first Starship launches, the reality looks more incredible than the fiction. Go look up the SN-8 landing video, tell me that does not look generated. I just want to know what is real and what is generated, by AI or not.
I think that this policy is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.
I think one of the bigger issues will be false positives. You'll do an upload, and youtube will take it down claiming that some element was AI generated. You can appeal, but it'll get automatically rejected. So you have to rework your video and figure out what it thought might be AI generated and re-upload.
This a pointless nearly unenforceable rule to make people feel better. Sure, if you generate something that seems like a real event that is provably false you can be caught, but anything mundane is not enforceable. Once models reach something like Sora 1.5 level of ability, we are kind of doomed on knowing whats real in video.
naah, there still will be certain patterns and they will be recognisable.
once something sora 1.5 level of ability is there – definitely reverse-sora model which can recognise ai-made videos should be possible to train as well
>This a pointless nearly unenforceable rule to make people feel better.
Pretty much. If Google says "Swiper no swiping" they can point at their policy when lobbying against regulations or pushing back against criticism.
Before surveillance capitalism became the norm, web services told users to not share personal information, and to not trust other users they had not met in real life.
They don't bother to mention it, but this is actually to comply with the the new EU AI act.
> Providers will also have to ensure that AI-generated content is identifiable. Besides, AI-generated text published with the purpose to inform the public on matters of public interest must be labelled as artificially generated. This also applies to audio and video content constituting deep fakes
You'd think they're evil too if they let a bunch of middlemen and parasitic companies dictate how the software you invested untold sums and hours developing and marketing should work.
So you making good pay by enabling a scammer makes it totally okay for the scammer to operate? By extension of that logic, hitmen should no longer be persecuted provided they make good pay from it.
Seems like this is sort of a manufactured argument. I mean, should every product everywhere have to cite every regulation it complies with? Your ibuprofen bottle doesn't bother to cite the FDA rules under which it was tested. Your car doesn't list the DOT as the reason it's got ABS brakes.
The EU made a rule. YouTube complied. That changes the user experience. They documented it.
Doesn't seem that out of place for a blog post on the exact change they made to comply though.
I mean you'd expect a pharmaceutical company to mention which rules they comply with at some point, even if not on the actual product (though in the case of medicine, probably also on the actual product).
+1 in France at least, food products must not suggest that mandatory properties like "preservative free" is unique. When they advertise this on the package, they must disclose it's per regulation. Source: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/particuliers/denrees-alimentair...
Is anyone else worried about how naive this policy is?
The solution here is for important institutions to get onboard with the public key infrastructure, and start signing anything they want to certify as authentic.
The culture needs to shift from assuming video and pictures are real, to assuming they are made the easiest way possible. A signature means the signer wants you to know the content is theirs, nothing else.
It doesn't help to train people to live in a pretend world where fake content always has a warning sticker.
This is about as realistic as the next generation of congress people ending up 40 years younger.
We literally have politicians talking about pouring acid on hardware and expect these same bumbleheads to keep their signing keys safe at the same time. The average person is far too technologically illiterate to do that. Next time you go to grandmas house you'll learn she traded her signing key for chocolate chip cookies.
I imagine it would be something handled pretty automatically for everyone.
If Apple wanted to sign every photo and document the iPhone they could probably make the whole user experience simple enough for most grandmas.
Some people will certainly give away their keys, just like bank accounts and social security numbers today, but those people probably aren't terribly concerned with proving the ownership of their online documents.
>I imagine it would be something handled pretty automatically for everyone.
Then your imagination fails you.
If it is automatic/easy, then you have the 'easy key' problem, such as the key is easy to steal or copy. For example is it based on your apple account? Then what occurs with an account is stolen? Is it based on a device, what happens when the device is stolen?
Who's doing the PKI? Is it going to be like https, but for individuals (this has never really worked at this scale and with revocation). Like most social media is posting content taken by randos on the internet.
When your account is stolen someone can create "official" documents in your name and impersonate you. There could be a system for invalidating your key after a certain date to help out with those situations.
For prominent people who actually have to worry about being impersonated they could provide their own keys.
The infrastructure could be managed by multiple groups or a singular one like the government. The point isn't to be a perfect system, it's to generate enough trust that what you're looking at is genuine and not a total fraud.
In a world where AI bots are generating fake information about everyone in the world, that kind of system could certainly be built and be useful.
I see a lot of confusing authenticity with accuracy. Someone can sign the statement "Obama is white" but that doesn't make it a true statement. The use of PKI as part of showing provenance/chain of trust doesn't make any claims about the accuracy of what is signed. All it does is assert that a given identity signed something.
It's not about what is being signed, it's about who signed it and whether you trust that source. I want credible news outlets to start signing their content with a key I can verify as theirs. In that future all unsigned content is by definition fishy. PKI is the only way to implement trust in a digital realm.
Why do you need a whole PKI for that, rather than just, say, a link to the news outlet's website where the content is hosted? People have already been doing that pretty much since the web was created.
> It's not about what is being signed, it's about who signed it
Yeah, that's what I said about PKI. I also said there is confusion between provenance of a statement and its accuracy. Just because it's signed doesn't mean anything about its accuracy, but those that confuse the two will think that just because it is signed, or because it was signed by a certain "trustworthy" party, that indicates accuracy. PKI does not establish the trustworthiness of the other party, it only gives you confidence in the identity of the party who signed something.
George Santos could sign his resume. We know it was signed by George Santos. And yet nothing in the resume could be considered accurate (or even a falsehood) purely because it is signed. That it was proven to be signed by George Santos via PKI is independent of the fact that George Santos is a known liar.
> The culture needs to shift from assuming video and pictures are real, to assuming they are made the easiest way possible.
That sounds like a dystopia, but I guess we're going into that direction. I expect that a lot of fringe groups like flat-earthers, lizard people conspiracy, war in Ukraine is fake, will become way more mainstream.
PKI has been around for, what, 30 years? Image authentication is just not going to happen at this point, because everyone's got too used to post-processing and it's a massive hassle for something that ultimately doesn't matter because real people use other processes to determine whether things are true or not.
Example: a video shows a group of police beating up a man for a minor crime (say littering). The video is signed by Michael Smith (the random passerby who filmed it on his phone). The video is published to Instagram and shared widely.
How do you expect people to take the authenticity of this video?
Sorry, I wasn't entirely clear that I was specifically responding to the GP comment referencing the EU AI act (as opposed to creating a new top-level comment responding to the original blog post and Google's specific policy) which pointed out:
> Besides, AI-generated text published with the purpose to inform the public on matters of public interest must be labelled as artificially generated. This also applies to audio and video content constituting deep fakes
Clearly "AI-generated text" doesn't apply to YouTube videos.
But, it is interesting that if you use an LLM to generate text and present that text to users, you need to inform them it was AI-generated (per the act). But if a real person reads it out, apparently you don't (per the policy)?
This seems like a weird distinction to me. Should the audience be informed if a series of words were LLM-generated or not? If so, why does it matter if they're delivered as text, or if they're read out?
Usually when a big corporation gleefully announces a change like this it's worth checking whether there's any regulations on that topic taking effect in the near future.
On a local level, I recall how various brands started making a big deal of replacing disposable plastic bags with canvas or paper alternatives "for the environment" just coincidentally a few months before disposable plastic bags were banned in the entire country.
Examples of content creators don’t have to disclose:
* Someone riding a unicorn through a fantastical world
* Green screen used to depict someone floating in space
* Color adjustment or lighting filters
* Special effects filters, like adding background blur or vintage effects
* Production assistance, like using generative AI tools to create or improve a video outline, script, thumbnail, title, or infographic
* Caption creation
* Video sharpening, upscaling or repair and voice or audio repair
* Idea generation
Examples of content creators need to disclose:
* Synthetically generating music (including music generated using Creator Music)
* Voice cloning someone else’s voice to use it for voiceover
* Synthetically generating extra footage of a real place, like a video of a surfer in Maui for a promotional travel video
* Synthetically generating a realistic video of a match between two real professional tennis players
* Making it appear as if someone gave advice that they did not actually give
* Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer missed a note in their live performance
* Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen
* Making it appear as if hospital workers turned away sick or wounded patients
* Depicting a public figure stealing something they did not steal, or admitting to stealing something when they did not make that admission
* Making it look like a real person has been arrested or imprisoned
I hope there is some kind of middle ground, legally, here? Like say you use a piano that uses AI to generate artificial piano sounds, but you create and play the melody yourself: can you get copyright or not?
If someone else uses the same AI generator software and makes the same piece of music should Google go after them for it? I don't think that would hold in court.
Hopefully this means that AI generated music gets skipped by Googles DRM checks.
> If you manually did enough work have the copyright it is fine.
Amount of work is not a basis for copyright. (Kind of work is, though the basis for the “kind” distinction used isn't actually a real objective category, so its ultimately almost entirely arbitary.)
That could get tricky. A lot of hardware and software MIDI sequencers these days have probabilistic triggering built in, to introduce variation in drum loops, basslines, and so forth. An argument could be made that even if you programmed the sequence and all the sounds yourself, having any randomization or algorithmic elements would make the resulting work ineligible for copyright.
Even if it is fully AI-generated, this requirement seems off compared to the other ones.
In all of the other cases, it can be deceiving, but what is deceiving in synthetic music? There may be some cases where it is relevant, like when imitating the voice of a famous singer, but other than that, music is not "real", it is work coming from the imagination of its creator. That kind of thing is already dealt with with copyright, and attribution is a common requirement, and one that YouTube already enforces (how it does that is different matter).
From a Google/Alphabet perspective it could also be valuable to distinguish between „original“ and „ai generated“ music for the purpose of a cleaner database to train their own music generation models?
In one of the examples, they refer to something called "Dream Track"
> Dream Track in Shorts is an experimental song creation tool that allows creators to create a unique 30-second soundtrack with the voices of opted-in artists. It brings together the expertise of Google DeepMind and YouTube’s most innovative researchers with the expertise of our music industry partners, to open up new ways for creators on Shorts to create and engage with artists.
> Once a soundtrack is published, anyone can use the AI-generated soundtrack as-is to remix it into their own Shorts. These AI-generated soundtracks will have a text label indicating that they were created with Dream Track. We’re starting with a limited set of creators in the United States and opted-in artists. Based on the feedback from these experiments, we hope to expand this.
So my impression is they're talking about labeling music which is derived from a real source (like a singer or a band) and might conceivably be mistaken for coming from that source.
There are many cases where such content is perfectly fine. After all, YouTube doesn't claim to be a place devoted to non-fiction only. The first one is an especially common thing in fiction.
The third one could easily be satire. Imagine that a politician is accused of stealing from the public purse, and issues a meme-worthy press statement denying it, and someone generates AI content of that politician claiming not to have stolen a car or something using a similar script.
Valid satire, fair use of the original content: parody is considered transformative. But it should be labeled as AI generated, or it's going to escape onto social media and cause havoc.
It might anyway, obviously. But that isn't a good reason to ban free expression here imho.
Respectfully disagree. Satire should not be labelled as satire. Onus is on the reader to be awake and thinking critically—not for the entire planet to be made into a safe space for the unthinking.
It was never historically the case that satire was expected to be labelled, or instantly recognized by anyone who stumbled across it. Satire is rude. It's meant to mock people—it is intended to muddle and provoke confused reactions. That's free expression nonetheless!
So when we have perfect deep fakes that are indistinguishable from real videos and people are using it for satire, people shouldn’t be required to inform people of that?
How is one to figure out what is real and what is a satire? Times and technologies change. What was once reasonable won’t always be.
- "How is one to figure out what is real and what is a satire?"
Context, source, tone of speech, and reasonability.
- "Times and technologies change."
And so do people! We adapt to times and technology; we don't need to be insulated from them. The only response needed to a new type of artificial medium, is, that people learn to be marginally more skeptical about that medium.
Nah. Satire was always safe when it's not pretending to have documented evidence of the thing actually happening.
Two recent headlines:
* Biden Urges Americans Not To Let Dangerous Online Rhetoric Humanize Palestinians [1]
* Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little [2]
Do you really think, if you jumped back a few years, you could have known which was satire and which wasn't?
The fact that we have video evidence of the second is (part) of how we know it's true. Sure, we could also trust the reporters who were there, but that doesn't lend itself to immediate verification by someone who sees the headline on their Facebook feed.
If the first had an accompanying AI video, do you think it would be believed by some people who are willing to believe the worst of Biden? Sure, especially in a timeline where the second headline is true.
Those voice overs on tiktok that are computer generated but sound quite real and often are reading some script. Do they have to disclose that those voices are artificially produced?
I think there's a clear difference between synthesizing music and synthetically generating music. One term has been around for decades and the other one is being confused with that.
To someone who is doing one or the there is a clear difference. I don't trust the EU or YouTube to be able to tell the difference from the other end, by the end product alone.
If AI writes MIDI input for a synthesizer, rather than producing the actual waveform, where does that land?
> * Voice cloning someone else’s voice to use it for voiceover
This is interesting because I was considering cloning my own voice as a way to record things without the inevitable hesitations, ums, errs, and stumbling over my words. By this standard I am allowed to do so.
But then I thought what does it even mean "someone else's" when multiple people can make a video, if my wife and I make a video together can we not then use my recorded voice because to her my voice is someone else.
I suspect all of these rules will have similar edge cases and a wide penumbra where arbitrary rulings will be autocratically applied.
Did you replace the real you with "AI you" to ask me "why"?
I presume you wouldn't do that? How about replacing your own voice on a video that you make, allowing your viewers to believe it's your natural voice? Are you comfortable with that deception?
Everyone has evolving opinions about this subject. For me, I don't want to converse with stand-in replacements for living people.
A lot different? The equivalent would be applying makeup to your mannequin replacement. All the things you mention are decoration. Replacing your voice is more than a surface alteration. I guess if some clever AI decides to take issue with what I say, and uses some enforcement tactic to arm-twist my opinion, I could change my mind.
I think the suggestion being discussed was AI-cloning your voice, and then using that for text-to-speech. Audio generation, rather than automating the cuts and tweaks to the recorded audio.
Yes exactly. Thanks. Voice cloning was indeed the suggestion made above.
The ethical challenge in my opinion, is that your status as living human narrator on a video is now irrelevant, when you're replaced by voice cloning. Perhaps we'll see a new book by "George Orwell" soon. We don't need the real man, his clone will do.
Interestingly they only say you have to disclose it if it's a singer missing a note. Seems like it's fair game to fix a note that was off key in real life and not disclose that.
Under the current guidelines, doesn't all music performances that make use of some sort of pitch correction assist are technically "digitally altered"?
>Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen
A bit funny considering a realistic warning and "live" radar map of an impending, major, natural disaster occurring in your city apparently doesn't violate their ad policy on YouTube. Probably the only time an ad gave me a genuine fright.
There’s a whole genre of videos on YouTube simulating the PSAs of large scale disasters. Nuclear war, meteors, etc. My 12 year old is really into them.
I think it's smart to start trying things here. This has infinite flaws with it, but from a business and learnings standpoint it's a step toward the right direction. Over time we're going to both learn and decide what is and isn't important to designate as "AI" - Google's approach here at least breaks this into rules of what "AI" things are important to label:
• Makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do
• Alters footage of a real event or place
• Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur
At the very least this will test each of these hypotheses, which we'll learn from and iterate on. I am curious to see the legal arguments that will inevitably kick up from each of these - is color correction altering footage of a real event or place? They explicitly say it isn't in the wider description, but what about beauty filters? If I have 16 video angles, and use photogrammetry / gaussian splatting / AI to generate a 17th, is that a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur? Do I need to have actually captured the photons themselves if I can be 99% sure my predictions of them are accurate?
So many flaws, but all early steps have flaws. At least it is a step.
One black hat thing I'm curious about though is whether or not this tag can be weaponized. If I upload a real event and tag it as AI, will it reduce user trust that the real event ever happened?
The AI tags are fundamentally useless. The premise is that it would prevent someone from misleading you by thinking that something happened when it didn't, but someone who wants to do that would just not tag it then.
Which is where the real abuse comes in: You post footage of a real event and they say it was AI, and ban you for it etc., because what actually happened is politically inconvenient.
And the only way to prevent that would be a reliable way to detect AI-generated content which, if it existed, would obviate any need to tag anything because then it could be automated.
Not convinced by this. Camera sensors have measurable individual noise, if you record RAW that won't be fakeable without prior access to the device. You'd have a straightforward case for defamation if your real footage were falsely labeled, and it would be easy to demonstrate in court.
> Camera sensors have measurable individual noise, if you record RAW that won't be fakeable without prior access to the device.
Which doesn't help you unless non-AI images are all required to be RAW. Moreover, someone who is trying to fabricate something could obviously obtain access to a real camera to emulate.
> You'd have a straightforward case for defamation if your real footage were falsely labeled, and it would be easy to demonstrate in court.
Defamation typically requires you to prove that the person making the claim knew it was false. They'll, of course, claim that they thought it was actually fake. Also, most people don't have the resources to sue YouTube for their screw ups.
Moreover, someone who is trying to fabricate something could obviously obtain access to a real camera to emulate.
Yes, but not to your camera. Sorry for not phrasing it more clearly: individual cameras have measurable noise signatures distinct from otherwise identical models.
On the lawsuit side, you just need to aver that you are the author of the original footage and are willing to prove it. As long as you are in possession of both the device and the footage, you have two pieces of solid evidence vs. someone elses feels/half-assed AI detection algorithm. There will be no shortage of tech-savvy media lawyers willing to take this case on contingency.
But who is the "you" in this case? There can be footage of you that wasn't taken with your camera. The person falsifying it would just claim they used their own camera. Which they would have access to ahead of time in order to incorporate its fingerprint into the video before publishing it.
Most consumer cameras require access menus to enable raw because dealing with RAW is a truly terrible user experience. The vast majority of image/video sensors out there don't even support raw recordings, out of the box.
Anyone with a mid-to-upper range phone or better-than-entry level DSLR/bridge camera has access to this, and anyone who uses that camera to make a living (eg shooting footage of protests) understands how to use RAW. I have friends who are complete technophobes but have figured this out because they want to be able to sell their footage from time to time.
I think you have a bit backwards. If you want to publish pixels on a screen there should be no assumption that they represent real events.
If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.
Also since no one likes RAW footage it should probably just be you post your edited version which may have "AI" upscaling / de-noising / motion blur fixing etc, AND you can post a link to your cryptographically signed verifiable RAW footage.
Of course there's still ways around that like your footage could just be a camera being pointed at an 8k screen or something but at least you make some serious hurdles and have a reasonable argument to the video being a result of photons bouncing off real objects hitting your camera sensor.
> If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.
At which point nobody could verify anything that happened with any existing camera, including all past events as of today and all future events captured with any existing camera.
Then someone will publish a way to extract the key from some new camera model, both allowing anyone to forge anything by extracting a key and using it to sign whatever they want, and calling into question everything actually taken with that camera model/manufacturer.
Meanwhile cheap cameras will continue to be made that don't even support RAW, and people will capture real events with them because they were in hand when the events unexpectedly happened. Which is the most important use case because footage taken by a staff photographer at a large media company with a professional camera can already be authenticated by a big corporation, specifically the large media company.
also the three letter agencies (not just from the US) will have access to private keys of at least some manufacturers, allowing them to authenticate fake events and sow chaos by strategically leaking keys for cameras that recorded something they really don't like.
For all the folks that bash the United States for "reasons" this one gave me a chuckle. Our handling of privacy and data and such is absolute ass, but at least we *can* hide our data from big government with little repercussion in most cases (translation: you aren't actively being investigated for a crime that a judge isn't aware of)
Of course that says nothing about the issues of corruption of judges in the court system, but that is a "relatively" new issues that DOES absolutely need to be addressed.
(Shoot one could argue that the way certain folks are behaving right now is in itself unconstitutional and those folks should be booted)
Countries all over the world (EVEN IN EUROPE WITH THE GDPR) are a lot less "gracious" with anonymous communication. The UK actually has been trying to outlaw private encryption, for a while now, as an example, but there are worse examples from certain other countries. You can find them by examining their political system, most (all? I did quit a bit of research, but also was not interested in spending a ton of time on this topic) are "conservative leaning"
Note that I'm not talking just about existing policy, but countries that are continually trying to enact new policy.
Just like the US has "guarantees" on free speech, the right to vote, etc. The world needs guaranteed access to freedom of speech, religion, right to vote, healthcare, food, water, shelter, electricity, and medical care. I don't know of a single country in the world, including the US, that does anywhere close to a good of job with that.
I'm actually hoping that Ukraine is given both the motive and opportunity to push the boundaries in that regard. If you've been following some of the policy stuff, it is a step in the right direction. I 100% know they won't even come close to getting the job done, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. I definitely do not support this war, but with all of the death and destruction, at least there is a tiny little pinprick of light...
...Even if a single country in the world got everything right, we still need to find a way to unite everyone.
Our time in this universe is limited and our time on earth more-so. We should have been working together 60 years ago for a viable off-planet colony and related stuff. If the world ended tomorrow, humanity would cease to exist. You need over 100,000 people to sustain the human race in the event a catastrophic event wipes almost everyone out. Even if we had 1,000 people in space, our species would be doomed.
I am really super surprised that basic survival needs are NOT on the table when we are all arguing about religion, abortion, guns, etc. Like really?
> We should have been working together 60 years ago for a viable off-planet colony and related stuff. If the world ended tomorrow, humanity would cease to exist. You need over 100,000 people to sustain the human race in the event a catastrophic event wipes almost everyone out.
We are hundreds of years away from the kind of technology you would need for a viable fully self-sustainable off-world colony that houses 100k or more humans. We couldn't even build something close to one in Antarctica.
This kind of colony would need to span half of Mars to actually have access to all the resources it needs to build all of the high-tech gear they would require to just not die of asphixiation. And they would need top-tier universities to actually have people capable of designing and building those high-tech systems, and media companies, and gigantic farms to make not just food but bioplastics and on and on.
Starting 60 years earlier on a project that would take a millennium is ultimately irrelevant.
Not to mention, nothing we could possibly do on Earth would make it even a tenth as hard to live here than on Mars. Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere. And Mars is still the most hospitable other celestial body in the solar system.
> Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere.
This is the best argument I've heard for why we should do it. Once you can survive on Mars you've created the technology to survive whatever happens on Earth.
> I am really super surprised that basic survival needs are NOT on the table when we are all arguing about religion, abortion, guns, etc. Like really?
Most people in the world struggle to feed themselves and their families. This is the basic survival need. Do you think they fucking care what happens to humantiy in 100k years? Stop drinking that transhumanism kool-aid, give your windows a good cleaning and look at what's happening in the real world, every day.
> I worked in device attestation at Android. It’s not robust enough to put our understanding of reality in.
I don't follow. Isn't software backward compatibility a big reason why Android device attestation is so hard? For cameras, why can't the camera sensor output a digital signature of the sensor data along with the actual sensor data?
There's been a slow march to requiring hardware-backed security. I believe all new devices from the last couple of years need a TEE or a dedicated security chip.
At least with Android there are too many OEMs and they screw up too often. Bad actors will specifically seek out these devices, even if they're not very technically skilled. The skilled bad actors will 0-day the devices with the weakest security. For political reasons, even if a batch of a million devices are compromised it's hard to quickly ban them because that means those phones can no longer watch Netflix etc.
But you don't have to ban them for this use case? You just need something opportunistic, not ironclad. An entity like Google could publish those devices' certificates as "we can't verify the integrity of these devices' cameras", and let the public deal with that information (or not) as they wish. Customers who care about proving integrity (e.g., the media) will seek the verifiable devices. Those who don't, won't. I can't tell if I'm missing something here, but this seems much more straightforward than the software attestation problem Android has been dealing with so far.
Not if you do it, only if the chip also gives you a signed JPEG. Cropping and other simple transformations aren't an issue, though, since you could just specify them in unsigned metadata, and people would be able to inspect what they're doing. Either way, just having a signed image from the sensor ought to be adequate for any case where the authenticity is more important than anesthetics. You share both the processed version and the original, as proof that there's no misleading alteration.
> You share both the processed version and the original, as proof that there's no misleading alteration
so you cannot share the original if you intend to black out something from the original that you don't want revealed (e.g., a face or name or something).
The way you specced out how a signed jpeg works means the raw data _must_ remain visible. There's gonna be unintended consequences from such a system.
And it aint even that trustworthy - the signing key could potentially be stolen or coerced out, and fakes made. It's not a rock-solid proof - my benchmark for proof needs to be on par with blockchains'.
> The way you specced out how a signed jpeg works means the raw data _must_ remain visible. There's gonna be unintended consequences from such a system.
You can obviously extend this if you want to add bells and whistles like cropping or whatever. Like signing every NxN sub-block separately, or more fancy stuff if you really care. It should be obvious I'm not going to design in every feature you could possibly dream of in an HN comment...
And regardless, like I said: this whole thing is intended to be opportunistic. You use it when you can. When you can't, well, you explain why, or you don't. Ultimately it's always up to the beholder to decide whether to believe you, with or without proof.
> And it aint even that trustworthy - the signing key could potentially be stolen or coerced out, and fakes made.
I already addressed this: once you determine a particular camera model's signature ain't trustworthy, you publish it for the rest of the world to know.
> It's not a rock-solid proof - my benchmark for proof needs to be on par with blockchains'.
It's rock-solid enough for enough people. I can't guarantee I'll personally satisfy you, but you're going to be sorely disappointed when you realize what benchmarks courts currently use for assessing evidence tampering...
It also occurs to me that the camera chips -- or even separately-sold chips -- could be augmented to perform transformations (like black-out) on already-signed images. You could even make this work with arbitrary transformations - just sign the new image along with a description (e.g., bytecode) of the sequence of transformations applied to it so far. This would let you post-process authentic images while maintaining authenticity.
Cryptography also has answers for some of this sort of thing. For example, you could use STARKs (Succinct Transparent Arguments of Knowledge) to create a proof that there exists a raw image I, and a signature S_I of I corresponding to the public key K (public input), and that H_O (public input) is a hash of an image O, and that O is the output of providing a specified transformation (cropping, JPEG compression) to I.
Then you give me O, I already know K (you tell me which manufacturer key to use, and I decide if I trust it), and the STARK proof. I validate the proof (including the public inputs K and H_O, which I recalculate from O myself), and if it validates I know that you have access to a signed image I that O is derived from in a well-defined way. You never have to disclose I to me. And with the advent of zkVMs, it isn't even necessarily that hard to do as long as you can tolerate the overhead of running the compression / cropping algorithm on a zkVM instead of real hardware, and don't mind the proof size (which is probably in the tens of megabytes at least).
I am not sure how verifying that a photo was unaltered after capture from a camera if very useful though. You could just take a photo of a high-resolution display when an edited photo on it
It's true that 1990s pirated videos where someone snuck a handheld camera into the cinema were often very low quality.
But did you know large portions of The Mandalorian were produced with the actors acting in front of an enormous, high-resolution LED screen [1] instead of building a set, or using greenscreen?
It turns out pointing a camera at a screen can actually be pretty realistic, if you know what you're doing.
And I suspect the pr agencies interested in flooding the internet with images of Politician A kicking a puppy and Politician B rescuing flood victims do, in fact, know what they're doing.
That's a freaking massive LED wall... with professional cinematography on top. If you believed my comment was intended to imply that I believed that's somehow impossible, well... you and I have a very different understanding of what it means to "just take a picture of a high-resolution display"...
I think doing this right goes the other direction. What we're going to end up with is a focus on provenance.
We already understand that with text. We know that to verify words, we have to trace it back to the source, and then we evaluate the credibility of the source.
There have been periods where recording technology ran ahead of faking technology, so we tended to just trust photos, audio, and video (even though they could always be used to paint misleading pictures). But that era is over. New technological tricks may push back the tide a little here and there, but mostly we're going to end up relying on, "Who says this is real, and why should we believe them?"
> If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.
That idea doesn't work, at all.
Even assuming a perfect technical implementation, all you'd have to do to defeat it is launder your fake image through a camera's image sensor. And there's even a term for doing that: telecine.
With the right jig, a HiDPI display, and typical photo editing (no one shows you raw, full-res images), I don't think such a signature forgery would detectable by a layman or maybe even an expert.
> The premise is that it would prevent someone from misleading you by thinking that something happened when it didn't, but someone who wants to do that would just not tag it then.
And when they do that, the video is now against Google's policy and can be removed. That's the point of this policy.
I mean they’re building the labeled dataset right now by having creators label it for them.
I would suspect this helps make moderation models better at estimating confidence levels of ai generated content that isn’t labeled as such (ie for deception).
Surprised we aren’t seeing more of this in labeling datasets for this new world (outside of captchas)
AI tags are to cover issues in the other direction: you publish an event as real, but they can prove it wasn't. If you didn't put the tag on it, malice can be inferred from your post (and further legal proceeding/moderation can happen)
It's the same as paid reviews: tags and disclaimers exist to make it easier to handle cases where you intentionally didn't put them.
It's not perfect and can be abused in other ways, but at least it's something.
The do have some use. Take for example the AI images of the pope wearing luxury brands that someone made about last year. They clearly wanted to make it as a joke, not to purposefully misinform people, and as long as everybody is in on the joke then I see no issue with that. But some people who weren't aware of current AIgen capabilities took it as real and an AI tag would have avoided the discussion of "has AI art gone too far" while still allowing that person to make their joke.
I suspect we're headed into a world of attestation via cryptographically signed videos. If you're the sole witness, then you can reduce the trust in the event, however, if it's a major event, then we can fall back on existing news-gathering machinery to validate and counter your false tagging (e.g. if a BBC camera captured the event, or there is some other corroboration & fact checking).
How does the signature help? It only proves that the video hasn't been altered since [timestamp]. It doesn't prove that it wasn't AI-generated or manipulated.
If I have a CCTV camera that is in a known location and a TPM that signs its footage, I could probably convince a jury that it’s legit in the face of a deepfake defense.
That’s the bar- it’s not going to be infallible but if you don’t find evidence of tampering with the hardware then it’s probably going to be fine.
This might be worse than nothing. It's exactly the same tech as DRM, which is good enough to stop the average person, but where tons of people have private exploits stashed away to crack it. So the judge and general public trust the system to be basically foolproof, while criminals can forge fake signatures using keys they extracted from the hardware.
Signatures are also able to (mostly) signal that a specific device (and/or application on that device) captured the video. It would be possible to check if a video was encoded by a specific instance of an iOS Camera app or AfterEffects on PC.
Everything else - corroboration, interviews, fact checking will remain as they are today and can't be replaced by technology. So I imagine a journalist would reach out to person who recorded thr video, ask them to show their device's fingerprint and ask about their experience when (event) occured, and then corroborate all that information from other sources.
When the news org publishes the video, they may sign it with their own key and/or vouch for the original one so viewers of clips on social media will know that Fox News (TM) is putting their name and reputation behind the video, and it hasn't been altered from the version Fox News chose to share, even though the "ModernMilitiaMan97" account that reshared it seems dubious.
Currently, there's no way to detect alterations or fabrications of both the "citizen-journalist" footage and post-broadcast footage.
We have to expect people to think for themselves. People are flawed and will be deceived but trying to centralize critical thinking will have far more disastrous results. Its always been that way.
Im not saying Youtube shouldn’t have AI labels. Im saying we shouldn’t assume they’re reliable.
>but trying to centralize critical thinking will have far more disastrous results
No. Having sources of trust is the basis of managing complexity. When you turned the tap water on and bought a piece of meat at the butcher you didn't yourself verify whether its healthy right? You trust the medicine you buy contains exactly what is says on the label and didn't take a chemistry class. That's centralized trust. You rely on it ten thousand times a day implicitly.
There need to be measures to make sure media content is trustworthy, because the smartest person on the earth doesn't have enough resources to critically judge 1% of what they're exposed to every day. It is simply a question of information processing.
It's a mathematical necessity. Information that is collectively processed constantly goes up, individiual bandwith does not, therefore you need more division of labor, efficieny and higher forms of social organisation.
> Having sources of trust is the basis of managing complexity.
This is a false equivalence that I’ve already addressed.
> When you turned the tap water on and bought a piece of meat at the butcher you didn't yourself verify whether its healthy right?
To a degree, yeah, you do check. Especially when you get it from somewhere with prior problems. And if you see something off you check further and adjust accordingly.
Why resort to anology? Should we blindly trust YouTube to judge whats true or not? I stated that labeling videos is fine but what’s not fine is blindly trusting it.
Additionally, comparing to meat dispenses with all the controversy because food safety is a comparatively objective standard.
Compare, “is this steak safe to eat or not?” To “is this speech safe to hear or not?”
I'm probably paraphrasing Schneier (and getting it wrong), but getting water from the tap and having it polluted or poisonous, has legal and criminal consequences. Similarly getting meat from a butcher and having it tainted.
Right now, getting videos which are completely AI/deepfaked to misrepresent, are not subject to the same consequences, simply because either #1 people can't be bothered, #2 are too busy spreading it via social media, or #3 have no idea how to sue the party on the other side.
And therein lies the danger, as with social media, of the lack of consequences (and hence the popularity of swatting, pretexting etc)
This bodes well for autocracies and would-be autocrats. It's the logical extreme of what they've been trying to do on social media over the last decade or so.
It just goes back to trusting the source. If 5 media orgs post different recordings of the same political speech, you can be reasonably sure it actually happened, or at least several orders of magnitude more sure than if it's one blurry video from a no name account.
I was immediately thinking that the #AI labels are going to give people a false sense of trust, so that when someone posts a good-enough fake without the #AI label, it can do damage if it goes viral before it gets taken down for the mislabeling. (Kudos for the effort, though, YouTube.)
Behind the scenes, I'm 99% confident that Google has deployed AI detection tools and will monitor for it.
That said, unless all the AI generators agree on a way to add an unalterable marker that something is generated, at one point it may become undetectable. May.
I'm not aware of any AI detection tools that are actually effective enough to be interesting. Perhaps Google has some super-secret method that works, but I rather doubt it. If they did, I think they'd be trumpeting it from the hilltops.
And this isn't new. A fad in films in the 90's was hyper-realistic masks on the one side, and make-up and prosthetics artists on the other, making people look like other people.
Faking things is not new, and you've always been right to mistrust what you see on the internet. "AI" technology has made it easy, convenient, accessible and affordable to more people though, beforehand you needed image/video editing skills and software, a good voice mod, be a good (voice) actor, etc.
> you've always been right to mistrust what you see on the internet.
But these tools make deception easier and cheaper, meaning it will become much more common. Also, it's not just "on the internet". The trust problem this brings up applies to everything.
This deeply worries me. A post-truth society loses it's ability to participate in democracy, becomes a low-trust society, the population falls into learned helplessness and apathy ("who can even know what's true any more?")
Look at Russian society for a sneak preview if we don't get this right.
This isn’t strictly some blackhat thing, people will attempt to hand wave inconvenient evidence against them as AI generated and build reasonable doubt.
I know people on HN love to hate on Google, but at least they're a major platform that's TRYING. Mistakes will be made, but let's at least attempt at moving forward.
Don't worry Google has become incompetent - it is in the "Fading AOL" portion of its life cycle. Do you remember how incontinent AOL became in the final minutes before it became completely irrelevant? Sure it's taking longer with Google. But it's not a process that they can reverse.
That means the system will be really really awful. So challengers can arise - maybe a challenger that YOU build, and open source!
That open source can replace corporate centralization? Since centralized platforms started extracting more profits (including manipulation) things like Fediverse are on the rise. For mindless browsing, centralized is still king for now (Fediverse also works to an extent) but if your site has something better than what's on the centralized corporate platform, people will go there once they learn about it. We're on Hacker News instead of Reddit because?
1. Google lost the battle for LLMs, and cannot win that battle without putting a nail in the coffin of its own search monetization strategy
2. Google search is now no better than DDG, which it also cannot recover from without putting a nail in the coffin of its own search monetization strategy
If you want a randomly accuse me of living in a bubble that's fine. It won't bother me one bit. Me living in a bubble doesn't change the fact that Google is backed into a corner when it comes to search quality and competing with LLMs.
Duck duck go is now more effective than Google, and I've been using it instead of Google for 5 years. Now I mainly ask GPT4 questions, and eliminate the need for search altogether in most cases. I run ad blockers on YouTube. And they're not getting cash from me via Android.
You may be right that they can survive more readily than AOL did.. but I certainly won't help them with anything more than a kick in the pants! ;)
I wonder if this will make all forms of surveillance, video or otherwise, inadmissible in court in the near future. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a lawyer to make an argument for reasonable doubt, with any electronic media now.
Bad evidence is not the same thing as inadmissible evidence. Evidence is admitted, and then the fact finder determines whether to consider it, and how much weight to give it. It is likely that surveillance video will be slightly less credible now, but can still be part of a large, convincing body of evidence.
Video evidence already requires attestation to be admissible evidence. You need a witness to claim that the footage comes from a camera that was placed there, that it was collected from the night of, etc. It's not like the prosecutor gets a tape in the mail and they can present it as evidence.
By that rationale, all witness testimony and written evidence should already be inadmissible.
This website focuses too much on the technical with little regard for the social a bit too often. Though in general, videos being easily fakable is still scary.
> I wonder if this will make all forms of surveillance, video or otherwise, inadmissible in court in the near future.
No, it won't. Just as it does now, video evidence (like any other evidence that isn't testimony) will need to be supported by associated evidence (including, ultimately, testimony) as to its provenance.
> It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a lawyer to make an argument for reasonable doubt,
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is only the standard for criminal convictions, and even then is based on the totality of evidence tending support or refute guilt, its not a standard each individual piece of evidence must clear for admissibility.
As someone who studied video production two decades ago, regarding the criteria you mentioned for AI:
- Makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do
- Alters footage of a real event or place
- Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur
These are things that have been true of edited video since even before AI was a thing. People
can lie about reality with videos, and AI is just one of many tools to do so. So, as you said, there are many flaws with this approach, but I agree that requiring labels is at least a step in the right direction.
For videos that requires pretty significant effort even today to be done by hand. Humans don't scale. AI does.
I think anonymity is completely dead now. Not due to social networks but AI will definitely kill it. With enough resources it is possible to engage an AI arms race against whatever detector they put.
It is also possible to remove any watermarking. So the only way to prove if the content is made by humans will be requiring extensive proofs to their complete identity.
If you're from a minority or a fringe group, all of your hopes about spreading awareness anonymously on popular social media will be gone.
Given the regular stories posted on HN about folks who've had some aspect of their social or other media canceled by any some SaaS company, are these companies having many (legal) qualms as it is about canceling people without providing a good reason for it? Would be nice if they did, though...
I'd much prefer Google cancel capriciously with solid TOS backing to it than without, but I'll complain about their double standards about what they choose to censor... Not regardless, but without a doubt, because Google will choose to selectively enforce this rule.
but this gives room to also abuse the uncertainty to censor anyone without recourse - by arguing such and such video is "AI" (true or not), they have a plausiblely deniable reason to remove a video.
Power is power - can be used for good or bad. This labelling is a form of power.
This is no different from their existing power. They can already claim that a video contained copyright infringement, and you can only appeal that claim once, or try to sue Google.
keep holding ourselves back with poorly written legislation designed to garner votes while rival companies take strides in the technology at rapid rates
I think the real benefit for this is that probably that it establishes trust as the default, and acts as a discriminator for good-faith uses of "AI". If most non-malicious uses of ML are transparently disclosed, and that's normalized, then it should be easier to identify and focus on bad-faith uses.
Porn classification / regulation boils down to: "I'll know it when I see it." Implying the existence of some hyper vigilant seer who can heroically determine what we should keep behind the video storre curtain of dencey, as if no grey areas exist. This also has the problem of requiring actual unbiased humans to view and accurately assess everything, which of course does not scale.
Perhaps AI classification is the mirror opposite to porn, using the test: "I'll know it when I don't see it", ie, if an average user would mistake AI generated content for reality, it should be clearly labeled as AI. But how do we enforce this? Does such enforcement scale? What about malicious actors?
We could conceivably use good AI to spot the bad AI, an endless AI cat and AI mouse game. Without strong AI regulation and norms a large portion of the internet will devolve into AI responding to AI generated content, seems like a gigantic waste of resources and the internet's potential.
The great thing about AI, is that it's exactly optimized for discriminating in gray areas with difficult-to-articulate rules like "I'll know it when I see it."
> We could conceivably use good AI to spot the bad AI
I suspect this is Google's actual goal with the tagging system. It's not so much about helping users, rather it's a way to collect labeled data which they can later use to train their own "AI detection" algorithms
Because right now AI is an issue the public and policymakers are concerned about, and this is to show that private industry can take adequate steps to control it to stave up government regulation while the attention is high.
> I am curious to see the legal arguments that will inevitably kick up from each of these
Google policy isn't law; there's no court judging legal arguments, it is enforced at Google’s whim and with effectively no recourse, at least not one which is focused on parsing arguments about the details of the policy.
So there won’t be “legal arguments” over what exactly it applies to.
Can’t they be sued for breach of contract if they aren’t following their own tos? Having a rule like this gives them leeway to remove what they consider harmful.
No, because the ToS says they can do anything they want to. The purpose of a ToS is to set an expectation on which things the company will tolerate users doing. It's (almost always) not legally binding for either party.
I’m reminded of how banks require people to fill out forms explaining what they’re doing, where it’s expected that criminals will lie, but this is an easy thing to prosecute later after they’re caught.
Could a similar argument be applied here? It doesn’t seem like there is much in the way of consequences for lying to Google. But I suppose they have other ways of checking for it, and catching someone lying is a signal that makes the account more suspicious.
It’s a compliance checkbox for the most part I think. They can stay on top of new legislation by claiming they are providing tools to deal with misinformation, whereas it’d be easier to say that they are encouraging the proliferation of misinformation by not doing anything about it. It certainly shifts the legal question in the way you described it would seem.
Yeah I think it’s a very similar approach to what you’ve described. The scale of YouTube, I don’t think you can just start banning content you don’t like. Instead you have to have a policy, clearly documented, and then you can start enforcing based on that policy.
The other thing is that they don’t necessarily want to ban all of this content. For example a video demonstrating how AI can be used to create misinformation and showing examples, would be fairly clearly “morally” ok. The policy being that you have to declare it allows for this sort of content to live on the platform, but allows you to filter it out in certain contexts where it may be inappropriate (searches for election coverage?) and allows you to badge it for users (like Covid information tags).
ELI5: what would be the difference if you use AI or it is a new release of Star Wars? I understand that AI does not need proof-of-work and that is the difference?
That's like saying speed limit signs have really nothing to do with cars, they're trying to impose a ban on collision velocity. Which is true, but only speciously, as the rule exists only because motor vehicles made it so easy to go fast.
They don't have anything specifically to do with cars. They apply equally to motorcycles, trucks and anything else that could go that fast. Get pulled over in a tank or a hovercraft and try to tell the officer that you can't have been speeding because it isn't a car.
Should we like deepfakes any better if they're created by a nation state using pre-AI Hollywood production technology, or "by hand" with Photoshop etc.? If 3D printers get better so that anybody can 3D print masks you can wear to convincingly look like someone else and then record yourself on camera, would you expect a different set of rules for that or are we talking about the same kind of problem?
You missed the analogy, so I'll spell it out: before we had cars[1], we couldn't go fast on roads, and there were no speed limit signs. Before we had AI, we couldn't deceive people with easy fakes, and so there was no need to regulate it. Now we do, and there is, and YouTube did.
Trying to characterize this as not related to AI just isn't adding to the discussion. Clearly it is a response to the emergence of AI fakes.
Trying to shovel in "and all of the other stuff" breaks the analogy though. Misinformation isn't new. Image gen is hardly the first time you could create a fictional depiction of something. It's not even the first time you could do it with commonly available tools. It's just the moral panic du jour.
YouTube did this because the EU passed a law about it. The EU passed a law about it because of the moral panic, not because the abstract concept of deception was only recently invented.
It's like having cars already, and speed limits, and then someone invents an electric car that can accelerate from 0 to 200 MPH in 5 seconds, so the government passes a new law with some arbitrary registration requirements to satisfy Something Must Be Done.
From your comment's tone, it seems like this is supposed to be a bad thing. The only people who would be upset about this are folks who are trying to pass generated content off as real. I'm sorry if I don't have much sympathy for them.
"You have to tell people if you're lying" isn't a stupid rule because lying is good, it's a stupid rule because liars can lie about lying and proving it was the original problem.
From the report button on a youtube video: Misinformation - Content that is misleading or deceptive with serious risk of egregious harm.
That sounds like a quagmire of subjectivity to enforce. You can argue whether generated content was created to mislead or whether it would cause _egregious_ harm.
Now there's no more arguing. Is it generated or is it real - and is it marked if generated? I still fail to see the downside here.
You're acting like this is a court with a judge. The company makes up subjective rules and then subjectively enforces them. There was never any arguing to begin with, they just ban you if they don't like you, or at random for no apparent reason, and you have no recourse.
> Now there's no more arguing. Is it generated or is it real - and is it marked if generated? I still fail to see the downside here.
How is this supposed to lead to less arguing? If there was an easy way to tell if something is AI-generated then you wouldn't need the user to tag it. When there isn't, now you have to argue about whether it is or not -- or if it obviously is, whether it then has to be tagged, because it obviously is and they've given that as an exception.
Youtube isn't some mom n' pop operation - they do have a review process and make an attempt at following the rules they set. They can ban you for any reason...but they generally don't unless you're clearly breaking a rule.
I'm not getting into the rabbit hole of finding out if it was actually generated - once again, that's a different problem. One that I already mentioned 2 comments back. My point was that there is less subjectivity with this rule. If the content is found to have been generated and isn't marked, then there are clear grounds to remove the video.
What youtube does when there is doubt is not known yet. I don't deal in "well this _could_ lead to this".
> Youtube isn't some mom n' pop operation - they do have a review process and make an attempt at following the rules they set. They can ban you for any reason...but they generally don't unless you're clearly breaking a rule.
They use (with some irony) AI and other algorithms to determine if you're breaking the rules, often leading to arbitrary or nonsensical results, which the review process frequently fails to address.
> I'm not getting into the rabbit hole of finding out if it was actually generated - once again, that's a different problem.
It isn't a different problem, it's the problem. You want people to label things because otherwise you're not sure, but because of that problem exactly, you have no way of reliably or objectively enforcing the labeling requirement. And you specifically have no way to do it in the cases where it most matters because it's hard to tell.
At a mom and pop you could at least talk to a person and figure out what happen.
>I don't deal in "well this _could_ lead to this"
Did you not learn from the entire DMCA thing? Remember the thing where piles tech people warned "Wow, this is going to be used as a weapon to cause problems" and then it was used as a weapon to cause problems.
Well, welcome to the next weapon that is going to be used to cause problems.
The DMCA implementation implemented is the only thing that saved youtube from getting sued out of existence. And people on the internet don't know what fair-use actually means, so they complain/exaggerate about DMCA takedowns when, surprise, it wasn't actually covered by fair-use.
There's a handful of cases where yt actually messed up w/ DMCA and considering the sheer volume of videos they process, I'd say it's actually pretty damn good.
So no, DMCA is not a valid reason to assume youtube will handle this improperly.
> The DMCA implementation implemented is the only thing that saved youtube from getting sued out of existence.
The alternative to the DMCA is Section 230 of the CDA, which could have just as easily been applied to copyright as it is to anything else if it weren't for the DMCA providing a more abuse-prone alternative.
> And people on the internet don't know what fair-use actually means, so they complain/exaggerate about DMCA takedowns when, surprise, it wasn't actually covered by fair-use.
Abusive takedowns are a huge problem, actually. It's common in cases of businesses sending takedowns for their competitors' websites or videos, for example. They're often completely fraudulent with no merit whatsoever, but the company receiving the takedown has no information on which to base a decision (who created this content? how would they know?), so they just mechanistically execute all of them with no validation.
> they just ban you if they don't like you, or at random for no apparent reason, and you have no recourse.
The ban recourse problem is the opposite.
This is the "keep recourse": "this video is obviously bad, but google doesn't feel like taking it down, and there is nothing I can do about it". Now there is, and it can actually go to a court with a judge in the end, if Google is obstinate.
You didn't have a right to be hosted on Google before, and you don't have now. Of course they can ban you as they like. The thing is, they can't host you as they like, if you're breaking this rule.
> The thing is, they can't host you as they like, if you're breaking this rule.
Except that the rule can be satisfied just by labeling it, and if there are penalties for not labeling but no penalties for labeling then the obvious incentive is to stick the label on everything just in case, causing it to become meaningless.
To prevent that would require prohibiting the label from being applied to things that aren't AI-generated, which is impracticable because now you need 100% accuracy and there is no way to err on the side of caution, but nobody has 100% accuracy. So then the solution would be to actually make everything AI-generated, e.g. by systematically running it through some subtle AI filter, and then you can get back to labeling everything to avoid liability.
You could be right. But I wonder if truly nobody will want to claim their video is not AI-generated. Seems like some people will, and they would get an advantage out of it. Yes, Fox News claims they're entertainment and nobody reasonable would believe them. But not all news channels do this.
Did the California proposition 65 really result in cancer labels on everything? Or is it just hyperbole? I suppose having a lot of labels is still bad, even if they're not technically on everything.
Of course, YouTube is well-known for its methodical approach to video removal, strictly adhering to transparent guidelines, rather than deciding based on the "computer says no" principle.
It sounds like it could also be used to take down a video someone thinks is fake. Proving it may be easy in some cases, but in other's it may be quite difficult.
They can, but it's often possible to prove it later. If you have a rule against lying and it's retroactively discovered to have been broken, then you already have the enforcement mechanism in place.
Really, your argument can be generalized to 'why have laws at all, because people will break them and lie about it'.
> They can, but it's often possible to prove it later. If you have a rule against lying and it's retroactively discovered to have been broken, then you already have the enforcement mechanism in place.
It isn't a rule against lying, it's a rule requiring lies to be labeled. From which you get nothing useful that you couldn't get from a rule against lying, because you'd need the same proof for either one.
Meanwhile it becomes a trap for the unwary because innocent people who don't understand the complicated labeling rules get stomped by the system without intending any malice.
> Really, your argument can be generalized to 'why have laws at all, because people will break them and lie about it'.
The generalization is that laws against not disclosing crimes are pointless because the penalty for the crime is already at least as severe as the penalty for not disclosing it and you'd need to prove the crime to prove the omission. This is, for example, why it makes sense to have a right against self-incrimination.
There are already various situations where lying is banned: depending on the circumstances, lying might count as perjury, fraud, false advertising, etc. It seems silly to suggest that these laws serve no purpose.
The same reason you have to check a box saying you're not a terrorist when entering the USA. It gives them a legal basis to actually do something about it when found out from other means.
The title was editorialized, which people do far more often than they should. The original title, with the domain name next to it, would have been fine.
Most interesting example to me: "Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer missed a note in their live performance".
This seems oddly specific to the inverse of what happened recently with Alicia Keys from the recent Superbowl. As Robert Komaniecki pointed out on X [1], Alicia Keys hit a "sour note" which was silently edited by the NFL to fix it.
This is a great example as a discussion point, thank you for sharing.
I will be coming back to this video in several months time to check whether the "Altered or synthetic content" tag has actually been applied to it or not. If not, I will report it to YouTube.
However autotune has existed for decades. Would it have been better if artists were required to label when they used autotune to correct their singing? I say yes but reasonable people can disagree!
I wonder if we are going to settle on an AI regime where it’s OK to use AI to deceptively make someone seem “better” but not to deceptively make someone seem “worse.” We are entering a wild decade.
A lot of people do! Tone correction [1] is a normal fact of life in the music industry, especially in recordings. Using it well takes both some degree of vocal skill and production skill.
You'll often find that it's incredibly obvious when done poorly, but nearly unnoticeable when done well.
Correct, it's the inverse that requires disclosure by Youtube.
Still, I find it interesting. If you can't synthetically alter someone's performance to be "worse", is it OK that the NFL synthetically altered Alicia Key's performance to be "better"?
For a more consequential example, imagine Biden's marketing team "cleaning up" his speech after he has mumbled or trailed off a word, misleading the US public during an election year. Should that be disclosed?
I don't understand the distinction. if the intent is to protect the user, then what if I make the sound better for rival contestants on American idol and don't do it for singers of a certain race.
Look at "realistic" photos , it is easy for someone with experience to spot issues, the hangs/fingers are wrong, shadows and light are wrong, hair is weird, eyes have issues. In a video there are much more information so much more places to get things wrong, making it pass this kind of test will be a huge job so many will not put the effort.
AI that is indistinguishable from reality is a certainty for the not-so-distant future.
That future will come, and it will come sooner than anyone's expecting.
Yet all I see is society trying to prevent the inevitable from installing itself (because it's "scary", "dangerous", "undermines the very pillars of society" etc.), instead of preparing itself for when the inevitable occurs.
People seem to have finally accepted we can't put the genie back in the bottle, so now we're at the stage where governments and institutions are all trying to look busy and pass the image of "hey, we're doing something about it, ok? You can feel safe".
Soon we will be forced to accept that all that wasted effort was but a futile attempt at catching a falling knife.
Maybe the next idiom in line will be "crying over spilled milk", because could someone point me to what is being done in terms of "hey, let's start by directly assuming a world in which anyone can produce unrestricted, genuine-looking content will soon come and there's no way around it -- what then?"
All I see is a meteor approaching and everyone trying to divert it, but no one actually preparing for when it does hit. Each day that passes I'm more certain that we will we look at each other like fools, asking ourselves "why didn't we focus on preparing for change, instead of trying to prevent change"?
There's a saying in my local language that people usually say to someone who's going through a breakup or going through an unfair situation:
"Accept it, it hurts less".
I'm not saying it makes the actual situation any better; it obviously doesn't. But anyone can feel the rarefied AI panic in the air growing thicker by the minute, and panic will only make the situation worse both before and after absolute change takes place.
When we don't accept incoming change before it arrives, we surely are forced to accept it after it arrives, at a much higher price.
You asked about preparations: prepare yourself to see governments try (and fail) to regulate what processing power can be acquired by consumers. Prepare yourself for the serious proposal of "truth-checking agencies" with certified signatures that ensure "this content had its chain of custody verified as authentic from its CMOS capture up to its encoded video stream", in which a lot of time and effort will be wasted (there's already people replying about this, saying metadata and/or encryption will come to the rescue via private/public keys. Supposedly no will would ever film a screen!).
The above might seem an exaggeration, but ask yourself: the YouTube guidelines this post is about, the recent EU regulation... do you think those are enough? Of course they're not. They will keep trying to solve the problem from the wrong end until they are (we are) forced to accept there's nothing that can be done about it, and that it is us who need to adapt to live in such a world.
There are some interesting hardware solutions from camera makers that provide provably authentic metadata and watermarks to videos and images - mostly useful for journalists, but soon consumers will expecting this to be exposed on social media platforms and those they follow on social media. There really are genuinely valuable things happening in this space.
This will always be spoofable by projecting the AI content onto the sensor and playing it to the microphone. Which will give the spurious content a veneer of authenticity, this is within reach of a talented malicious amateur, and would be trivial for nationa-state actors to do at scale.
Thank you for pointing that out, I want to reply to everyone here but I don't think I have it in me to fight this battle. It seems my initial message of "have we questioned ourselves what we'll do should the countermeasures fail?" fell on deaf ears. I asked a very simple question: "what will we do / should we do when faced with a world in which no content can be trusted as true", and most replies just went on to list the countermeasures being worked on. I will follow my own advice and simply accept that is how the band plays.
Of course. I don’t think anyone is going to be arguing that content captured by these cameras is real, it’s that the content is captured by the owner of that specific camera. There always needs to be some aspect of trust, and the value comes in connecting that with a trusted identity. Eg one couldn’t embed the CSPAN watermarks from a non-CSPAN camera.
We've been preparing for a while? It's all that work people have been doing for years with asynchronous cryptography, ecc, and tech like what happens during heavy rain downpours and that coin with a bit in front of it.
These are all the proper preparation for AI. AI can't generate a private key given a public key. AI can't generate the appropriate text given a hash.
So we build a society upon these things AI can't do.
It has been a good run. We have done things like the tried and true ink stamping to verify documents. We have a labyrinth of bureaucracy for every little activity, mostly because it is the way that has always worked. It has surely been nice for the "administration" to sit around and sip lemonade in their archaic jobs. It has been nice to have incompetent people with no vision being appointed to high places for being born into the right families connected with the right people. That gravy train was surely a joy for those who were a part of it.
Sadly, it won't work anymore. We will need competent people now that actually care.
We need everything to be authenticated now with digital signatures.
It is not even that difficult a problem to solve. The existing systems are far more complex, far more prone to error, far more expensive, and far more difficult to navigate.
AI is giving us an opportunity to evolve. It is a time for celebration. Society will be faster, more efficient, more secure, and much more fun with generative content. AIs will produce official AI-signed content, and unsigned content. Humans will produce official human signed content, and unsigned content. Some AIs will use humans to sign content to subvert systems. But all of this pales in comparison to the fraud, waste, and total abuse of the current system.
Most nefarious AI content is going to be posted by humans misusing the AI tools, as opposed to some kind of AI gone rogue.
These humans would simply generate a public key from the private key, then post it under their human identity. The main threat from AI in the future IMO is not rouge AI, but bad human actors using it for their own nefarious agendas. This is how the first "evil" AI will probably come about.
Forgive me on an initial reading, it is hard to have a nuanced discussion on this stuff without coming off like an uncaring caricature of one of two stereotypes, or look like you're attacking your interlocutor. When I'm writing these out, it's free association like I'm writing a diary entry, not as a critique of your well-reasoned and 100% accurate take.
Personal thoughts:
- we're already a year past the point where it was widely known you can generate whatever you want, and get it to a reasonable "real" threshold with less than a day worth of work.
- the impact is likely to be significantly muted, rather than an exponential increase upon, a 2020 baseline. professionals were capable of accomplishing this with a couple orders of magnitude more manual work for at least a decade.
- in general, we've suffered more societally from histrionics/over-reactions to being bombarded with the same messaging
- it thus should end up being _net good_, in that a skeptic has a 100% accurate argument for requiring more explanation than "wow look at this!"
- I expect that being able to justify / source / explain things will gain significant value relative to scaled up distributors giving out media someone else gave them without any review.
- something I've noticed the last couple years is people __hate__ looking stupid. __Hate__. They learn extremely quickly to refactor knowledge they think they have once confronted in public, even by the outgroup, as long as theyre a non-extremist.
After writing that out, I guess my tl;Dr as of this moment and mood, is there will be negligible negative effects, we already reached a nadir of unquestioned BS sometime between 2010 and 2024, and a baseline be _anyone_ can easily BS will lead to wide acceptance of skeptical reactions, even within ingroups.
I like the outlook you build through your observations, and I acknowledge the possible conclusion you arrive at as plausible. I do, however, put a heavier weight on your first point because I see what we have today in terms of image/video generation as very rudimentary compared to what we'll have in a couple years. A day's worth of work for a 100% convincing, AI-generated video immune to the most advanced forensics? We'll soon have it instantaneously.
Thank you for the preface you wrote, I completely understand your point of how easy it is to sound like a contrarian online, I'm sure my writing style doesn't help much on that front I'm afraid to admit.
> All I see is a meteor approaching and everyone trying to divert it, but no one actually preparing for when it does hit. Each day that passes I'm more certain that we will we look at each other like fools, asking ourselves "why didn't we focus on preparing for change, instead of trying to prevent change"?
I don't know, we've done a pretty good job at preventing nuclear war so far. We didn't just say "oh well, the genie is out of the bottle now. Everyone will have nuclear weapons soon and there's nothing we can do about it. All wars from now on are going to be nuclear. Might as well start preparing for nuclear winter." We signed treaties and made laws and used force to prevent us all from killing each other.
Scammers have been making fake content on youtube since its founding. And youtube has never even pretended so much as to care about doing anything about it.
I am not envious of the policy folks at Youtube who will have to parse out all the edge cases over the next few years. They are up against a nearly impossible task.
516 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadStill, I believe you are wrong despite your statement ringing true. You are conflating different reasons as to why people may want to generate AI videos. The nefarious motive may be nothing more than profit ('cheaper than paying actor') as opposed to malice('we want to defraud people'). There are all sorts of reasons as to why self-disclosure is not a bad start including the fact that if it turns out you lied, you can be removed without it being a question of freedom of speech and so on.
It would be hard, for example, for a political party to claim that this policy selectively discriminates against their viewpoint.
This is also why we have to do the insufferable corporate training on how not to do bribery, sexual harassment, etc. It's not that HR thinks you don't know, it's that HR knows that if they don't make everyone take the training then bad actors can successfully avoid/delay consequences by pretending to not have known. I think of these things like jury duty: a civic duty that is slightly obnoxious in and of themselves but very important for the functioning of the overall system.
This sounds like every thumbnail on youtube these days. It's good that this is not limited to AI, but it also means this will be a nightmare to police.
People using VFX aren't trying to create images in likeness of another existing person to get people to buy crypto or other scams. Comparing the two is disingenuous at best.
The ease and lack of skill required. That brings whole another set of implications.
This is like regulating handguns differently from compound bows. Both are lethal weapons, but the bow requires hours of training to use effectively, and is more difficult to carry discreetly. The combination of ease, convenience, and accessibility necessitates new regulation.
This being said, AI for video is an incredibly promising technology, and I look forward to watching the TV shows and movies generated with AI-powered tooling.
This really depends on what you're doing. There are some great Cinema 4d plugins out there. As the plethora of YouTube tutorials out there clearly demonstrate, multiple professionals, and vast experience, are not required for some of the things they have listed. Tooling and assets costs are 0, in the high seas.
Until Sora is widely available, or the open source models catch up, at this moment it's easier to use something like Cinema 4d than AI.
Do we make all usages of VFX now require a warning, just in case the VFX was generated by AI?
I think this is different to the bow v gun metaphor as I can tell an arrow from a bullet, but I can foresee a future where no human could tell the difference between AI-assisted and non-AI-assisted VFX / art
I believe this is evidenced by the fact that people can go around accusing any art piece of being AI art and the burden of proving them wrong falls on the artist. Essentially I believe we are rapidly approaching the point of it not mattering if someone uses AI in their art because people won't be able to tell anyway
The last word on this subject was not written in the 1920s, it's good to revisit old assumptions every century or so, when new forms of media and media manipulation become developed.
The first pass on it is unlikely to be the best, or even the last one.
And just like a prototype that would never end up in production, we'll remain with the first implementation we could think of cough copyright cough
Here's an obvious question that came up (and was resolved differently in different jurisdictions) - can photographs be copyrighted? What about photographs made in public? Of a market street? Of the Eifel tower? Of street art? Can an artist forbid photography of their art? An actor of their performance? A celebrity of their likeness? A private individual of their face? Does the purpose for which the photograph will be used matter?
At what point does a photograph have sufficient creative input to be copyrightable? Is pressing a button on a camera creative input? What about a machine that presses that button? Only humans can create copyrightable works under most jurisdictions. Is arranging the scene to be photographed a creative input? Can I arrange a scene just like yours and take a photo of it? Am I violating your copyright by doing it?
There's tens of thousands of pages of law and legal precedent that answer that question. As a conversation, it went on for decades, with no simple first-version solution sticking.
society in this case = media companies
You have to speak to get heard.
WARNING: This video contains content known to the State of Google to be generated by AI algorithms and/or tools.
Ok, beauty face filters are not included. How about character motion animations? How detailed does the after effects plugin need to be before it's considered AI? Can we generate just a background? Just a minor subject in the foreground? Or is it like pornography, where we'll recognize it once we see it?
I fear AI tools will soon become so embedded in normal workflows that it's going to become a question of "how much" not "contains", and "how much" is such a blurry, subjective line that it's going to make any binary disclaimer meaningless.
EDIT: I think these should also include whatever built-in processing is applied to the raw sensor data within the camera itself.
[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/content-credenti...
> Generating realistic scenes: Showing a realistic depiction of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.
Does the Wizard of Oz tornado scene need a warning now? [0] (Of course not, but it may be hard to draw the line in some places.)
[0] https://www.grunge.com/486387/heres-how-the-tornado-scene-in...
For context, Pixiv had to deal with a massive wave of AI content being dumped onto the site by wannabe artists basically right as the initial diffusion models became accessible. They responded by making 'AI-generated' a checkbox to go with the options to mark NSFW and adding an option for users to disable AI-generated content from being recommended to them. Then, after an incident of someone using their Patreon style service to pretend to be a popular artist, selling commissions generated by AI to copy the artist's style, they banned AI-generated content from being offered through that service.
My guess is that youtube is going to downrank this content, and may be trying to crowdsource training data in order to do this automatically.
Personally, I've developed a strong aversion to content that is primarily done by AI with very little human effort on top. After how things went with Pixiv I've come to hold the belief that our societies don't help people develop 'cultural maturity'. People want the clout/respect of being a popular artist/creator, without having to go through the journey they all go through which leads to them becoming popular. It's like wanting to use the title of Doctor without putting in the effort to earn a doctorate, the difference just being that we do have a culture of thinking that it's bad to do that.
I think that this policy is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.
once something sora 1.5 level of ability is there – definitely reverse-sora model which can recognise ai-made videos should be possible to train as well
Pretty much. If Google says "Swiper no swiping" they can point at their policy when lobbying against regulations or pushing back against criticism.
Before surveillance capitalism became the norm, web services told users to not share personal information, and to not trust other users they had not met in real life.
Let’s see how long it will take them to collect enough data and train a model to distinguish AI-generated from user-generated videos.
> Providers will also have to ensure that AI-generated content is identifiable. Besides, AI-generated text published with the purpose to inform the public on matters of public interest must be labelled as artificially generated. This also applies to audio and video content constituting deep fakes
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory....
Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39746669
How is this shit different that useless and annoying cookie popups.
The EU made a rule. YouTube complied. That changes the user experience. They documented it.
I mean you'd expect a pharmaceutical company to mention which rules they comply with at some point, even if not on the actual product (though in the case of medicine, probably also on the actual product).
Also, if every applicable regulation had to be mentioned, it’d be a very long list.
[1] https://epaper.telegraphindia.com/imageview/464914/53928423/...
The solution here is for important institutions to get onboard with the public key infrastructure, and start signing anything they want to certify as authentic.
The culture needs to shift from assuming video and pictures are real, to assuming they are made the easiest way possible. A signature means the signer wants you to know the content is theirs, nothing else.
It doesn't help to train people to live in a pretend world where fake content always has a warning sticker.
We literally have politicians talking about pouring acid on hardware and expect these same bumbleheads to keep their signing keys safe at the same time. The average person is far too technologically illiterate to do that. Next time you go to grandmas house you'll learn she traded her signing key for chocolate chip cookies.
If Apple wanted to sign every photo and document the iPhone they could probably make the whole user experience simple enough for most grandmas.
Some people will certainly give away their keys, just like bank accounts and social security numbers today, but those people probably aren't terribly concerned with proving the ownership of their online documents.
Then your imagination fails you.
If it is automatic/easy, then you have the 'easy key' problem, such as the key is easy to steal or copy. For example is it based on your apple account? Then what occurs with an account is stolen? Is it based on a device, what happens when the device is stolen?
Who's doing the PKI? Is it going to be like https, but for individuals (this has never really worked at this scale and with revocation). Like most social media is posting content taken by randos on the internet.
For prominent people who actually have to worry about being impersonated they could provide their own keys.
The infrastructure could be managed by multiple groups or a singular one like the government. The point isn't to be a perfect system, it's to generate enough trust that what you're looking at is genuine and not a total fraud.
In a world where AI bots are generating fake information about everyone in the world, that kind of system could certainly be built and be useful.
Yeah, that's what I said about PKI. I also said there is confusion between provenance of a statement and its accuracy. Just because it's signed doesn't mean anything about its accuracy, but those that confuse the two will think that just because it is signed, or because it was signed by a certain "trustworthy" party, that indicates accuracy. PKI does not establish the trustworthiness of the other party, it only gives you confidence in the identity of the party who signed something.
George Santos could sign his resume. We know it was signed by George Santos. And yet nothing in the resume could be considered accurate (or even a falsehood) purely because it is signed. That it was proven to be signed by George Santos via PKI is independent of the fact that George Santos is a known liar.
That sounds like a dystopia, but I guess we're going into that direction. I expect that a lot of fringe groups like flat-earthers, lizard people conspiracy, war in Ukraine is fake, will become way more mainstream.
How do you expect people to take the authenticity of this video?
> Besides, AI-generated text published with the purpose to inform the public on matters of public interest must be labelled as artificially generated. This also applies to audio and video content constituting deep fakes
Clearly "AI-generated text" doesn't apply to YouTube videos.
But, it is interesting that if you use an LLM to generate text and present that text to users, you need to inform them it was AI-generated (per the act). But if a real person reads it out, apparently you don't (per the policy)?
This seems like a weird distinction to me. Should the audience be informed if a series of words were LLM-generated or not? If so, why does it matter if they're delivered as text, or if they're read out?
On a local level, I recall how various brands started making a big deal of replacing disposable plastic bags with canvas or paper alternatives "for the environment" just coincidentally a few months before disposable plastic bags were banned in the entire country.
Examples of content creators don’t have to disclose:
Examples of content creators need to disclose:What about music made with a synthesizer?
But since AI can't legally have copyright to their music Google probably wants to know for that reason.
But the person who uses that software certainly can own the copyright to the resulting work.
Hopefully this means that AI generated music gets skipped by Googles DRM checks.
Amount of work is not a basis for copyright. (Kind of work is, though the basis for the “kind” distinction used isn't actually a real objective category, so its ultimately almost entirely arbitary.)
In all of the other cases, it can be deceiving, but what is deceiving in synthetic music? There may be some cases where it is relevant, like when imitating the voice of a famous singer, but other than that, music is not "real", it is work coming from the imagination of its creator. That kind of thing is already dealt with with copyright, and attribution is a common requirement, and one that YouTube already enforces (how it does that is different matter).
> Dream Track in Shorts is an experimental song creation tool that allows creators to create a unique 30-second soundtrack with the voices of opted-in artists. It brings together the expertise of Google DeepMind and YouTube’s most innovative researchers with the expertise of our music industry partners, to open up new ways for creators on Shorts to create and engage with artists.
> Once a soundtrack is published, anyone can use the AI-generated soundtrack as-is to remix it into their own Shorts. These AI-generated soundtracks will have a text label indicating that they were created with Dream Track. We’re starting with a limited set of creators in the United States and opted-in artists. Based on the feedback from these experiments, we hope to expand this.
So my impression is they're talking about labeling music which is derived from a real source (like a singer or a band) and might conceivably be mistaken for coming from that source.
> * Making it appear as if hospital workers turned away sick or wounded patients
> * Depicting a public figure stealing something they did not steal, or admitting to stealing something when they did not make that admission
Considering they own the platform, why not just ban this type of content? It was possible to create this content before "AI".
Valid satire, fair use of the original content: parody is considered transformative. But it should be labeled as AI generated, or it's going to escape onto social media and cause havoc.
It might anyway, obviously. But that isn't a good reason to ban free expression here imho.
It was never historically the case that satire was expected to be labelled, or instantly recognized by anyone who stumbled across it. Satire is rude. It's meant to mock people—it is intended to muddle and provoke confused reactions. That's free expression nonetheless!
How is one to figure out what is real and what is a satire? Times and technologies change. What was once reasonable won’t always be.
Context, source, tone of speech, and reasonability.
- "Times and technologies change."
And so do people! We adapt to times and technology; we don't need to be insulated from them. The only response needed to a new type of artificial medium, is, that people learn to be marginally more skeptical about that medium.
Two recent headlines:
* Biden Urges Americans Not To Let Dangerous Online Rhetoric Humanize Palestinians [1]
* Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little [2]
Do you really think, if you jumped back a few years, you could have known which was satire and which wasn't?
The fact that we have video evidence of the second is (part) of how we know it's true. Sure, we could also trust the reporters who were there, but that doesn't lend itself to immediate verification by someone who sees the headline on their Facebook feed.
If the first had an accompanying AI video, do you think it would be believed by some people who are willing to believe the worst of Biden? Sure, especially in a timeline where the second headline is true.
1. https://www.theonion.com/biden-urges-americans-not-to-let-da...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/11/donald-trump...
https://youtu.be/3oWFFAVYMec
https://youtu.be/aL1f6w-ziOM
Yagoddabekidding. That could cover any piece of music created with MIDI sequencing and synthesizers and such.
If AI writes MIDI input for a synthesizer, rather than producing the actual waveform, where does that land?
This is interesting because I was considering cloning my own voice as a way to record things without the inevitable hesitations, ums, errs, and stumbling over my words. By this standard I am allowed to do so.
But then I thought what does it even mean "someone else's" when multiple people can make a video, if my wife and I make a video together can we not then use my recorded voice because to her my voice is someone else.
I suspect all of these rules will have similar edge cases and a wide penumbra where arbitrary rulings will be autocratically applied.
To her, your voice is your voice not someone else's voice.
If you share a Youtube account with your wife, "someone else" means someone other than you or your wife.
The more interesting and troubling point is your use of "synthetic you" to make the real you sound better!
Why?
I presume you wouldn't do that? How about replacing your own voice on a video that you make, allowing your viewers to believe it's your natural voice? Are you comfortable with that deception?
Everyone has evolving opinions about this subject. For me, I don't want to converse with stand-in replacements for living people.
The ethical challenge in my opinion, is that your status as living human narrator on a video is now irrelevant, when you're replaced by voice cloning. Perhaps we'll see a new book by "George Orwell" soon. We don't need the real man, his clone will do.
/j
Under the current guidelines, doesn't all music performances that make use of some sort of pitch correction assist are technically "digitally altered"?
A bit funny considering a realistic warning and "live" radar map of an impending, major, natural disaster occurring in your city apparently doesn't violate their ad policy on YouTube. Probably the only time an ad gave me a genuine fright.
• Makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do
• Alters footage of a real event or place
• Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur
At the very least this will test each of these hypotheses, which we'll learn from and iterate on. I am curious to see the legal arguments that will inevitably kick up from each of these - is color correction altering footage of a real event or place? They explicitly say it isn't in the wider description, but what about beauty filters? If I have 16 video angles, and use photogrammetry / gaussian splatting / AI to generate a 17th, is that a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur? Do I need to have actually captured the photons themselves if I can be 99% sure my predictions of them are accurate?
So many flaws, but all early steps have flaws. At least it is a step.
Which is where the real abuse comes in: You post footage of a real event and they say it was AI, and ban you for it etc., because what actually happened is politically inconvenient.
And the only way to prevent that would be a reliable way to detect AI-generated content which, if it existed, would obviate any need to tag anything because then it could be automated.
Which doesn't help you unless non-AI images are all required to be RAW. Moreover, someone who is trying to fabricate something could obviously obtain access to a real camera to emulate.
> You'd have a straightforward case for defamation if your real footage were falsely labeled, and it would be easy to demonstrate in court.
Defamation typically requires you to prove that the person making the claim knew it was false. They'll, of course, claim that they thought it was actually fake. Also, most people don't have the resources to sue YouTube for their screw ups.
Yes, but not to your camera. Sorry for not phrasing it more clearly: individual cameras have measurable noise signatures distinct from otherwise identical models.
On the lawsuit side, you just need to aver that you are the author of the original footage and are willing to prove it. As long as you are in possession of both the device and the footage, you have two pieces of solid evidence vs. someone elses feels/half-assed AI detection algorithm. There will be no shortage of tech-savvy media lawyers willing to take this case on contingency.
But who is the "you" in this case? There can be footage of you that wasn't taken with your camera. The person falsifying it would just claim they used their own camera. Which they would have access to ahead of time in order to incorporate its fingerprint into the video before publishing it.
It’s nice honest users will do that but they’re not really the problem are they.
We do, we ask paid endorsements to be disclaimed.
If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.
Also since no one likes RAW footage it should probably just be you post your edited version which may have "AI" upscaling / de-noising / motion blur fixing etc, AND you can post a link to your cryptographically signed verifiable RAW footage.
Of course there's still ways around that like your footage could just be a camera being pointed at an 8k screen or something but at least you make some serious hurdles and have a reasonable argument to the video being a result of photons bouncing off real objects hitting your camera sensor.
At which point nobody could verify anything that happened with any existing camera, including all past events as of today and all future events captured with any existing camera.
Then someone will publish a way to extract the key from some new camera model, both allowing anyone to forge anything by extracting a key and using it to sign whatever they want, and calling into question everything actually taken with that camera model/manufacturer.
Meanwhile cheap cameras will continue to be made that don't even support RAW, and people will capture real events with them because they were in hand when the events unexpectedly happened. Which is the most important use case because footage taken by a staff photographer at a large media company with a professional camera can already be authenticated by a big corporation, specifically the large media company.
Of course that says nothing about the issues of corruption of judges in the court system, but that is a "relatively" new issues that DOES absolutely need to be addressed.
(Shoot one could argue that the way certain folks are behaving right now is in itself unconstitutional and those folks should be booted)
Countries all over the world (EVEN IN EUROPE WITH THE GDPR) are a lot less "gracious" with anonymous communication. The UK actually has been trying to outlaw private encryption, for a while now, as an example, but there are worse examples from certain other countries. You can find them by examining their political system, most (all? I did quit a bit of research, but also was not interested in spending a ton of time on this topic) are "conservative leaning"
Note that I'm not talking just about existing policy, but countries that are continually trying to enact new policy.
Just like the US has "guarantees" on free speech, the right to vote, etc. The world needs guaranteed access to freedom of speech, religion, right to vote, healthcare, food, water, shelter, electricity, and medical care. I don't know of a single country in the world, including the US, that does anywhere close to a good of job with that.
I'm actually hoping that Ukraine is given both the motive and opportunity to push the boundaries in that regard. If you've been following some of the policy stuff, it is a step in the right direction. I 100% know they won't even come close to getting the job done, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. I definitely do not support this war, but with all of the death and destruction, at least there is a tiny little pinprick of light...
...Even if a single country in the world got everything right, we still need to find a way to unite everyone.
Our time in this universe is limited and our time on earth more-so. We should have been working together 60 years ago for a viable off-planet colony and related stuff. If the world ended tomorrow, humanity would cease to exist. You need over 100,000 people to sustain the human race in the event a catastrophic event wipes almost everyone out. Even if we had 1,000 people in space, our species would be doomed.
I am really super surprised that basic survival needs are NOT on the table when we are all arguing about religion, abortion, guns, etc. Like really?
We are hundreds of years away from the kind of technology you would need for a viable fully self-sustainable off-world colony that houses 100k or more humans. We couldn't even build something close to one in Antarctica.
This kind of colony would need to span half of Mars to actually have access to all the resources it needs to build all of the high-tech gear they would require to just not die of asphixiation. And they would need top-tier universities to actually have people capable of designing and building those high-tech systems, and media companies, and gigantic farms to make not just food but bioplastics and on and on.
Starting 60 years earlier on a project that would take a millennium is ultimately irrelevant.
Not to mention, nothing we could possibly do on Earth would make it even a tenth as hard to live here than on Mars. Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere. And Mars is still the most hospitable other celestial body in the solar system.
This is the best argument I've heard for why we should do it. Once you can survive on Mars you've created the technology to survive whatever happens on Earth.
Most people in the world struggle to feed themselves and their families. This is the basic survival need. Do you think they fucking care what happens to humantiy in 100k years? Stop drinking that transhumanism kool-aid, give your windows a good cleaning and look at what's happening in the real world, every day.
They come and ask. You say no? They find cocaine in your home.
You aren't in jail because you refused to hand out data. You are in jail because you were dealing drugs.
Or an APT (AKA advanced persistent teenager) with their parents camera and more time than they know what to do with.
I don't follow. Isn't software backward compatibility a big reason why Android device attestation is so hard? For cameras, why can't the camera sensor output a digital signature of the sensor data along with the actual sensor data?
At least with Android there are too many OEMs and they screw up too often. Bad actors will specifically seek out these devices, even if they're not very technically skilled. The skilled bad actors will 0-day the devices with the weakest security. For political reasons, even if a batch of a million devices are compromised it's hard to quickly ban them because that means those phones can no longer watch Netflix etc.
so you cannot share the original if you intend to black out something from the original that you don't want revealed (e.g., a face or name or something).
The way you specced out how a signed jpeg works means the raw data _must_ remain visible. There's gonna be unintended consequences from such a system.
And it aint even that trustworthy - the signing key could potentially be stolen or coerced out, and fakes made. It's not a rock-solid proof - my benchmark for proof needs to be on par with blockchains'.
You can obviously extend this if you want to add bells and whistles like cropping or whatever. Like signing every NxN sub-block separately, or more fancy stuff if you really care. It should be obvious I'm not going to design in every feature you could possibly dream of in an HN comment...
And regardless, like I said: this whole thing is intended to be opportunistic. You use it when you can. When you can't, well, you explain why, or you don't. Ultimately it's always up to the beholder to decide whether to believe you, with or without proof.
> And it aint even that trustworthy - the signing key could potentially be stolen or coerced out, and fakes made.
I already addressed this: once you determine a particular camera model's signature ain't trustworthy, you publish it for the rest of the world to know.
> It's not a rock-solid proof - my benchmark for proof needs to be on par with blockchains'.
It's rock-solid enough for enough people. I can't guarantee I'll personally satisfy you, but you're going to be sorely disappointed when you realize what benchmarks courts currently use for assessing evidence tampering...
The possibilities are pretty endless here.
Then you give me O, I already know K (you tell me which manufacturer key to use, and I decide if I trust it), and the STARK proof. I validate the proof (including the public inputs K and H_O, which I recalculate from O myself), and if it validates I know that you have access to a signed image I that O is derived from in a well-defined way. You never have to disclose I to me. And with the advent of zkVMs, it isn't even necessarily that hard to do as long as you can tolerate the overhead of running the compression / cropping algorithm on a zkVM instead of real hardware, and don't mind the proof size (which is probably in the tens of megabytes at least).
But did you know large portions of The Mandalorian were produced with the actors acting in front of an enormous, high-resolution LED screen [1] instead of building a set, or using greenscreen?
It turns out pointing a camera at a screen can actually be pretty realistic, if you know what you're doing.
And I suspect the pr agencies interested in flooding the internet with images of Politician A kicking a puppy and Politician B rescuing flood victims do, in fact, know what they're doing.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-il...
We already understand that with text. We know that to verify words, we have to trace it back to the source, and then we evaluate the credibility of the source.
There have been periods where recording technology ran ahead of faking technology, so we tended to just trust photos, audio, and video (even though they could always be used to paint misleading pictures). But that era is over. New technological tricks may push back the tide a little here and there, but mostly we're going to end up relying on, "Who says this is real, and why should we believe them?"
That idea doesn't work, at all.
Even assuming a perfect technical implementation, all you'd have to do to defeat it is launder your fake image through a camera's image sensor. And there's even a term for doing that: telecine.
With the right jig, a HiDPI display, and typical photo editing (no one shows you raw, full-res images), I don't think such a signature forgery would detectable by a layman or maybe even an expert.
And when they do that, the video is now against Google's policy and can be removed. That's the point of this policy.
I would suspect this helps make moderation models better at estimating confidence levels of ai generated content that isn’t labeled as such (ie for deception).
Surprised we aren’t seeing more of this in labeling datasets for this new world (outside of captchas)
To the extent that they allow Google to exclude AI video from training sets they’re obviously useful to Google.
It's the same as paid reviews: tags and disclaimers exist to make it easier to handle cases where you intentionally didn't put them.
It's not perfect and can be abused in other ways, but at least it's something.
That’s the bar- it’s not going to be infallible but if you don’t find evidence of tampering with the hardware then it’s probably going to be fine.
Everything else - corroboration, interviews, fact checking will remain as they are today and can't be replaced by technology. So I imagine a journalist would reach out to person who recorded thr video, ask them to show their device's fingerprint and ask about their experience when (event) occured, and then corroborate all that information from other sources.
When the news org publishes the video, they may sign it with their own key and/or vouch for the original one so viewers of clips on social media will know that Fox News (TM) is putting their name and reputation behind the video, and it hasn't been altered from the version Fox News chose to share, even though the "ModernMilitiaMan97" account that reshared it seems dubious.
Currently, there's no way to detect alterations or fabrications of both the "citizen-journalist" footage and post-broadcast footage.
Im not saying Youtube shouldn’t have AI labels. Im saying we shouldn’t assume they’re reliable.
No. Having sources of trust is the basis of managing complexity. When you turned the tap water on and bought a piece of meat at the butcher you didn't yourself verify whether its healthy right? You trust the medicine you buy contains exactly what is says on the label and didn't take a chemistry class. That's centralized trust. You rely on it ten thousand times a day implicitly.
There need to be measures to make sure media content is trustworthy, because the smartest person on the earth doesn't have enough resources to critically judge 1% of what they're exposed to every day. It is simply a question of information processing.
It's a mathematical necessity. Information that is collectively processed constantly goes up, individiual bandwith does not, therefore you need more division of labor, efficieny and higher forms of social organisation.
This is a false equivalence that I’ve already addressed.
> When you turned the tap water on and bought a piece of meat at the butcher you didn't yourself verify whether its healthy right?
To a degree, yeah, you do check. Especially when you get it from somewhere with prior problems. And if you see something off you check further and adjust accordingly.
Why resort to anology? Should we blindly trust YouTube to judge whats true or not? I stated that labeling videos is fine but what’s not fine is blindly trusting it.
Additionally, comparing to meat dispenses with all the controversy because food safety is a comparatively objective standard.
Compare, “is this steak safe to eat or not?” To “is this speech safe to hear or not?”
Right now, getting videos which are completely AI/deepfaked to misrepresent, are not subject to the same consequences, simply because either #1 people can't be bothered, #2 are too busy spreading it via social media, or #3 have no idea how to sue the party on the other side.
And therein lies the danger, as with social media, of the lack of consequences (and hence the popularity of swatting, pretexting etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
There will be no way to say something is true beside seeing it with own eyes.
That said, unless all the AI generators agree on a way to add an unalterable marker that something is generated, at one point it may become undetectable. May.
Faking things is not new, and you've always been right to mistrust what you see on the internet. "AI" technology has made it easy, convenient, accessible and affordable to more people though, beforehand you needed image/video editing skills and software, a good voice mod, be a good (voice) actor, etc.
But these tools make deception easier and cheaper, meaning it will become much more common. Also, it's not just "on the internet". The trust problem this brings up applies to everything.
Look at Russian society for a sneak preview if we don't get this right.
That means the system will be really really awful. So challengers can arise - maybe a challenger that YOU build, and open source!
2. Google search is now no better than DDG, which it also cannot recover from without putting a nail in the coffin of its own search monetization strategy
If you want a randomly accuse me of living in a bubble that's fine. It won't bother me one bit. Me living in a bubble doesn't change the fact that Google is backed into a corner when it comes to search quality and competing with LLMs.
You may be right that they can survive more readily than AOL did.. but I certainly won't help them with anything more than a kick in the pants! ;)
And? Do they have a track record of crafting a false reality for people?
I wonder if this will make all forms of surveillance, video or otherwise, inadmissible in court in the near future. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a lawyer to make an argument for reasonable doubt, with any electronic media now.
This website focuses too much on the technical with little regard for the social a bit too often. Though in general, videos being easily fakable is still scary.
No, it won't. Just as it does now, video evidence (like any other evidence that isn't testimony) will need to be supported by associated evidence (including, ultimately, testimony) as to its provenance.
> It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a lawyer to make an argument for reasonable doubt,
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is only the standard for criminal convictions, and even then is based on the totality of evidence tending support or refute guilt, its not a standard each individual piece of evidence must clear for admissibility.
- Makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do
- Alters footage of a real event or place
- Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur
These are things that have been true of edited video since even before AI was a thing. People can lie about reality with videos, and AI is just one of many tools to do so. So, as you said, there are many flaws with this approach, but I agree that requiring labels is at least a step in the right direction.
I think anonymity is completely dead now. Not due to social networks but AI will definitely kill it. With enough resources it is possible to engage an AI arms race against whatever detector they put.
It is also possible to remove any watermarking. So the only way to prove if the content is made by humans will be requiring extensive proofs to their complete identity.
If you're from a minority or a fringe group, all of your hopes about spreading awareness anonymously on popular social media will be gone.
If someone for example makes a political video and fails to label it, they can delete the video/terminate the account for a breach of service.
Power is power - can be used for good or bad. This labelling is a form of power.
If someone says "I am not a crook" and you edit out the "not", do you need to label it.
What if it is done for parody.
What if the edit is more subtle - where a 1 hour interview is edited into 10 minute excerpts.
Mislabeled videos for propaganda.
Or simply date or place incorrectly stated.
Dramatic recreations as often done in documentaries.
Etc
>> 17th angle - AI Generated vantage point based on existing 16 videos (reference links). <<
Would be • Alters footage of a real event or place
Not everyone works in ML.
> with poorly written legislation
This is a company policy, not legislation.
> designed to garner votes
Represent the will of the people?
> while rival companies take strides
Towards?
> in the technology at rapid rates
YouTube's "Trending" page isn't a research lab.
Even if it was, why would honesty slow it down?
Perhaps AI classification is the mirror opposite to porn, using the test: "I'll know it when I don't see it", ie, if an average user would mistake AI generated content for reality, it should be clearly labeled as AI. But how do we enforce this? Does such enforcement scale? What about malicious actors?
We could conceivably use good AI to spot the bad AI, an endless AI cat and AI mouse game. Without strong AI regulation and norms a large portion of the internet will devolve into AI responding to AI generated content, seems like a gigantic waste of resources and the internet's potential.
I suspect this is Google's actual goal with the tagging system. It's not so much about helping users, rather it's a way to collect labeled data which they can later use to train their own "AI detection" algorithms
Google policy isn't law; there's no court judging legal arguments, it is enforced at Google’s whim and with effectively no recourse, at least not one which is focused on parsing arguments about the details of the policy.
So there won’t be “legal arguments” over what exactly it applies to.
Could a similar argument be applied here? It doesn’t seem like there is much in the way of consequences for lying to Google. But I suppose they have other ways of checking for it, and catching someone lying is a signal that makes the account more suspicious.
The other thing is that they don’t necessarily want to ban all of this content. For example a video demonstrating how AI can be used to create misinformation and showing examples, would be fairly clearly “morally” ok. The policy being that you have to declare it allows for this sort of content to live on the platform, but allows you to filter it out in certain contexts where it may be inappropriate (searches for election coverage?) and allows you to badge it for users (like Covid information tags).
Should we like deepfakes any better if they're created by a nation state using pre-AI Hollywood production technology, or "by hand" with Photoshop etc.? If 3D printers get better so that anybody can 3D print masks you can wear to convincingly look like someone else and then record yourself on camera, would you expect a different set of rules for that or are we talking about the same kind of problem?
Trying to characterize this as not related to AI just isn't adding to the discussion. Clearly it is a response to the emergence of AI fakes.
[1] And all the other stuff you list
YouTube did this because the EU passed a law about it. The EU passed a law about it because of the moral panic, not because the abstract concept of deception was only recently invented.
It's like having cars already, and speed limits, and then someone invents an electric car that can accelerate from 0 to 200 MPH in 5 seconds, so the government passes a new law with some arbitrary registration requirements to satisfy Something Must Be Done.
Finding out a video is maliciously fabricated is a different problem.
Of course there was. The community guidelines have prohibited impersonation and misinformation for years.
That sounds like a quagmire of subjectivity to enforce. You can argue whether generated content was created to mislead or whether it would cause _egregious_ harm.
Now there's no more arguing. Is it generated or is it real - and is it marked if generated? I still fail to see the downside here.
> Now there's no more arguing. Is it generated or is it real - and is it marked if generated? I still fail to see the downside here.
How is this supposed to lead to less arguing? If there was an easy way to tell if something is AI-generated then you wouldn't need the user to tag it. When there isn't, now you have to argue about whether it is or not -- or if it obviously is, whether it then has to be tagged, because it obviously is and they've given that as an exception.
I'm not getting into the rabbit hole of finding out if it was actually generated - once again, that's a different problem. One that I already mentioned 2 comments back. My point was that there is less subjectivity with this rule. If the content is found to have been generated and isn't marked, then there are clear grounds to remove the video.
What youtube does when there is doubt is not known yet. I don't deal in "well this _could_ lead to this".
They use (with some irony) AI and other algorithms to determine if you're breaking the rules, often leading to arbitrary or nonsensical results, which the review process frequently fails to address.
> I'm not getting into the rabbit hole of finding out if it was actually generated - once again, that's a different problem.
It isn't a different problem, it's the problem. You want people to label things because otherwise you're not sure, but because of that problem exactly, you have no way of reliably or objectively enforcing the labeling requirement. And you specifically have no way to do it in the cases where it most matters because it's hard to tell.
At a mom and pop you could at least talk to a person and figure out what happen.
>I don't deal in "well this _could_ lead to this"
Did you not learn from the entire DMCA thing? Remember the thing where piles tech people warned "Wow, this is going to be used as a weapon to cause problems" and then it was used as a weapon to cause problems.
Well, welcome to the next weapon that is going to be used to cause problems.
There's a handful of cases where yt actually messed up w/ DMCA and considering the sheer volume of videos they process, I'd say it's actually pretty damn good.
So no, DMCA is not a valid reason to assume youtube will handle this improperly.
The alternative to the DMCA is Section 230 of the CDA, which could have just as easily been applied to copyright as it is to anything else if it weren't for the DMCA providing a more abuse-prone alternative.
> And people on the internet don't know what fair-use actually means, so they complain/exaggerate about DMCA takedowns when, surprise, it wasn't actually covered by fair-use.
Abusive takedowns are a huge problem, actually. It's common in cases of businesses sending takedowns for their competitors' websites or videos, for example. They're often completely fraudulent with no merit whatsoever, but the company receiving the takedown has no information on which to base a decision (who created this content? how would they know?), so they just mechanistically execute all of them with no validation.
The ban recourse problem is the opposite.
This is the "keep recourse": "this video is obviously bad, but google doesn't feel like taking it down, and there is nothing I can do about it". Now there is, and it can actually go to a court with a judge in the end, if Google is obstinate.
You didn't have a right to be hosted on Google before, and you don't have now. Of course they can ban you as they like. The thing is, they can't host you as they like, if you're breaking this rule.
Except that the rule can be satisfied just by labeling it, and if there are penalties for not labeling but no penalties for labeling then the obvious incentive is to stick the label on everything just in case, causing it to become meaningless.
To prevent that would require prohibiting the label from being applied to things that aren't AI-generated, which is impracticable because now you need 100% accuracy and there is no way to err on the side of caution, but nobody has 100% accuracy. So then the solution would be to actually make everything AI-generated, e.g. by systematically running it through some subtle AI filter, and then you can get back to labeling everything to avoid liability.
Did the California proposition 65 really result in cancer labels on everything? Or is it just hyperbole? I suppose having a lot of labels is still bad, even if they're not technically on everything.
Who's there
dmcAI takedown notice!
Really, your argument can be generalized to 'why have laws at all, because people will break them and lie about it'.
It isn't a rule against lying, it's a rule requiring lies to be labeled. From which you get nothing useful that you couldn't get from a rule against lying, because you'd need the same proof for either one.
Meanwhile it becomes a trap for the unwary because innocent people who don't understand the complicated labeling rules get stomped by the system without intending any malice.
> Really, your argument can be generalized to 'why have laws at all, because people will break them and lie about it'.
The generalization is that laws against not disclosing crimes are pointless because the penalty for the crime is already at least as severe as the penalty for not disclosing it and you'd need to prove the crime to prove the omission. This is, for example, why it makes sense to have a right against self-incrimination.
This divide is obviously going to play out on two sides.
Proving authenticity may turn out to be as difficult as proving fakeness. People will use this maliciously to flag and censor content they dislike.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
This seems oddly specific to the inverse of what happened recently with Alicia Keys from the recent Superbowl. As Robert Komaniecki pointed out on X [1], Alicia Keys hit a "sour note" which was silently edited by the NFL to fix it.
[1] https://twitter.com/Komaniecki_R/status/1757074365102084464
I will be coming back to this video in several months time to check whether the "Altered or synthetic content" tag has actually been applied to it or not. If not, I will report it to YouTube.
However autotune has existed for decades. Would it have been better if artists were required to label when they used autotune to correct their singing? I say yes but reasonable people can disagree!
I wonder if we are going to settle on an AI regime where it’s OK to use AI to deceptively make someone seem “better” but not to deceptively make someone seem “worse.” We are entering a wild decade.
A lot of people do! Tone correction [1] is a normal fact of life in the music industry, especially in recordings. Using it well takes both some degree of vocal skill and production skill. You'll often find that it's incredibly obvious when done poorly, but nearly unnoticeable when done well.
[1] AutoTune is a specific brand
Still, I find it interesting. If you can't synthetically alter someone's performance to be "worse", is it OK that the NFL synthetically altered Alicia Key's performance to be "better"?
For a more consequential example, imagine Biden's marketing team "cleaning up" his speech after he has mumbled or trailed off a word, misleading the US public during an election year. Should that be disclosed?
seems to comply?
If they don't reject it for that, nothing changes.
Look at "realistic" photos , it is easy for someone with experience to spot issues, the hangs/fingers are wrong, shadows and light are wrong, hair is weird, eyes have issues. In a video there are much more information so much more places to get things wrong, making it pass this kind of test will be a huge job so many will not put the effort.
That future will come, and it will come sooner than anyone's expecting.
Yet all I see is society trying to prevent the inevitable from installing itself (because it's "scary", "dangerous", "undermines the very pillars of society" etc.), instead of preparing itself for when the inevitable occurs.
People seem to have finally accepted we can't put the genie back in the bottle, so now we're at the stage where governments and institutions are all trying to look busy and pass the image of "hey, we're doing something about it, ok? You can feel safe".
Soon we will be forced to accept that all that wasted effort was but a futile attempt at catching a falling knife.
Maybe the next idiom in line will be "crying over spilled milk", because could someone point me to what is being done in terms of "hey, let's start by directly assuming a world in which anyone can produce unrestricted, genuine-looking content will soon come and there's no way around it -- what then?"
All I see is a meteor approaching and everyone trying to divert it, but no one actually preparing for when it does hit. Each day that passes I'm more certain that we will we look at each other like fools, asking ourselves "why didn't we focus on preparing for change, instead of trying to prevent change"?
"Accept it, it hurts less".
I'm not saying it makes the actual situation any better; it obviously doesn't. But anyone can feel the rarefied AI panic in the air growing thicker by the minute, and panic will only make the situation worse both before and after absolute change takes place.
When we don't accept incoming change before it arrives, we surely are forced to accept it after it arrives, at a much higher price.
You asked about preparations: prepare yourself to see governments try (and fail) to regulate what processing power can be acquired by consumers. Prepare yourself for the serious proposal of "truth-checking agencies" with certified signatures that ensure "this content had its chain of custody verified as authentic from its CMOS capture up to its encoded video stream", in which a lot of time and effort will be wasted (there's already people replying about this, saying metadata and/or encryption will come to the rescue via private/public keys. Supposedly no will would ever film a screen!).
The above might seem an exaggeration, but ask yourself: the YouTube guidelines this post is about, the recent EU regulation... do you think those are enough? Of course they're not. They will keep trying to solve the problem from the wrong end until they are (we are) forced to accept there's nothing that can be done about it, and that it is us who need to adapt to live in such a world.
Enjoy the ride, I suppose.
These are all the proper preparation for AI. AI can't generate a private key given a public key. AI can't generate the appropriate text given a hash.
So we build a society upon these things AI can't do.
It has been a good run. We have done things like the tried and true ink stamping to verify documents. We have a labyrinth of bureaucracy for every little activity, mostly because it is the way that has always worked. It has surely been nice for the "administration" to sit around and sip lemonade in their archaic jobs. It has been nice to have incompetent people with no vision being appointed to high places for being born into the right families connected with the right people. That gravy train was surely a joy for those who were a part of it.
Sadly, it won't work anymore. We will need competent people now that actually care.
We need everything to be authenticated now with digital signatures.
It is not even that difficult a problem to solve. The existing systems are far more complex, far more prone to error, far more expensive, and far more difficult to navigate.
AI is giving us an opportunity to evolve. It is a time for celebration. Society will be faster, more efficient, more secure, and much more fun with generative content. AIs will produce official AI-signed content, and unsigned content. Humans will produce official human signed content, and unsigned content. Some AIs will use humans to sign content to subvert systems. But all of this pales in comparison to the fraud, waste, and total abuse of the current system.
These humans would simply generate a public key from the private key, then post it under their human identity. The main threat from AI in the future IMO is not rouge AI, but bad human actors using it for their own nefarious agendas. This is how the first "evil" AI will probably come about.
Personal thoughts:
- we're already a year past the point where it was widely known you can generate whatever you want, and get it to a reasonable "real" threshold with less than a day worth of work.
- the impact is likely to be significantly muted, rather than an exponential increase upon, a 2020 baseline. professionals were capable of accomplishing this with a couple orders of magnitude more manual work for at least a decade.
- in general, we've suffered more societally from histrionics/over-reactions to being bombarded with the same messaging
- it thus should end up being _net good_, in that a skeptic has a 100% accurate argument for requiring more explanation than "wow look at this!"
- I expect that being able to justify / source / explain things will gain significant value relative to scaled up distributors giving out media someone else gave them without any review.
- something I've noticed the last couple years is people __hate__ looking stupid. __Hate__. They learn extremely quickly to refactor knowledge they think they have once confronted in public, even by the outgroup, as long as theyre a non-extremist.
After writing that out, I guess my tl;Dr as of this moment and mood, is there will be negligible negative effects, we already reached a nadir of unquestioned BS sometime between 2010 and 2024, and a baseline be _anyone_ can easily BS will lead to wide acceptance of skeptical reactions, even within ingroups.
God I hope I'm right.
Thank you for the preface you wrote, I completely understand your point of how easy it is to sound like a contrarian online, I'm sure my writing style doesn't help much on that front I'm afraid to admit.
I don't know, we've done a pretty good job at preventing nuclear war so far. We didn't just say "oh well, the genie is out of the bottle now. Everyone will have nuclear weapons soon and there's nothing we can do about it. All wars from now on are going to be nuclear. Might as well start preparing for nuclear winter." We signed treaties and made laws and used force to prevent us all from killing each other.
https://novehiclesinthepark.com/