This is Nick Bilton My name is Nick Bilton I'm a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and his beat you could say is trying to predict the future of technology to look into the future and to this kind of crystal ball and try to predict what the next 51015 years would look like for the media industry if you have a good batting record like digits as you call some big you know phones in our pockets that would be like super computers the social media would drive news not newspapers and so on and things like that so you know it's it's been pretty good I reached out to you because I came across this article that you wrote an article that sent shivers down my spine and I'm not one to typically be given shivers by article so I guess how did you stumble into all of this and where did where does this start for you so I was sitting around with some friends in my living room and front of my mention oh did you see this thing that Adobe put out recently. Live in a time when more people than ever before believed that they could change the world and that conversation led Nick to a video a video online of the adobe Macs 2016 call. Their tons and tons of people in the audience is amazing and off in front of the news it looks like the stage of a Apple product launch but sort of beach themed why beach I have absolutely no idea that's a little t.m.i. But hey you know there are 2 hosts that are sitting in these like the lifeguard chairs sorry me. Jordan Peele Jordan Peele is in Key and Peele Jordan Peele Yes And then the other host is this woman Kim Chambers who is a marathon swimmer and an Adobe employee. And then please welcome just. Say you know everyone. Laughing You guys have been making where to start from law and I were photo editing and he says Adobe is no. For Photoshop we're known for editing photos and doing magical things visual well. We're on to the next the thing today let's do something to human speech the screen on a Mac. Computer Wow I have obtained this piece of all do you know where there's Mike Ok talking to peel about his feeling after getting. Keegan Michael key had been nominated for an Emmy and he and Jordan Peele were talking about it there's a pretty interesting joke here so let's just hear it. I jumped up. And kissed my dogs and my wife in that order. Not a bad joke so that's. Ok so I suppose you want to. Go to his wife so in other words what if Keegan Michael Key was feeling like that was a little bit rough on my wife that was a little bit mean you know maybe he wanted to go and rewrite history and say that he kissed his wife before the dogs actually want his wife to go before the dogs. Ok so what do we do it usually save clicks a button the program automatically generates a transcript of the audio and projects it up on the screen behind him you know just text of what King Michael Kay said Ok I mean zooming a little bit and then copy paste she just highlights the word wife and pastes it over in front of dogs Ok let's listen to clicks play and I kissed my wife and my dogs. 'd So he was able to move the at the audio by moving the text around in the text Yes exactly Ok well that's kind of cool kind of impressive. But then here's more here's the more. We have to type something that's not here so wait what I'm just hands of thing I've heard that actually that I'm not there. My whole activity here is our Jordan. So start to recover the truth let's do it he goes back into that little word box so let's remove the word of my or your secret's out and also just type the word Jordan I typed it out j o r d And just to be clear Michael he did not say Jordan anywhere in this clip and here we go and I kissed Jordan and my dogs I. Just typed in a word that the guy never said and it made the guy say the word he never said it as if he actually said it exactly Well you know which. Jumps out of the lifeguard chair sort of stomping around the stage or what you want you would be human Oh yeah I have a magic and the last magic I'm going to show you guys as we can actually type small phrases so that say Ok I'll remove the deletes the words my dogs any type spree. That's. The bag and I just ordered 3 times. The. Wage that you are saying that Keegan Michael Key never said ever said Jordan never said 3 he never said times never ever said any of those words and somehow just from the typing in the bit the guy is now saying them and we're hearing them in his voice that's what just happened that is exactly what the demo claims it's essentially Photoshop for audio Nick Bilton again you can take as little as 20 minutes of someone's voice and type the words and it creates in that voice. That sentence with just 20 minutes of the guy talking yes but how how in heaven do you do this. Ok And so you were here to do what exactly do you do here sure I'm the product manager for audio this is during. I flew it to Seattle and tracked him down to ask him exactly that question so essentially what it does is it doesn't analysis of the speech and it creates models and it basically and explain to me that this program which they call Vocal by the way what it does is it takes 20 minutes or actually 40 if you have the best results of you talking and it figures out all the phonetics of your speech all of the sounds you make find each little block of sound and speech that is in the recordings chop them all up and then when you go and type things in it will recombine those into that new word but what if it encounters a sound that I never made. The theory is in 40 minutes of speech which is the amount they recommend you feed in you're going to probably say just about every sound really English language so if really so like phonetically I go I run through the gamut and in 40 minutes yes. Like what would you what are you hoping people will would use a product like foco for. So for the video production tools and for what I dish it is used for a lot as dialogue editing the whole idea during said is to help people that work in movies and t.v. a Lot of our customers record great audio and set the actors in the dialogues and everything. And when they come back if sometimes there's a mistake or they make a change like the actor on set said Shoo but what he was pointing out was obviously a book and right now there's they do what's called a.d.r. They'll bring the actor in record someone's in the trying drop that into the video but you're not using the same microphones are not in the same location the actor might be sick that day so his voice sounds different in things you a lot of times you can really hear that stand out in productions if they don't get it just right but with Coco you just delete the words shoot type in boot and there it is using the same source medium the same characteristics and have it just sound seamless and natural and so. It's going to be a sort of the hope is that it will make the lives of professional post-production editors easier the world over that's our hope right now yeah. But that's not exactly well I mean it's what Nick Bilton thought when he saw this video it could be Donald Trump's voice or Vladimir Putin. I saw that and I thought wow imagine a of audio clips start getting shared around the Internet. As fake news of a fake conversation between you know Putin poll man afford about trying to get Trump into the White House or something like that and right now I was like whoa this is this is scary stuff. But we're just getting started in the words of John Raymond Arnold played by Samuel l. Jackson in the movie dressing part in his own voice but things are about to get a lot. Crazier. So forget voices for a 2nd because now 123-451-2345 it's Face Time All right we are at the g. L. And center at the University of Washington in Seattle so I left Adobe and went across town to talk to the head of the Grail lab. Yeah. Dr. Elizabeth a professor in the computer says he. Gets his book going to save you from a little. Ok just to back up for a 2nd when Nick 1st saw the vocoded demonstration he started to wonder Ok How could this be used down the road in my original thesis was oh well maybe what will happen is that you will be able to create 3 d. Actors just like you didn't Star Wars then join it with the vocoder stuff to create a fake Hillary Clinton and you know Donald Trump having a conversation or making out whatever it is you want to do and that led him to investigate the type of work that era does did using these terms like facial reenactment and facial manipulation are those the Are those the right words and then what the hell did these words yeah so. I mean it's all it's a way of animating basis and it started from the movie concept is these remotely controlled bodies to think like the aptly named movie Avatar. Or so you're going to look for the back side of intelligent life in the toys story. And to make the characters come alive you need is the expressions of the actors playing them this is a movie a space means that you will bring that person to the studio then you cover their face with these sticky sensory marker things and then they will spend hours hours hours capturing that person's little dynamics like smile. No teeth surprised disturbance that's angry bloated. And from that they create a virtual character capable of emoting all those expressions and to make that character believable the animators sometimes have to model a bone structure and muscles and as you can imagine this can get very very expensive and so what people like era started to wonder was like can this be done on a budget so she and others in the field started feeding videos of faces into computers and trained those computers to break down the face into a series of points. 50 by 350 that is 62500 points on one human face in the months you know that's right you get dragged the points Ok so once you can track how my face moves through a video clip by these 250 by 250 points what can you then do with that information well I can apply the points on the face on a different model of a different person now this is this is where things get quite strange because instead of being able to map all of your facial movements onto a computer generated virtual character or person what era and others in this field of facial reenactment have. How to do is to map your facial movement on to a real person a pre recorded real person well what is that even maybe How's that work the best example of this is this piece of software that Nick showed us this software that I found from the university students called Face to Face present a novel real time facial reenactment method that works with any money the webcam there's a video demo of this and when you open it up this very monotone voice comes in saying center method only uses r.g.b. Data for both the source and target actor and you're like What the heck is this and screen pops up here we demonstrate our method in a live set up on the right you've got this heavy set man goatee spiked hair on the right a source actor is captured with a standard webcam arching his eyebrows he's pursing his lips he's opening his mouth widely sort of like like if you're making funny faces for a 2 year old kind of thing yeah and then this input drives the animation of the face in the video shown on the monitor to the left on the left you've got this dealt computer screen displaying a c.n.n. Clip of George Bush this is a real clip of Bush back from 2013 and his face is there looking right at the camera occupies most of that screen significant difference to create and what you start to notice is when the man with the goatee smiles George Bush in the c.n.n. Clip also smiles when the man raises his eyebrows George Bush raises his eyebrows and you realize this man is controlling George Bush's face so this is a guy in the president controlling a past George Bush a real George Bush from an old video clip Yeah Ok I pulled up a video for you here Ok and a little while back when we were just learning about this we happen to have a friend who writes for The New Yorker in the studio so that is George Bush's face . What oh God. God that's terrifying. His Ok so yeah I cannot stop watching George Bush's face oh they're doing it Putin now holy God so I just have a guy just sort of going. For you and then that's what Putin is doing yeah. Oh now it's Trump you know I mean those videos online my mouth agape again this is this this is a form of puppetry where your face is the is the puppet ear and the only thing is is that George w. Bush is the puppet so I sit in front of a camera I smile and the business is taken care of it that's real time this isn't like you have to render some software on your computer literally you download a clip or you take a clip from cable news and you turn on your webcam and however long it takes you to do it you're done the same as a shooting a video on your phone what is this for so what are the applications of this. I want to be able to help develop telepresence this is era again so I look telepresence yet so for example so my mom leaves in Israel. And I'm here and. What is the cool if I could have some it's kind of crazy but right but if I could have some going to hologram of her sitting on my couch here and we can have a conversation going one step further one of your colleagues a guy by the name of Steve cites I'm a professor at the University of Washington and I also work part time a Google He told me that they see this technology as like a building block that could one day be used to essentially virtually bring someone back from the dead I just think this technology combined with a virtual reality and other innovations could help me you know just be there in the room with Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan you know that sort of the motivation that's what they want to do that's the motivation to ghosts for them yes and when I was talking to some folks who work in commercials they're developing their own version of this and the idea is that they're going to make a 1000000 or a $1000000000.00 off of this because say you bring I don't know. Jennifer Aniston in. In to film some make up commercial and in the make up commercial in English she says so come and buy this product this is the best sort of whatever product around right now you've got China which is a booming market you maybe want to market things to China and you'd really like to be able to use Jennifer Aniston problem is Jennifer Aniston doesn't speak Mandarin so either you use the same audio clip and you have someone come in and speak Mandarin over her and the lips don't line up or you have to hire Mandarin speaking actor to come in and do the part of Jennifer Aniston with this technology all you have to do is record Jennifer Aniston once you can hire a Mandarin speaker and the Mandarin speakers voice will be coming out of Jennifer Aniston's mouth as if she had said it and in front of the camera her lips would be moving as if she were a perfect Mandarin speaker exactly exactly wow I think that is actually a that's a that's amazing yeah. I'm amazed and completely frightened by what you're telling me and that's the whole point of what Nick was writing about that they gave me shivers that some day if you join the video manipulation with the vocal voice manipulation you mean you're you're the the ultimate puppets here you can create. Anyone talking about anything that you want in their own voice and having any kind of emotion around it and you have it right there for everyone to see in video and all you need to do is take that and put it on Twitter or Facebook and if it's shocking enough i minutes later it's everywhere. The. Like the timing of you guys making this thing and then this explosion of fake news. How do you guys think about about how it could be used for various purposes. It's a good question. Again you're coming from and if you're going every technology is developed and there is danger of. Technology it can create fake videos and so on why they want to call it fake it is that like to create media from audio right but there are fake video Yeah but the way that I think about it is that like scientists are doing their job in sign like inventing the technology and science of and then we all need to like think about the next steps obviously I mean because of the white on that. And the answer is not there maybe it's an education maybe every video should come up with some code now that this is this is like a fanfic media are authentic attacks and you don't believe anything else I mean yeah but like it is maybe was the timing more than anything but I saw this video and it really felt like oh my god like America can't handle this right now like we're in a moment where we're truth seems to be sort of an open disc what is true is has become an open discussion and this seems to be adding fuel on the fire of sort of. Competing narratives in a way that I I find troubling and I'm just curious that you don't. I think that. I think that people if people know that knowledge exists then they will be more skeptical my guess I don't know but if people know that thinking is exists and they know that take that exists fake videos exist fake photos exist then everyone is more skeptical of what they read and see but like is a man in North Carolina I think it's from North Carolina believed from a fake print article that Hillary Clinton was running a sex ring out of a pizza parlor in d.c. Which is like insane this man believed and shut up with a gun and if people are at a moment where they are willing to believe stories as ludicrous as that like I don't expect them to wonder if this video is real or not. So what are you asking I ask you Well I'm asking do you are you afraid of the power of this and if not why. I'm just giving my own I don't know it just there I'm answering your questions bad I mean technologist I'm a computer scientist so. Not really because another and I know that because I know that this technology is reversible I mean well there is not. Too much. Have you seen these videos otherwise I can. Ok yeah. We're feeling worried and more than that surprised that the folks making these technologies weren't we decided to check if we were totally off base and get in touch with one of the guys who's on the front lines can you describe what was going to you when you were watching Bush's face I can tell you exactly what I was thinking I was thinking how are we going to develop a friends a technique to detect this. This is honey for Reed I am a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College he's sort of like a Sherlock Holmes digital misdeeds which means that spends a lot of time sitting around looking at pictures and videos trying to understand where has this come from has it been manipulated and should we trust that he's done work for all sorts of organizations the a.p. The Times who want to know if say a picture is fake or not they often ask me you have to when the just happened yesterday images came out of North Korea and every time images come out of these regimes where there's a history of photo manipulation there are real concerns about this so I was asked to determine if they've been manipulated in some way and if so how had they been manipulated and how did how the heck would you do that every time you manipulate data you're going to leave something behind let's say you do some funny business to a photo you might create some noticeable distortion in the picture itself but you also might distort the data and we're in the business of basically finding those distortions in the data for example imagine he gets sent a photo it's probably a j peg which now is 99 percent of the image formats that we see out there is what is called the compression scheme just a fancy way to say that when a photo is taken and stored as a j peg the camera you know just to save space throws a little bit of the data away so for example if I went out to the Dartmouth green right now and took a picture of the graph. The camera isn't going to store all those millions of little variations of Green hit with the grass because that would be just a huge file it's going to save space by throwing some of those greens away you just don't notice if it changes but a lot or a little bit less than that just grass as far as you can tell now here's honeys trick every camera has a subtly different palette of greens that's going to keep greens that's going to throw away this varies tremendously from device to device an i Phone compresses the image much more so less greens and a high end Nikon or a high end Canon which would keep more of the variation now if you hold these 2 pictures side by side you might not be able to tell the difference but honey says when you look at the underlying pixels there are different recognizable patterns if you take an image off of your i Phone I should be able to go into that j. Pag and look at the packaging and say ah yes this should have come out of an i Phone but if that image is uploaded to Facebook and then read downloaded or put into Photoshop and resave it will not look like a peg consistent with an i Phone So basically he can see at the level of the pixels or data whether the picture has been messed with in any way and this is of course just one of many different ways that honey can spot a fake Yeah yeah let me ask you if you could go up against the top 100 best counterfeiters do you think you'd catch them 10 percent of the time 50 percent of the time just have kids what's your sense I would say we could probably catch 75 percent of the fakes but I would say that would take a long time to do this is not an easy task and so you know the pace at which the media moves does not lend itself to careful forensic analysis of images I'm always amazed that you get the same as you are you got 20 minutes and you would need you know half a day a day per image very manual in a very human process it so is this video editing and this audio editing that's coming down the pipeline. And here yeah I guess should I be should I be terrified. Yeah you should know if you really mean that yeah I think it's I think it's going to raise the fake news thing to a whole new level I did see some artifacts by the way in the videos they are not perfect but that's neither here nor there because the ability of technology to manipulate and alter reality is growing at a breakneck speed and the ability to disseminate that information is phenomenal so I can't stop that by the way because at the end of the day it's always going to be easier to create a fake and to detect the fake. Very much we're going to Chad himself just handed me a cup of water which shows none of you have gotten too big for your britches and that could be a serious problem I would like to have seen Peter Jennings do that ever for this guy my name is John Klein co-founder and c.e.o. Of tap media before that president of c.n.n. U.s. Before that I was executive vice president of c.b.s. News where I was executive in charge of 60 Minutes 48 hours a bunch of other things for and he's had to react to some serious evolutions in the media industry he was manning the helm as social media exploded as smartphones became ubiquitous and consequently had to deal with figuring out how and if to trust thousands of hours of video taken on these smartphones incented by viewers what to broadcast and what not and so we wanted to know how someone in his position would think about these fake videos so we sent him all of the different demos and videos we'd come across just to see what he thought 1st thought was that this is the kind of thing that a James Bond villain would put to use or the Joker in Batman or an 8th grade girl who wants to be most popular except yeah you know I mean this is there are so many ways to abuse this blows your mind. I mean it it goes to their e. Core of communication of any sort whether it's television or radio or interpersonal. It is what I'm seeing true is what I'm hearing real in your over the course of your career you've seen multiple technological developments that have him packed in the media in rather profound ways where is your terror level right now or your fear level caused by this relative to all of the other sort of advancements that have occurred over over your career. It's terrifying. And it hurtles us even faster toward the point where no one believes anything. How do you have a democracy in a country where people can't trust anything that they see or read any more than what what we saw happen with the fake news during the election cycle was that all the didn't it didn't even need to matter if anyone you know would rebuff it afterwards this is Nick Bilton again it would reach millions and millions of people in mere seconds and and you know and that was it you done it had done his job its job and I think that with this audio stuff and the video stuff that's going to that's going to come down. A mine in the next few years it's going to do the same thing but but no one's going to know what's real what's not to be I moved her you know who I moved on and I fell and what's more the excess if you think about the video that came out Donald Trump from Access Hollywood I'm automatically attracted to the I just a case of the thing that was really interesting about the video we were starving let you do it you can do anything but if you want to grab either you don't actually see Donald Trump until the very last 2nd when he gets off the bus how will you say you only hear him make me a soap star. And so if that technology existed today I can guarantee you that Donald Trump would have responded by saying oh it's fake fake news fake audio you can't see me I didn't say that and it would just be this videos were against his. Actually that's kind of like for me that's sort of the real problem here like you create this this possibility for like. Plausible deniability. You know I mean it's like you know it's like the débâcle industry in the sixty's and seventy's just reading this great article by writer Tim Harford about this in the sixty's and seventy's at the back of the industry led this very calculated effort to sort of push back against cancer science by you know just little bit of doubt here little bit of doubt there right on the other hand on the other hand this and on the other hand that the idea was to create just enough wiggle room that nothing happens they do that with climate change too Exactly and it's that little bit of doubt that creates. Paralysis And is that what's going to happen that like there's going to be paralysis now writ large because now we're talking about the very things we see the very things we hear. But wait but we don't you think that before we get completely carried away with the threat of this technology because you know maybe we should just find out literally where we are now yeah we should give it a spear Yeah so so at this moment do you think making one of these clips is possible. I think it's entirely possible just to be careful what it is. After the break things get. Fake. Out the everyone has an evangelist calling from Dallas Texas Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred p. Sloan Foundation and he is the Public Understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world more information about Sloan w w w Sloan or saints radio lab 'd. Hi this is mentioned lotto from Kalamazoo Michigan Radio Lab is supported by Progressive Insurance offering snapshot a device designed to reward safe drivers learn more at progressive dot com or 1800 progressive Now that's progress has. Many more. From Washington d.c. New lab. With. Players who want to be 80 percent of the person behind the read more and more and he dot com hired. One night this spring a cyber security researcher stumbled upon a data said it was from facial recognition cameras in Beijing and as we started digging deeper into it realized people were effectively being watched we have latitude longitude Camerons but I didn't the Kurds masseur valence became part of the fabric of life in China Monday afternoon on All Things Considered from n.p.r. News plus liable to lose updates during your Monday afternoon commute on p.c. All you Public Radio. Maybe you are. Maybe you're. Not a morning person. Wherever or whenever your day begins started with a show that connects you to what's happening everywhere Morning Edition from n.p.r. News is now available on demand weekdays from 7 to 3 just say Alexa play Morning Edition Morning Edition on your schedule from n.p.r. News including local news from k.c.a.l. You. Light therapy is sometimes used to treat conditions like depression now a doctor in Arizona is exposing patients with migraines to greenlight every day it was an amazing transformation could his experiment help relieve other chronic ailments we're just scratching the surface and please cations can be really significant if it works for other conditions as well on the next Morning Edition from n.p.r. News Monday from when you wake up on Casey to Robert Radiolab So we're back we're going to now fake something we're going to build our own video from scratch fake words fake faces because we want to know like any use how dangerous are these technologies really can they make a convincing fake Are they as easy as advertised so we will find out by giving the assignment as always to our longsuffering Simon Adler so well I was in Seattle talking to during believes I not so subtly hinted that I would really like to to give vocal world let's say I had my hands on it can I do it well right now nothing because we haven't shared it with. A 1st I just thought he didn't want me to be able to play around with it but then I realized that I don't even have a personal copy for myself yet it's not even on the premises here no it's still very much contained to research. But. Great Eventually I got in touch with this guy and Dr Matthew the chief science officer in that it which is a vocal synthesis research company based in Edinburgh Yeah Ok so I called you up because I was hoping that you could help me to make a video clip that has I don't know like George Bush or Barack Obama saying things that they have never set. Yet this is great. That's it uses game yeah the thing is what his company does is not quite the same as vocal they do is like for a client they'll create a voice that you can then just type in words or sentences and make that voice say whatever you want to say I feel that's an interesting idea they've created voices with a variety of accents. In a variety of languages. And in their spare time when they're not making voices for clients. I think they're building celebrity voice a future and it just so happens they've got a Barack Obama and a George Bush bought Yes How did did you create a George Bush robot Well great thing about George Bush is he was president of the United States to some time Morning Morning morning which means he had to give a weekly presidential address we could go today I received a great honor and the other great thing about the dress is it's completely copyright free so we're allowed to do anything we like that for the people of America maybe things that they haven't visited that we've got to do with it real quick digression here just because it's absolutely fascinating it looks like we're actually about to enter this really sticky gray area when it comes to voice ownership for example if you record an audiobook and you've signed over the rights to those audio files to the publisher the publisher has the copyright you you don't own it you do not own your own voice is that really true yet anyway back to Bush so I took all those weekly addresses about 6 hours worth which is a lot more tape and vocoders 20 minutes but what he did with it is pretty similar right you fed them into this machine learning algorithm along with their transcript and then the program will do will take the text and it will analyze it in terms of the linguistics that will say this is the word Social Security Social social is made up of the sounds oh well right and so. Those sounds are into lots of little tiny piece. And it did that for all of the words. In all of these addresses. Around $80000.00 in total. Put them all in this database tons of info about what sound came before and after cetera and once that database is built all that's left to do I type in some text and then I push to go in and try to find the sets of little which we're going to get the really nicely and then I play in the see how well they came out so what we did was we found an old video of former presidents George Bush and Barack Obama together I think the letter shaking hands making generic statements exactly isn't important but we wondered Could we turn that clip from a boring meet and greet to a scenario where Bush is telling Obama a joke so we convinced a comedy writer Rachel axillary who works for the show Veep to write a few jokes then sent it off to Matt and this is what the computer spat out and well it goes something like Mark knock who's there. I think it's something about the Oval Office probably that was a very good joke Mr President my wife tells you better. What. Terrible. Thing that was like I don't even get I don't understand that joke at all and that's literally what the computer spy now that is with a computer and truth be told I don't think it's anywhere if it did it is not worthy of the negative response that you're getting terrible terrible Let me show you another one so happy to be joining forces with this good man good covers all in your drinking water what is all to go protect people's teeth so they don't get fillings Isn't that right oh shoot I think I signed the wrong bill. This is a pretty good. You know that the robots are terrible in here good joke is funny like a joke the robust is massacred that is in itself kind of a joke well I do think it let me get it well I think that you 2 are far more critical than you should be and you are far more critical than the average listener however many. But anyway met did tell me that conversations getting people to talk back and forth to each other are still really difficult for a synthesizer to do so you know conversational stock is always difficult and in fact we're going to see it's going to be a long time before we who really really easy conversational synthesis there's all sorts of barriers to there's a human quality to it to a conversation that the synthesizers can't quite capture yet but he also told us that you know if we at once we add the video or if we add a video to this it will smooth out a lot of a lot of the problems when you have to say she says Well speaking people are not focusing. And you can hear that the I was saying why so. Kyle Oh yeah great great I found these 2 grad students My name is. Tyler just you know from the University of Southern California u.s.c. They also do a lot of facial reenactment research and agreed to help us but making these visuals also turned out to be way harder than we thought it turned out the clip we chose posed some serious challenges there were too many side shots of Obama's face the lighting was all wrong and eventually I got an e-mail one late Sunday night saying it's not going to work Ok so now I think I can draw a line year and I can point out that this is that we've got over excited about this technology it is not yet ready for true deceit you have been fumbling and fumbling and fumbling here I have no with the guy. Here I find it interesting psychologically that I'm in feels like it's a personal failure I don't like to fail. This is so Ok Just just just on Simon's behalf on the behalf of actually trying to answer the question we felt like Ok maybe maybe we should try this one last time let's find a simpler Obama video and with the audio rather than like a whole phrases let's just do a couple were replacements here or there by the way the only reason we're using Obama's and he seems to be the guy all these technologies are built around in case we chose the video of Obama's last week we address and we chose the audio from a talk he'd given in Chicago after he left office. Was one thing no no in this speech he sort of talks about what he's going to do next how he's still going to keep fighting for what he believes is right Phil idealism and absolutely. The world but we so what if in an alternate reality he didn't want to keep fighting what if he could at that moment see the divisions ahead and he was just like too much and. No truth is we didn't think too hard. This is we didn't have much time we just worked together did a script based on the words Obama use with a few changes send it off to the guys at u.s.c. And I videotaped myself saying this new script that used that video of my face to public ties the former president and when we got the final video back. I have to say it was I was expecting it to be horrible and we were to have a good laugh blah it I it went from like laugh you. Wait this is cool creepy you know I was suddenly I had been gangbusters we got to release this thing and not tell anybody and try to fake out the entire world but when when I saw it there was a reluctant see you mean you want oh no I went Oh God yeah yeah I thought this this you know my personal thought was like it was convincing enough that I got genuinely spooked but you know just in fairness we shouldn't sit around talking about something people can't see go to future of fake news dot com and check it out for yourself it's all one word future of fake news dot com and it'll pop right up you can see tell us what you think you can see how Simon made the video check it out anyhow the whole process got us all thinking like oh wow if we bunch of idiots can do this for no money very very quickly what will this mean to like a newsroom for example just to start there we're at the level now with with this kind of thing where we need technologists to to verify or knock down and again news executive John Klein I don't think journalists. English majors are going to be the ones to solve this you know you may have been editor of your school paper but this is beyond your capability but if you're good at collaborating with engineers and scientists. You know you feel you have a good chance of working together to to figure it out so we need we need technical expertise more than we ever have can I ask you in your heart this isn't me compare your art to my art for saying in my heart I want somebody to tell the researchers Yes sorry you can't do that sorry you know I know it's really cool and I know you probably are really proud of that algorithm but. Some Men in Black are going to walk in right now and they're going to take your computers away and you just can't sorry society is going to overrule you right now do you is there a party that just dictatorially wants to just like squash this well sure but wouldn't you still have the what are they the f.s.b. In Moscow or the CIA utilizing this and developing it anyway weaponize ing it. So to speak probably I think that the top down model could never contain that John says ultimately what's happening is probably going to be bigger than any one organization or any one newsroom can solve he said it will probably end up coming down to the 14 and 15 year olds of tomorrow who will grow up using this technology making fake videos being the victims of fake videos and that maybe in the maze of them having to parse truth from fiction in such a personal way some kind of code will develop I'm an optimist by nature I do I look at this and I say well somebody is going to figure it out what worries me is the larger context within this take within which this takes place. This is all occurring within a. Context of massive news illiteracy and the the consumers seem to be just throwing their hands up and tiring of China even figure it out and so just the. The work involved in getting to the bottom of the truth is an appealing to a growing percentage of the audience and I'm not sure where Gen z. The teenagers of today come out on this let's hope that they are more willing to do the work maybe out of self interest maybe so that they're not disturbed by. The girl in social studies. But that's our best hope for overcoming it because everybody else seems to be sick of trying. The frets and was. The reporter Simon Adler this piece was produced by Simon and and me. Were Well before we leave this subject let me just propose that there might be kind of happy ending which we will hear in just a 2nd this is radio on Jad and I Robert. Is Jolie and her in Nova Scotia Olivia lab supported by Progressive Insurance offering its home called Explorer designed to provide information about available home insurance options in one place more information of the rest of the cost. Time it isn't enough and loud coming from Norwich for a month maybe a magic imported by chance or why a new way to manage money across borders over 6000000 people and businesses who spend their white van and receive money internationally more x. And for y. Not on black media land or on the end. The fastest growing cities in the world are in Africa and we're about to take you there the life with the people is very happy when they see each other in the street just a hello like 5 minutes how are you doing. The same thing. Africa and the future of the city next time on to the best of our knowledge from our acts Sunday evening between 6 and 8 on you. I'm Peter O'Dowd small towns across America are struggling to stabilize declining populations but researchers in Iowa say shrinking cities can still be great demographics is not equal quality of life that your town can still be thriving thriving community occupation that's next time on here and now. Monday between 11 in the morning and one in the afternoon on k.c.a.l. You a listener supported community service of California Lutheran University 100 years ago some women in America won the right to vote next time on the world where women voted and ran for office 25 years before that sociologists journalists political scientists they also luck to Australia to watch their effect of what was considered today extraordinarily social experiment in political equality an extraordinary idea on the world between 2 and 3 Monday afternoon Also at 7 in the evening on k c o u Public Radio. And I'm Jad I will run I'm Robert Krulwich the Radio Lab And when we last left you we were just worried we are worried that people are becoming exhausted by trying to distinguish truth from fiction and the kids we were kind of hoping might take up just out of intuition some sense of how to smell a rat. There is of course just this other chance that in any population of Americans it's going to be a few people like Paul Revere who are going to run through the House and say no no no no no no alarm alarm and we've met such a person he's not 13 he's pushing 50 I guess but. Listen to how he handles fact versus fiction it's not impossible to hold a lotus position it's just unlikely you're doing it for these other ways that are described I said yeah we're going to play this amazing little bit of a conversation you had with Neil de Grasse Tyson I was talking with him at the 92nd Street right in front of a live audience and in the middle of the conversation out of nowhere really he began telling me about a little incident Oh yes so I had there was there was there was an incident. In Pasadena California I was there I don't drink much coffee I don't have a relationship with caffeine but every now and then I'll be delighted to have a nice cup of hot cocoa and I went to one of these coffee houses you know with the chalkboard out front and so I had you know to kind of talk about they're all over Brooklyn you trip on the chalkboards in Brooklyn so. So I mean now I want to have chocolate and I want it with whipped cream of course right and it comes to the table and there's no whipped cream and I said I would do this with whipped cream Oh we put it on. And I sent where is it oh he said it sunk to the bottom. I then said. Either the laws of physics that apply everywhere in the universe are suspended in your coffee shop. Or you didn't put whipped cream on my cocoa. And he looked in to get really. Now to his credit rather than continue to argue with me he intended to prove me wrong as he went into the kitchen brought out the whipped cream. Scooped it up popped it in my mind how cocoa and a bulb once and floated a top. And there it was. Held by your sweet sweet invited Oh she of course whipped cream past the flow. Because 1st of all before was whipped cream it was cream Ok and old timers remember what is cream do in under homogenized milk it floats to the top and you steam off the cream leaving behind. Ok this is how that works now you take that heavy cream and then whip it putting an end to it. It is not going to sink on any known liquid devised by man Ok. So so here's my point the lesson there is yes. I'm a fan of the edict if an argument last more than 5 minutes then both sides are wrong the fact it applies maybe 85 percent of the time it's a good it's a good rule it's a good Tenet yes to carry with you know watch. This how science works. One researcher comes up with a result and that is not the truth no no a scientific emergent truth is not the result of any one experiment what has to happen is somebody else has to. Verify it prefer a bully a competitor prefer bully someone who doesn't want you to be correct. Such as my way. He went out to prove me wrong and got the same result that I had declared. We can call that the beginnings of an emergent truth about whip cream. Now we need someone to do it in Asia and in Europe in and and then you get a trend and you can do then declare that a consensus of observation and experiments has emerged. In the scientific community whip cream floats on hot chocolate. And that winner today is getting a Ph d. . To. That's Neil de Grasse Tyson at the 92nd Street by his new book is called astrophysics for people in a hurry. Very special thanks to Kyle o. Chef ski and the entire team at U.S.C.'s Institute for Creative Technology for all their work manipulating that video of President Obama and thanks to Matthew a leg for synthesizing so so many words for us Rachel Axler for writing the jokes that we tried to use so when power for billing It's an amazing website and it's Neal Amy Parle everybody in the. News Room for advise ing us and giving us reaction shots of the face to face video and to David Carroll for putting us in touch with Nick Bilton in the 1st place and to Nick Bilton for inspiring this whole story with his article he's got a new and a book actually American kingpin about the founder of the black market website called the Silk Road and to superstar and switching a coin computer scientists who works in eras lab who have to understand what back was going on and finally you can see the video that we created as well as a bunch of other kind of crazy clips that we mention throughout this episode it's at the future of fake news dot com It's all one word in the future of fake news dot com And with that. My real co-host and I will bid you adieu. I'm Robert Krulwich That's who we really hire. I'm glad we could finally be honest about here all these years. Since we 1st reported this story a ton has developed in this world of fake videos in on you and in fact we just released a new story looking at what happens when these rapidly advancing technologies get released out into the wild you can give a listen to that at Radio Lab. And thanks. To I am Holly free professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. Produced by Thor and we were little and he is our director. David Cook. He'll be Robert Krulwich And in the q. But if Nasser Melissa Donald area and whack and I Webster but I don't. Rebecca Schaeffer for backlash a song but only she the Wang thing Katie Ferguson said You shall have to hear the message again Press 2. From the polluted studios at California Lutheran University this is listener supported k.c.l. You one night this spring a cyber security researcher stumbled upon a data set it was from facial recognition cameras in Beijing and as we started digging deeper into realized people were effectively being watched we had latitude longitude cameras but I didn't heard how mass surveillance became part of the fabric of life in China Monday afternoon on All Things Considered from n.p.r. News plus liable to lose updates during your Monday afternoon commute on k c o u Public Radio. It's 6 o'clock. This is n.p.r. Or the California coast 88.3 k.c.a.l. You f.m. In h.d. 1000 Oaks 102.3 f.m. 1340 am k.c.a.l. You Santa Barbara and 89.7 k c l m a k c l m h d Santa Maria 92 point one in San Luis Obispo listen on smart speakers with a command play case you know you. Are the best of our knowledge strain champs. The youngest fastest growing cities on the planet are in Africa and when I say fast I mean at this explosive population growth on a scale that's never been seen before so we're only now right now we're about to get to more cotton just so our biggest market can find everything from food to cars you know chaos but it's moving. From. Lego's to. Africa cities are changing the story of how cities grow and how they thrive there's been this misperception based on a kind of I think older sort of colonial arrogance that what's happening in African cities is that they are catching up to the rest of the world recognizing that they have their own forms of organizing this hour how Africans are building the cities of the future. First this. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Janine Herbst after announcing a phase one trade agreement with the Us China has now delayed tariffs on American imports that previously had been set to go into effect today N.P.R.'s Amy Chang has more in response to the u.s. Press voting a plan tariff increase and cutting some existing tariffs and half the state council in Beijing suspended its owners how it's wary of penalties on u.s. Goods such as farm products and automobile parts this decision came after top officials in both countries reached consensus on an interim trade deal according to u.s. Trade representative Robert light hisor attorneys negotiators committed to purchasing $40000000000.00 of u.s. Agricultural products over the next 2 years in addition to promising reforms on issues like technology transfer details about when and where the phase when trade deal be formalized are unclear officials in Beijing left these questions unanswered during Friday's press conference but Washington says it is aiming to sign early next month Amy Chang n.p.r. News Beijing a winter storm system is blanketing the Midwest today with ice and snow producing white oak conditions and causing major traffic jams Palmer reports from member station k.c. You are eastern Kansas and western Missouri have been heavily impacted snow began falling in Kansas City around 7 am dumping 3 inches by noon Spencer Melly meteorologist with the National Weather Service says the snowfall is limited visibility and made roads slick temperature so cold out there this afternoon to cool off the snow to accumulate on the road and I think that caught some people off guard this morning Interstate 29 north of Kansas city was shut down due to a wreck involving multiple semi trucks the snow was also a headache for n.f.l. Fans.

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