Video Technology: Seeing is not always believing

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:26:16 -0400

It used to be you needed the likes of George Lucas to make believable fake videos; not any more.

There's a great spoof video going around the Internet--or more accurately, a class of spoof videos--posing as a news story about an unknown presidential candidate taking the election by storm. For example, I'm taking the election by storm.

Okay, obviously I'm not running for office.

Now, I'm guessing that you understood the previous sentence to be true without flinching. You did so based on a principle that I like to call the "Henry Kissinger's Wife Rule". The idea goes like this:

I know that Henry Kissinger's wife is not three feet tall. Why? Because if she were three feet tall, I would have known that fact by now. But I don't know that fact. Therefore, she is not three feet tall.

So, if I were a serious candidate for president, you would have known it. But you don't know it. So, I'm not.

But you did not know I was not running because of the quality of the spoof video. In other words, the quality of the video would not cause most viewers to reject it has a fake.

But what about this Fox News video?

That's a little tougher call, eh? The quality makes it believable and the Henry Kissinger's Wife rule is no help here. (That is, Fox News might or might not do something like this. And if they did, you would not necessarily know about it.)

Now, here's the interesting ponderable...

Stop and think about the first video suggesting that I was running for president. That video was programmatically generated based on some very simple input (i.e., my name) that was entered into a web form by my not-quite-six-year-old daughter. She's an very bright kid, but when it comes to technical knowledge about making believable fake videos, she falls considerably short of George Lucas.

So, given the the rapidly advancing video technologies (that will soon make it possible to generate billions of mass customized fake videos for next to nothing), and given the undeniable willingness of certain classes of people to exploit technology for every imaginable purpose (e.g., selling pills, selling sex, stealing money, etc.), what types of fake-video-based scams are coming down the pike?

Brace yourself.

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Video Technology: Seeing is not always believing

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