Randahl Fink1d ago

I need your help.

The US midterm elections are under attack. On YouTube, I constantly encounter American AI generated political commentary channels that are picking up followers, and I am convinced the objective is to use these channels to disinform the public in the fall.

Please help by reporting this video as misinformation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P0EwPwF7jw

If you are not sure this is AI, notice the way it repeats the same few hand gesture multiple times throughout the video.

1/2

#disinformation

Show threadRandahl Fink1d ago

For documentation, I am attaching a short clip where the hand gesture is shown.

Apart from this AI bot looking unnatural, the people behind this clearly also overlook the fact, that human political commentators normally do not produce their content from a creative home studio filled with crayons, colourful paper and beige pottery.

2/2

Show threadCrow1d ago
@randahl weird to imagine anyone wouldn’t instantly recognize this as #AIslop. There’s a disconnect between the mouth movements and the voice.
Show threadKing of Tors1d ago
@Crow @randahl Yes, but this isn't just an AI problem. I've been working in sound for picture since way before AI joined the party and there has been a marked slide in the acceptance levels for lip sync in video editing software and common workflows. I can't even relax when I watch TV if I'm looking at the mouths. And so many Netflix viewers watch dubbed versions of foreign shows without even noticing it wasn't filmed in English. The dubbing has been happening since, oh I doubt the Jazz Singer was dubbed into foreign languages, but not long after that, and it's one of the many examples of technology making things worse in our business. We used to edit "deep fakes" with razor blades and open reel tape and I swear we did it better.
Show threadstib1d ago
@kingtor
A lot of the blame is on the playback devices. My crappy Samsung TV can not get sound to synch with vision reliably and the Apple TV never does. It's so much easier to keep sound in synch when editing these days, compared to when you needed a chinagraph pencil and a Steenbeck.
@Crow @randahl
Show threadKing of Tors1d ago
@stib @Crow @randahl True, but it's also easier to mess it up. The amount of time the dialog editors have to spend chasing sync has gone way up in my career. I used to be confident that the guide track was in sync, then for awhile had to say "that's the picture editor's job: give me a guide track in sync and I will deliver a finished dialog track in sync," and get it from them. Now I play it for the director in sync with the guide track and the director says "oh, that's from the camera that records audio 2 frames out of sync," and say "isn't that your job?" when I ask why no one had thought to fix that earlier. (True story.)
Show threadstib
@kingtor @Crow @randahl What camera is that? Is it a double head system? I can't work out how you'd go about setting it up to be capable of doing this on the cameras I work with (Ursa, FX6, Red Dragon).
Mar 17 at 5:33amWeb
Show threadKing of Tors17h ago
@stib @Crow @randahl Oh, I don't know. I think it was a consumer Hi8 or some bull...oney. And from what very little I know about the Hi8 format, it was likely a problem ingesting the footage and would've been best fixed then.
Show threadKing of Tors17h ago
@stib @Crow @randahl Worth noting I am talking about micro-budget truly indie filmmaking. I also work on Hollywood stuff, but these days it's usually ADR recording/mixing and when the client asks me about sync, they're talking about my eyes and the picture, not guide track and phase lock. I haven't done any dialog editing for one of them in quite a few years. Back in those days, the auto-conform was +/- a half frame or so and we had to watch out for pull-up/-down issues, but the guide track from the Avid was pretty solid. I started noticing issues with guide tracks when Final Cut Pro was starting to work it's way into the business, and it's only gotten worse since. And I've seen some things in movie theaters and on awards screeners (back when they were on DVD/BluRay) that are pretty messed up. Some on movies that have won major sound editing awards. :/
Show threadstib15h ago
@kingtor
Hi8 is wild, I shot a doco on it, analogue S-video pictures, digital sound, all squeezed on a tiny tape. Not one I want to use again.
@Crow @randahl
Show threadKing of Tors14h ago
@stib I worked with a guy once who called me years after we'd last worked together because we was archiving some Hi8 tapes while he still could. He was having trouble with sync, specifically drift, and I couldn't quite figure out what was going wrong, but figured I could probably come up with some workaround, so I offered to check it out if he'd just send me the drive of what he'd gotten digitized. I could hear him blush over the phone as he muttered something about he wasn't even sure what was on them and one might be a sex tape. I never heard from him about that project again