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Deepfake: A Brief History of Unreliable Images

2019-02-05 · explainer · John · 4:00 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: History & curiosities) · mode: Personal essay

Opening with a deepfake that puts his old mustache on both brothers, John surveys a history of staged, forged and airbrushed photographs used to spread disinformation and argues that such images work because we trust our eyes, so we must learn to live in a world where we cannot believe them.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Deepfake 'reunion video': Ryan's model puts John's old mustache on both brothers

  • ★★ John explains the opening is a deepfake by Ryan, a University of Washington professor, whose model maps the brothers' faces to put a mustache John once had on both of them. — 00:00:00 · Hank Green
  • ★ John jokes the deepfake shows how bad Hank would look with a mustache and reminds him that he himself is no Tom Selleck. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Hank Green

00:00:29 — Deepfakes of Trump and Obama; 2019 deepfakes already beat 2007 YouTube and will catch up soon

  • ★★ John says deepfake technology has been used to make Donald Trump, Barack Obama and many others say things they haven't actually said. — 00:00:29 · Donald Trump, Barack Obama
  • ★★★ John grants that today's fakes can still be spotted, but says 2019 deepfakes look better than 2007 YouTube reality and it won't take them long to catch up. — 00:00:29 · YouTube

00:00:58 — Woolf and Sontag on photographs; staged, forged and airbrushed photos from Brady to Stalin, Kerry and Tydings

  • ★★ John says Virginia Woolf wrote in a famous 1938 essay that photographs are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye, and Susan Sontag replied decades later that photographs are not simply anything. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ John says photography's crude statements of fact have long contained fictions. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ John says Mathew Brady's celebrated US Civil War battlefield photographs were often staged, with corpses moved to make them more photogenic. — 00:00:58
  • ★ John says a widely distributed World War I photo shows not a person but a figurine. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ John says the London milkman photographed on his delivery route during the Blitz was not a milkman but the photographer's assistant in a costume. — 00:01:27 · London
  • ★★ John says faked photos have long spread disinformation and changed history: Mussolini hid that he needed a horse trainer to look like Napoleon. (playful) — 00:01:27
  • ★★ John says Stalin often had former allies airbrushed out of photos once they became enemies, such as his secret police head Nikolai Yezhov after his execution. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ John says Hitler did the same to Goebbels and Lenin to Trotsky, and it happened often in China, most famously in a photo of Mao's funeral without the Gang of Four. — 00:01:57 · China
  • ★★ John says democracies are not immune: a completely fake photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally was widely distributed during the 2004 presidential election. — 00:01:57 · United States presidential election
  • ★★ John says in 1939 the Canadian Prime Minister had King George VI cut out of a photo, thinking he'd look more powerful talking only to the Queen Mum. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ John says Maryland Senator Millard Tydings probably lost re-election in 1950 because of a forged photo purporting to show him talking to the American Communist Party leader. (hedged) — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ John argues that people who have or want power devote lots of resources to these forgeries because they work. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ John says it is really difficult to develop a distrust of our sensory inputs, like pear jelly beans that taste of pear without containing any. — 00:02:26

00:02:55 — Why forgeries work: we trust our senses; Sontag on 'it seemed like a movie'; learning to live without believing our eyes

  • ★★ John says that even knowing a photo of someone lounging happily in idyllic surroundings is cropped, posed and filtered, their life feels more vivid and thrilling than his own. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ John argues that on some level Stalin's images worked even if people knew they were cropped, because we trust our eyes. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Susan Sontag (quoted): John quotes Susan Sontag in 1977: people now describe a violent event they lived through as seeming like a movie, to explain how real it was. — 00:03:24
  • ★★★ John doesn't think humans will ever transcend their senses enough to decouple the visible from the real, so we had better learn to live where we cannot believe our eyes. — 00:03:24

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description credits the deepfake mustache content to Ryan Georgi, who wrote a post explaining the work, and thanks Rosianna. — video description · Rosianna Halse Rojas
  • ★★★ John corrects the video: it was Stalin, not Lenin, who ordered the photo of Lenin and Trotsky altered, noting that even a video about misinformation contains misinformation. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: deepfake

Also: People: Adolf Hitler · Barack Obama · Benito Mussolini · Donald Trump · George VI · Jane Fonda · John Kerry · Joseph Goebbels · Joseph Stalin · Leon Trotsky · Mao Zedong · Mathew Brady · Millard Tydings · Napoleon · Nikolai Yezhov · Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother · Susan Sontag · Tom Selleck · Virginia Woolf · Vladimir Lenin · William Lyon Mackenzie King

Works: On Photography · Regarding the Pain of Others · Three Guineas

Organizations: Communist Party USA · University of Washington · YouTube

Groups: Gang of Four

Concepts: misinformation · moustache · sense

Places: China · London · Maryland

Events: American Civil War · The Blitz · United States presidential election · World War I · World War II

Only in the description or credits: Ryan Georgi

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