#videoproductiontutorial

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There’s a fake video showing Mark Zuckerberg saying he’s in control of ‘billions of people’s stolen data,’ as Facebook grapples with doctored videos that spread misinformation

source Charles Platiau/Reuters A fake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that was created using deepfake technology has appeared on Instagram Vice first reported the video The video appeared not long after Facebook came under criticism for its decision not to remove a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was circulated on the platform The video of Zuckerberg was created by two artists and an advertising company as part of a documentary festival Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories A fake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created using “deepfake” technology has emerged on Instagram, in yet another example showing how artificial intelligence can be used to construct phony content that’s easily shareable through social media The video , which was first spotted by Vice , was posted by the Instagram account @bill_posters_uk and was created by the artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, along with the advertising firm Canny, according to the news outlet Vice reported it was created as part of an exhibit called “Spectre” for the Sheffield Doc Fest, a documentary festival in the UK “Imagine this for a second,” the fake Zuckerberg says in the video, which was edited to look like a news clip. “One man with total control of billions of people’s stolen data All their secrets, their lives, their futures I owe it all to Spectre Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future” The video was posted four days ago and has nearly 2,000 views at the time of writing View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bill Posters (@bill_posters_uk) on Jun 7, 2019 at 7:15am PDT While the video certainly has a few hints that indicate it’s a fake – such as Zuckerberg’s voice and the way his mouth moves – it highlights the growing concern over deepfake technology, an artificial-intelligence-powered technique that can be used to falsely put words in anybody’s mouth, as we see here An Instagram spokesperson provided the following comment when contacted by Business Insider: “We will treat this information the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram. If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we will filter it from Instagram’s recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages.” Last month, The Washington Post reported that a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been slowed down to make it sound as if her words had been slurred and was circulated on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter Instead of removing the video, Facebook notified users who attempted to share it that the clip was fake The doctored Pelosi video is just one instance in which manipulated videos have been used for malicious purposes While the Pelosi video wasn’t exactly a deepfake, doctored videos have become a source of misinformation and other problems: Over the past year, deepfakes have increasingly been used to display a person’s face on another person’s body in pornographic videos, with celebrities often being targeted Others have used the technology to highlight the risks it poses Last year, a fake video showing former President Barack Obama cussing and insulting President Donald Trump circulated online The video turned out to be a project created BuzzFeed, Monkeypaw Productions, and the comedian and director Jordan Peele It was an effort to showcase the dangers of deepfake technology The recently published deepfake of Zuckerberg is also meant to promote awareness but not necessarily around the dangers of AI “This will change the way we share and tell stories, remember our loved ones, and create content” Omer Ben-Ami, one of Canny’s cofounders, said to Vice, adding that he sees the tech as “the next step in our digital evolution” TAGS Read the full article

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It certainly seems like the world of streaming video entered

By Alex Cranz on at It certainly seems like the world of streaming video entered a new epoch recently Last week, Comcast finally handed the reigns of Hulu over to Disney , which means the company will have not only the impending Disney+ streaming service but also a live TV service that competes with the big cable companies Then, the very same day, we saw a genuinely awful outcome of AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, when CEO Randall Stephenson announced that Friends and other WarnerMedia-owned shows would be pulled from Netflix to run exclusively on the company’s forthcoming streaming platform Apple reminded us of its foray into streaming with the release of the new Apple TV app, which will support TV+ later this year, and US cable channel IFC announced it’s own streaming service Look at all those content fiefdoms As these companies snatch hold of rights and create their new exclusive content, they’re cordoning off their empires and demanding you to either ignore some of the most talked about TV shows and films available or pay your way into their services Either way, it’s a dark future for the streamer Now you might think “well I can just not subscribe!” or maybe “I don’t need to revisit Friends or the enormous catalogue of classic films Warner now owns ” And that’s very true But for many, that’s not realistic People naturally want to be included in conversations The Internet has only bolstered the water cooler imperative of keeping up with mass culture events like Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones Disney recognises this. The company now owns the rights to some of the largest franchises in the business and is slowly pulling them from all other competing streaming platforms to force people to watch them on Disney+ Want to watch a Marvel movie or Star Wars ? What about X-Men? Got a hankering for those blue Avatar people? Need to check out Frozen , Moana , The Incredibles or Aladdin ? You’ll have to cough up cash for Disney+ And you’ll be paying Disney for the privilege of watching ESPN too It owns that, not to mention A&E, ABC, History Channel, a big chunk of Vice, FX and even Lifetime As we said before, Disney now owns Hulu outright, too – AT&T sold its share last month, and Comcast agreed to relinquish its share last week Whenever a company consolidates large portions of a commodity that everyone wants, the first concern that comes to mind is cost Streaming could get a whole lot more expensive Remember how cheap Netflix was when it was just a dinky little add-on to the disc subscription service? But over the years it’s crept up It’s now double the price it was five years ago Disney, with its now enormous catalogue of content (a catalogue far more extensive and potentially more lucrative than Netflix’s), has already spread subscriptions across three different services: Hulu, ESPN, and soon Disney+ After it hooks US viewers on Disney+ for $7 (£550) a month later this year, and internationally within the next two years, it could very easily start increasing the price (No one at Disney has said as much to date) It’s a tactic that has served TV providers well for some time Lure them in with introductory prices, get them addicted to the service provided, and then raise the price. You could shut off the never-ending stream of Moana, but will you? As irritating and expensive as Disney’s streaming monopoly will be, it’s the company’s dominance over culture that feels the most terrifying So far this year, Disney has dominated roughly 35 per cent of the American box office sales, according to Box Office Mojo Combined with Warner Bros, that number jumps to about half of the US. box office Very few companies are producing a large percentage of what we watch, and as they consolidate the means of distribution via the Internet, it’s beginning to feel like they’ve got too much power – it ends badly And we know that because this isn’t the first time a few companies have controlled both the production and distribution of huge amounts of entertainment. Back in the 1940s, you had a similar system, in some respects. “Basically the studios financed the movies, produced them themselves at their own companies and then they also owned some movies theaters,” Karina Longworth , a Hollywood historian and host of You Must Remember This , told me This meant they could give sweetheart distribution deals to their own cinemas while gouging competitors and it meant, if you wanted to be in the business of making movies, you also probably had to be in the business of building cinemas all across the United States According to Longworth, the US government perceived that vertical integration of the entertainment business as a monopoly. Following a series of anti-trust actions and negotiations in the 1930s and 1940s, the studios ended up divesting themselves of their control over cinemas According to Longworth, the effect wasn’t immediately felt by consumers in any kind of financial way, but it had huge ramifications for the film industry, and for the kind of voices that were prioritised in movies “There was, for all intents and purposes, no such thing as independent film that got any kind of distribution until the 1950s” No indie film meant every single movie being made was dictated, to some degree, by a very small group of people at the very top of these studios And while the people running studios can lift up and amplify a wide variety of voices and experiences, that’s not always practically the case Black cinema wasn’t embraced by the big studios, nor was queer cinema Films featuring people from other countries weren’t common. And thanks to the draconian nature of the Hays code and its enforcers (collectively working as the precursor to the frequently as awful MPAA ) there was a broad swathe of subject matter the big studios wouldn’t touch You couldn’t even make a film decrying Nazism until right before the US entered World War II Filmmakers getting out of the exhibiting game changed things dramatically And those studios getting back into the exhibiting game, via the streaming, could change things too It’s not clear just how Disney’s new direct to consumer strategy will affect what kinds of content it makes A cynic might be tempted to read far too much into recent developments as an indication of what the company’s plans are. Disney wanted to create its own streaming service, so the Marvel shows at Netflix were all cancelled Instead of a bulletproof black man taking on a corrupt Blue Lives Matter world ( Luke Cage ), and a victim of sexual assault learning to overcome her PTSD ( Jessica Jones ), you’ll be getting Disney+ shows like the one about soldiers travelling the world fighting bad guys , the one about a time-travelling trickster Norse god , and one about a lady in love with a robot who has been dead since 2018 Maybe they’ll be good and challenging, and all of my hand-wringing will be proven wrong Longworth told me she didn’t think any studio has ever commanded as much of the box office as Disney now does (MGM at its peak had only about a 22 per cent market share ) The company is inescapable and thanks to its streaming holdings, its iron grip on our attention and our entertainment expenditure has never been stronger. Featured illustration: Jim Cooke (Gizmodo) Tags: Read the full article

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How capitalism killed one of the best video game studios

The week's best photojournalism Fifteen years ago, the game studio Valve released Half Life 2 , a first-person shooter about a physicist fighting an alien occupation of Earth The game was a smash hit, selling over 10 million copies and winning dozens of "game of the year" awards. Naturally, Valve planned a sequel, only this time broken into three parts Episode 1 and Episode 2 duly followed in 2006 and 2007 respectively, which were both enormous successes as well But, to the bitter disappointment of eager fans, the third installment never came Indeed, Valve — once one of the most artistically creative game studios in the world — has all but stopped producing games altogether What happened? In a word: capitalism Valve has mutated from a game developer into a ruthless financial middleman through its platform Steam, which has become the largest platform for digital game distribution — allowing them to make huge amounts of money while creating virtually nothing original themselves It took several years for this transformation to be completed. In 2007 Valve released Portal , an excellent puzzle game, and Team Fortress 2 , a team-based shooter They followed up with cooperative zombie survival games Left 4 Dead in 2008 and Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009 In 2011 they released Portal 2 , and in 2013 Dota 2 , a multiplayer battle arena game All six were big successes For a few years after 2007, Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell assured interviewers that the studio was working on Episode 3 , and the company released a bunch of concept art to that effect But then he clammed up , and the final installment never came Indeed, innovative single-player games — what used to be Valve's bread and butter, starting with their groundbreaking first game Half Life in 1998 — have completely vanished from their output They haven't produced one for eight years — Portal 2 was the last one up to this day Meanwhile, Valve's focus has quite obviously moved to Steam The platform, which serves as a one-stop shop for gamers to buy and download titles from nearly every major game developer, reportedly made roughly $43 billion in revenue in 2017 (as it takes a substantial cut of every sale), up from $35 billion in 2016 — and that doesn't include revenue from downloadable content and "microtransactions" (that is, in-game purchases of cosmetic items and such) There is clearly a lot more money in being an Amazon-style distribution platform than in developing games What's more, that money is a lot easier to make First-mover advantage and network effects do most of the work for you At first glance, this seems somewhat odd Surely it would be possible to run Steam and produce games — indeed, with the fat Steam profits Valve could generously fund its production department, and maybe even take bolder risks than they used to Not producing Episode 3 surely meant tens of millions of dollars in foregone profits, not to mention millions more in abandoned development work and legions of infuriated fans. That's not exactly great business practice! And besides, while the Half Life 2 series is great, it's not like it was some Proustian flawless masterpiece. A game that was basically similar to Episode 2 with a reasonably compelling story would have sold like hotcakes. Indeed, Marc Laidlaw, a former Valve writer who wrote most of the first two games in the series, published a thinly-disguised Episode 3 plot synopsis in 2017, which would have worked just fine So what gives? One factor is that a capitalist business mindset is badly corrosive to an artistic temperament Running a platform is all about tweaking its setup to maximize revenue, even if that comes as the cost of lousy art For instance, Steam has long had a wide-open policy to independent games, doing almost nothing to validate quality and not even that much to stop copyright infringement The result, as Jim Sterling has covered extensively , was an absolute tsunami of atrocious "asset flips" (games made by slapping together pre-made assets from third-party stores) and other even worse garbage — like a game about a school shooting Independent developers working on genuinely high-quality games have found their titles drowned in a sea of dreck on the platform Valve itself even allowed an appallingly bad third-party Half Life game using Valve's own branding, engine, and assets to be published there The development of microtransactions is even more corrosive. Research demonstrates that most revenue from these purchases come from a tiny minority of players with impulse control problems (like children with their parent's credit card number ). That leads to games deliberately designed like addictive drugs or gambling to hook the " whales " — things like restricting processes behind frustrating time gates that you can pay to unlock, or selling slot machine-style "loot boxes" which have a small chance to contain something good, or even simple "pay-to-win" mechanics, where the best items in the game simply must be bought A great many awful mobile games are designed around these techniques Valve has clearly internalized a lot of this abusive capitalist mindset The only major game it has released since Dota 2 is an online card game called Artifact , where one builds a deck by buying random card packs and individual cards on a secondary marketplace It came out to middling reviews in late 2018 (one streamer quit after he spent $300 on cards and still couldn't even build two quality decks), and the player population has since fallen by about 95 percent Meanwhile, as Valve has stopped producing traditional games, it has hemorrhaged talent No writers who worked on the Half Life series remain at the company Another factor may be simple lack of pressure to publish In 2004 David Hodgson published a book called Raising the Bar about the development of Half Life 2 , which was published after its release but written beforehand. In the foreword, Newell wrote that "I have the world's worst case of stage fright You, the reader, know how the launch of Half Life 2 went … Did we create a worthy successor to Half Life? Did we live up to gamers' expectations? Did we pull it off? You know, and I don't, and that seems terribly unfair to me right now" Artists are often very anxious about how their creations will be received A game studio which makes its money from selling games has no choice but to publish at some point But one with a monopolist platform that essentially prints money can keep neurotically tweaking and polishing their work forever, until they either give up or their abilities rot away to nothing This situation may not last forever though, as other game companies are attempting to horn in on Steam's market share Epic Games, publisher of the massive hit Fortnite , recently launched an "Epic Store," and has aggressively scooped up exclusive rights to tons of upcoming third-party games with both direct payments and a generous revenue split Steam's quasi-monopoly may soon end — and that is probably a good thing. Even after 12 years, the Half Life property is one of the most valuable in the gaming market Maybe it's time for Newell and company to remember why they got in the business in the first place Read the full article