An AI Video Hoax to Be Wary of

Did Senator John Kennedy humiliate Robert De Niro at a public event?

No. He didn’t. A lot of other celebrity confrontations and grudges didn’t happen either. Some entity or entities at Youtube is posting faked videos based on various related premises. The sponsoring organizations in many cases are seeking paid subscriptions, but not always. The lure in individual cases may be the obligatory ad(s) that must be watched prior to the title being sought.

I’ve been tracking this for some time, casually at first but with more concern as the number of such videos seems to be proliferating. My wife and I watched one the other day that finally included confirmation of what I’d been concluding for some time. The video was a voiceover account of a bitter argument on ‘The View’ between Harrison Ford and Joy Behar. It was similar to one I’d seen months ago about an interview with Melania Trump in which a gotcha-guy host wanted to embarrass her by asking if she ever regretted marrying Donald Trump. She made him look like a sleazebag and the left-leaning audience applauded her at the end. I had reservations because there was no actual video or audio, just a smooth AI-sounding narration. On the other hand it was the opposite of a lefty hit job, and the project may have done with narration because of legal issues surrounding access to authentic clips from a left-leaning show.

The format of the Ford-Behar collision was much the same. No actual audio or video. Lots of narrated stage direction: He quivered with anger, she tensed in fury, he stood up dramatically, she seethed in her chair and leaned in aggressively, etc. Again, not a lefty hit job. It was the takedown of Joy Behar many have long wished would happen. By now though I was definitely suspicious. There were too many references to the booth not cutting away to go to commercial. The video producer committed the cardinal error of making the fight longer than the show, well over 30 minutes worth. The viewer Comments included with the video also made it clear in the aggregate that this event never occurred at all. Double checking at Google confirmed that there was no news record of any such spat on The View.

Looking back, I recalled a spate of videos offering to reveal the five or six professional rivals this or that musician, actor, or director disliked or even hated the most. I’d seen some, flagged a clear error in one of them, and also twigged to a narration howler I’d discovered in a slightly different version of the same formula: a video purporting to expose the Top Ten Dumbest Stars in the history of Hollywood. I’d heard much of the content before, just as I had with the ‘hated most’ vids, but my respect for the creative mind behind the project plummeted when the AI narrator made three unforgivable  pronunciation errors with respect to names. Actress Jean Arthur was misidentified at least once as Joan Arthur. Editing oversight? Maybe. But not the next two. Unaccountable, Milton Berle became Milton Burlee. Repeated, not a mistake. And then Peter Lorre became Peter Lore. Not even a really stupid, ignorant human narrator would make that gaffe. And there was clearly no human producer who listened to the end product before it was posted. 

I was looking at a business.it was only today, though, that I, learned just how big, ambitious, and potentially dangerous this business is. The target of the deception is right-leaning traditionalists who are,ll ling for ammunition of various kinds to use against the obnoxious lefties in their lives. What Imfound today was an arsenal that may be just one of many.

The video this time was about an encounter between Senator John Kennedy and Robert DeNiro. Same format as Themother videos I’ve described. No actual video or audio clips. And extensive, slowly building  assault by akennedy against the initial intemperate putdown by De Niro. The personal anecdotes employed by Kennedy sound eminently plausible, enough that they may be the result of some high-powered AI search algorithm. The giveaway, as with the Ford-Behar set-to, is length. It all just goes on far too long. Which is not plausible for Kennedy. He wouldn’t waste nearly so much personal information on a trashy street thug like De Niro. When I looked at the comments, however, the viewers seemed un suspicious, happier to pile on to De Niro than question the source.

I looked up the name of the sponsoring organization and did a separate a Google search for them.here’s what I found:

And it keeps going. LOTS of videos…

If you’re persistent you can also find this screen:

Without hunting and pecking and guessing, there’s no way to know how many such hoaxed productions are being created and peddled to the credulous. Even if there is accurate information within them, there is no documentable source available. Everything becomes, ultimately, non-credible.

Why AI is dangerous. Not because it’s smart. It’s no conscious, it doesn’t know what it’s doing, but it’s innumerable algorithms can crawl tirelessly, a high speed, through every scrap of words attributed to John Kennedy and write an entirely unoriginal narrative around them under the direction of whoever is invoking the applicable code.

An enormous amount of nonsensical junk documentation can be built in exactly this way and probably is. 

Don’t get taken in by it. Look for the goofy giveaways. What AI’s moron code seems to have the most trouble anticipating and forestalling. 

Bet you anything, AI wouldn’t get the joke here. Forget’em.