"And you can think about this as the same sort of thing, it just changes the shape of what we can create. The printing press didn't allow you to write but the printing press made it so much cheaper to distribute knowledge that it completely changed the shape of civilisation. "It's not whether you can do something like this, it's how much it costs to do this. He sees this as a fundamental shift in how we are able to interpret the world, and one we're ill-prepared to face. In early 2016, Ovadya sounded the alarm about how vulnerable our digital world was to misinformation and manipulation, outlining a scenario that at the time sounded pretty far-fetched - social media had created an explosive breeding ground for misinformation that would have real-world consequences.Īviv Ovadya, chief technologist at the Centre for Social Media Responsibility ( Supplied: Katherine Fang)īut for Ovadya, who is chief technologist at the Centre for Social Media Responsibility, the crisis gripping social media organisations pales in comparison to the threat machine learning and deepfakes could pose. Aviv Ovadya is a technologist who sounded an early warning about the rise of fake news, well before the phrase became a White House favourite. If all this sounds scary to you, then you're not alone. Think of the rise of #blacklivesmatter: police brutality towards African-Americans has long been an issue, but footage from CCTV cameras, mobile phones and police dash-cams and body-cams made the issue more visceral and much harder to dismiss.īut that relies on us being able to trust the pictures we see. Up to now, video footage (often grainy) has been the deciding point of proof that tips a story over into becoming a national or global issue. The president declares it's fake news and the footage itself is a hoax, made by machine learning. Then, some footage of the incident follows. Picture this: a story emerges about a US president getting up to no good in a Russian hotel. It's this trust that has allowed the rise of mass media broadcasters - even if people on TV said things you didn't agree with, you could at least be sure they were the people saying it. We're used to being able to rely on footage like this to navigate the world, we're used to turning on the TV or looking on Facebook and seeing footage of someone saying something and not having to question it. If at the moment you're feeling frustrated and a little confused, then that's the point.Įven if you guessed correctly on every video in our quiz, imagine having to apply that much scrutiny to every piece of video you see. Was it the real one or was it the fake? And would you have spotted the fake in that context? But the real question is: W hich of those videos did we use at the top of the story? If you guessed the second video, you're correct.
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