27
votes
South Park creators launch new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
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- Title
- NEW Sassy Justice with Fred Sassy | From South Park's Trey Parker & Matt Stone w/ Peter Serafinowicz
- Authors
- Sassy Justice
- Duration
- 14:42
- Published
- Oct 26 2020
This is fun and scary. Right now deepfakes are impressive but noticeable. In 10 years they’re gonna be literally indistinguishable.
It's some pretty well executed fakery. It actually took me a minute to realize that the host is a fake DT. Which is to say, I though that was a real actor with an obvious wig who looked similar to Trump. The thing that usually trips my brain is the way even most of the well done fakes move not quite correctly. This one is very well done in that respect, the motion matching is almost unnoticeable. Once you start looking for it though, it sticks out.
Not the biggest fan of Trey and Matt, but I hope this brings a lot more attention to how easy it is to make these.
Oh I used to love South Park before they adopted season long arcs. They’re at their best at ultra topical absurdist humor.
They also took a weird stand against political correctness with PC principal. Not that you cannot criticize political correctness, though.
10 years? Bear in mind Matt and Trey aren't trying very hard to be realistic here. If you had someone trying to mimic the mannerisms of the person being faked, and used the current cutting edge voice synth stuff for voice synth, the results would be a lot more convincing.
Video good enough to fool a decent percentage of people is easily doable now if you have enough compute hardware/time. I'd say 2-3 years at the most before the technology is good enough to be unnoticeable by anyone without expert knowledge.
What's interesting is we're not seeing the deepfaked viral stuff which shows Biden eating babies or whatever. If I were the Bad Guys I'd be all over that.
Well, technically 10 years does not exclude the possibility of the same thing happening in 1 :P
I was just being safe.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct. :)
Fair point though.
It's not just that; if a video is released with someone saying something unflattering like, say, that he will "just grab them by the pussy" then he can just say "not real, it's a deepfake". Who is going to prove it's not? Even if experts would be able to tell the difference with high accuracy then it won't matter, since enough people lost trust in "experts" that it won't make an iota of difference.
This point was illustrated in the video by the "expert" labelling the Trump stroke as real, and the (presumable real) Fauci footage as "fake". The potential here isn't just making people say "vagina poop" or whatnot, but muddling the waters and creating an alternative reality even more than they already have.
Well, yes. Strategically, what I'd be doing would be releasing a few videos of my opponent doing/saying very mildly bad things. Not eating babies because that's obviously fake, but some "off camera" remarks which would hurt their support among swing voters. Some quiet leaks of $candidate or members of their team saying nothing hugely damning, just the sort of thing which would start to nudge a few % of people away. Nothing too obviously made up, and I wouldn't leak it to the media, I'd spread it via highly targetted social media ads.
In the very specific and relatively unique case of Trump, he doesn't actually care if people are talking about him saying he'll grab people by the pussy or talking about him doing something good (has he done anything good?), what he cares is that people are talking about him.
There might be a deep fake uncanny valley information where if it is something you can see in front of you, you have to accept or reject it outright where if it's a rumor or "people saying," it can affect your decision making even if it doesn't have your full attention.
Sincere question here... will people really find this any measure of funny? Sure, the deepfake stuff is interesting, but it seems wasted here. Even as someone who liked the occasional South Park episode, this comedy is not only bad, it's about 20 years out of date.
Yeah, South Park may have juvenile humour overall, but at least it has some depth to it often enough to balance it out a bit... whereas this was juvenile in the extreme from beginning to end, and so was pretty disappointing. And as much as I occasionally enjoy South Park too, I honestly don't trust Trey Parker & Matt Stone with a show this overtly political either, since they are openly hardcore Libertarians and pretty vocal with their bullshit "both sides are equally bad" views.
I am a pretty big fan of South Park, so when I watched this I was surprised how unfunny this was. I thought Matt and Trey are funny? How did they manage to make something this unfunny then?
The deepfake stuff was certainly interesting though.
IKR? It was pretty weak, IMO. And the fact they chose to lampoon Al Gore again, a Democrat who hasn't been politically relevant for 20 years now, and who most of this show's target age group probably won't even recognize, highlights just how incredibly out of touch they are when it comes to American politics... which is not a great sign for something meant to be "political satire".
Trey Parker & Matt Stone always had a funniness problem. Their thing is breaking taboos and it used to be funny because of how absurd it was to see a kid in a Hitler costume and whatnot. But reality has caught up. A lot of “Southpark stuff” is actually happening now and it’s more depressing than funny.
I'm particularly surprised that they decided to start this up so close to the election.
Was the initial launch delayed? Do they have plans for both potential outcomes of the election? If Biden wins, how long would Matt and Trey be able to keep this up, if so much of it revolves around making fun of the current administration?
Any chance this could be marked NSFW? I'm pretty sure if HR and been walking by when the Carry Underwood puppet came up I'd have been in big trouble. (also I should have known better since it's from the creators of south park).