Emerson Dameron - The Art of the Prank

December 20, 2018December 15, 2023

Another Reason Art Is Bad for Fascism

Ever wondered why fascists hate free speech? Brains trumped brawn when this German art collective shined a light on dozens of violent neo-Nazis.

“Who Says Art Is Useless? A German Art Collective Outs 25 Neo-Nazis in an Online Sting Operation”
by Henri Neuendorf
Artnet News
December 8, 2018

A left-wing German art collective is using its creativity for a cause. The group’s members announced on Wednesday that they had identified dozens of neo-Nazis by luring them into an elaborate digital trap.

In August, far-right groups gathered in the east German city of Chemnitz for a multi-day rally that quickly turned violent. Fascist extremists chased and harassed immigrants, vandalized property, made Nazi salutes (which is illegal in Germany), and clashed with riot police. But most of the demonstrators who caused the unrest managed to evade arrest and prosecution.

In response, the leftist artist and activist group Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) made it their mission to bring as many neo-Nazi rioters to justice as possible. After the unrest, the activists began collecting footage and images of rioters and cross-referenced it with publicly available social media profiles.

The group built a website with information and pictures of more than 1,500 of the estimated 7,000 Chemnitz demonstrators and sent out a newsletter urging the public to come forward with further information. But the public appeal turned out to be a trick. Programmers working with ZPS deliberately designed the site so visitors could only see 20 profiles at a time, encouraging the fascists to use the search function to find out if they themselves had been named. Read more.

December 20, 2018December 15, 2023

Deep Fakes: Down the Horrifying Rabbit Hole

On the topic of our tenuous collective relationship with the concept formerly known as “truth,” this examination of “deep fakes,” high-tech simulated video recordings of people you recognize doing things they’ve never actually done, may be the most frightening and portentous emerging story of 2018. And that’s saying a mouthful.

“You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes are where truth goes to die”
by Oscar Schwartz
November 12, 2018
The Guardian

Fake videos can now be created using a machine learning technique called a “generative adversarial network”, or a GAN. A graduate student, Ian Goodfellow, invented GANs in 2014 as a way to algorithmically generate new types of data out of existing data sets. For instance, a GAN can look at thousands of photos of Barack Obama, and then produce a new photo that approximates those photos without being an exact copy of any one of them, as if it has come up with an entirely new portrait of the former president not yet taken. GANs might also be used to generate new audio from existing audio, or new text from existing text – it is a multi-use technology.

The use of this machine learning technique was mostly limited to the AI research community until late 2017, when a Reddit user who went by the moniker “Deepfakes” – a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake” – started posting digitally altered pornographic videos. He was building GANs using TensorFlow, Google’s free open source machine learning software, to superimpose celebrities’ faces on the bodies of women in pornographic movies.

A number of media outlets reported on the porn videos, which became known as “deep fakes”. In response, Reddit banned them for violating the site’s content policy against involuntary pornography. By this stage, however, the creator of the videos had released FakeApp, an easy-to-use platform for making forged media. The free software effectively democratized the power of GANs. Suddenly, anyone with access to the internet and pictures of a person’s face could generate their own deep fake. Read more.

December 20, 2018December 15, 2023

The Best Defense Against a Bad Guy With a Bot

During the 2016 US election cycle, artificial intelligence was wildly successful at spreading lies and propaganda. These researchers suggest weaponizing better bots and aiming them in the opposite direction.

“Bots spread a lot of fakery during the 2016 election. But they can also debunk it.”
by Daniel Funke
November 20, 2018
Poynter

Aside from their role in amplifying the reach of misinformation, bots also play a critical role in getting it off the ground in the first place. According to the study, bots were likely to amplify false tweets right after they were posted, before they went viral. Then users shared them because it looked like a lot of people already had.

“People tend to put greater trust in messages that appear to originate from many people,” said co-author Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of South Florida, in the press release. “Bots prey upon this trust by making messages seem so popular that real people are tricked into spreading their messages for them.”

The study suggests Twitter curb the number of automated accounts on social media to cut down on the amplification of misinformation. The company has made some progress toward this end, suspending more than 70 million accounts in May and June alone. More recently, the company took down a bot network that pushed pro-Saudi views about the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi and started letting users report potential fake accounts.

Nonetheless, bots are still wrecking havoc on Twitter — and some aren’t used for spreading misinformation at all. So what should fact-checkers do to combat their role in spreading misinformation?

Tai Nalon has spent the better part of the past year trying to answer that question — and her answer is to beat the bots at their own game.

“I think artificial intelligence is the only way to tackle misinformation, and we have to build bots to tackle misinformation,” said the director of Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checking project. “(Journalists) have to reach the people where they are reading the news. Now in Brazil, they are reading on social media and on WhatsApp. So why not be there and automate processes using the same tools the bad guys use?” Read more.

December 20, 2018December 15, 2023

This Rascal’s Obituary is a Collaborative Literary Masterpiece

As a fitting tribute to the prank-loving Rick Stein on the occasion of his death, his daughter Alex Walsh took some creative liberties in his honor. Then things got really ridiculous, swelling into a funny and moving tribute to the power of a life irreverently lived.

“A daughter’s hilarious obituary unravels her father’s mysterious life. You have to read to the end to get it.”
by Allison Klein
October 11, 2018
The Washington Post

The obituary that ran last week in Delaware Online is a mystery, the tale of a globe-trotting Renaissance man who disappeared in a single-engine plane over the Atlantic Ocean after learning he had cancer.

It was written by Alex Walsh about her father, Rick Stein, 71, a man who she said had an endless appetite for comedy. The huge response on social media has been comfort to the mourning family, she said, as people who never knew her father have been sending condolences by the dozens.

“All of this is bittersweet,” Walsh, 45, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

The obituary begins:

“Rick Stein, 71, of Wilmington was reported missing and presumed dead on September 27, 2018 when investigators say the single-engine plane he was piloting, The Northrop, suddenly lost communication with air traffic control and disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rehoboth Beach. Philadelphia police confirm Stein had been a patient at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital where he was being treated for a rare form of cancer. Hospital spokesman Walter Heisenberg says doctors from Stein’s surgical team went to visit him on rounds when they discovered his room was empty. Security footage shows Stein leaving the building at approximately 3:30 Thursday afternoon, but then the video feed mysteriously cuts off.

“Authorities say they believe Stein took an Uber to the Philadelphia airport where they assume he somehow gained access to the aircraft. ‘The sea was angry that day,’ said NTSB lead investigator Greg Fields in a news conference. ‘We have no idea where Mr. Stein may be, but any hope for a rescue is unlikely.”’ Continue reading “This Rascal’s Obituary is a Collaborative Literary Masterpiece”

December 19, 2018December 15, 2023

Barney Rosset Documentary Seeks Support

Recently, a team of seasoned and passionate documentary filmmakers launched a Kickstarter project to fund Barney’s Wall, a tribute to the iconoclastic Evergreen Review publisher, First Amendment crusader, and countercultural titan Barney Rosset.

Now, they need a bit more help to cover permissions, attorney fees, and other expenses associating with bringing such a project to fruit. (We can certainly sympathize.)

If you’d like to donate, you can do so here before January 4th, 2019.

And if you aren’t familiar with Rosset, check out his obituary. He’s an essential figure in the development of 20th Century creative rebellion, and it’s a rousing read in its own right.

“Colleagues said he had ‘a whim of steel’. ‘He does everything by impulse and then figures out afterward whether he’s made a smart move or was just kidding.'”