Gigaom AI Minute – December 22

Transcript

As long as there has been journalism there have been quotations that have been misattributed or things that were made up that people never said, and of course it's only a few years since we have had to get used to the idea that photographs can easily be digitally manipulated. Luckily tools still exist that if you take the time you can generally tell if a photo has been altered. That isn't going to be the case for much longer. To compound matters, the technology to simulate a specific person's voice to get them to say anything is getting better and better and better, and we can only expect that it too will reach a point that you cannot tell, you cannot dissect the file and determine if that person really said it. And finally our ability to simulate video, to take multiple photographs of a person and superimpose them in a video doing something, really marks the end of the adage that seeing is believing. We may be in a world where hearing someone say something, unless it's first-hand, or seeing them, unless you witness it yourself, you can't be certain if it's true or not.