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  • Good morning, John.

  • Union Video.

  • Wait, what is happening?

  • Okay, so you're looking at something right now called a Deep Fake, which was created by a professor at the University of Washington named Ryan, who trained a model tow learn how to map our faces so that he could superimpose a mustache.

  • I had once onto both Hank and me, thereby giving us a glimpse of just how bad Hank would look with a mustache, as well as a reminder that I, myself am no Tom Selleck.

  • Sorry I'm not as good as Ryan.

  • A deep fix.

  • Hi, Good morning tickets Tuesday.

  • It's really me, or is it right?

  • So this technology has been used to make Donald Trump and Barack Obama and many other people say things they haven't actually said.

  • And you might be thinking the check isn't that good.

  • I can still tell that it's fake and fair enough, but I'll remind you that in 2007 YouTube looked like this.

  • Like 2019 deep fakes look better than 2007 reality.

  • It's not going to take deep fakes long to catch up in a famous 1938 s, a Virginia Woolf wrote that photographs are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the I, to which Susan San Tag would reply decades later.

  • The truth is, photographs are not simply anything.

  • Photography's crude statements of facts have long contained fictions like Way Back in the U.

  • S.

  • Civil War.

  • Mathew Brady's celebrated battlefield photographs were often staged with corpses moved this way or that to make them more photogenic.

  • This widely distributed World War Photo totally fake.

  • That's not even a person.

  • It's a figurine.

  • The London milk man on his delivery round during the blitz in World War Two was not a milk man.

  • He was the photographer's assistant wearing a costume, and the deep fakes of the past have long been spreading disinformation and even changing history.

  • Like Mussolini didn't want you to know he needed a horse trainer to look like Napoleon.

  • Joseph Stalin frequently ordered erstwhile allies airbrushed out of photos when they became enemies like Here's Stalin with his head of the secret police, Nikola Yezhov.

  • And here's the picture.

  • After Stalin had Yezhov executed, Hitler did it two gerbils.

  • Lenin did it to Trotsky, and the same thing happened all the time in China, most famously in this picture from Mao's funeral now without the gang of four, unless you think democracies are immune from this kind of stuff.

  • This photo purporting to show John Kerry with Jane Fonda at an anti war rally was widely distributed in 2004 during the presidential election, even though it is completely fake.

  • In 1939 the Canadian prime minister had poor King George the sixth cut out of a photo because he thought he would look more powerful talking.

  • Toa only the queen mum and in 1950 Maryland Senator Millard Tydings probably lost reelection because of this forged photo, which purported to show tidings talking to the leader of the American Communist Party.

  • People who have or want power devote lots of resource is to these forgeries because they work.

  • It's really difficult to develop a distrust of our sensory inputs, like I might know intellectually, that juicy pear jelly beans don't contain any actual pairs, but they still taste like pears, and I understand.

  • I'm witnessing a cropped, imposed and filtered moment when I see a photograph of someone looking absurdly happy lounging and idyllic surroundings.

  • But even so, their lives feel vivid and thrilling in a way that my own does not.

  • On some level, Stalin's images worked, even if people knew they were cropped because we trust our eyes.

  • Back in 1977 Susan Santa Groat, reality has come to seem more and more like what were shown by cameras.

  • It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up a plane crash shoot out a terrorist bombing, that it seemed like a movie.

  • This is, said, other descriptions seeming insufficient in order to explain how real it waas.

  • I don't think humans will ever transcend their senses enough to decouple the visible from the rial.

  • But we better learn how to live in a world where we truly cannot believe our eyes.

  • Hank, I'll see you on Friday or images of you anyway.

Good morning, John.

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