AI generated newscast, Russia

Leifer

Senior Member.
Claim:
1) Russian state-run TV newscasters are AI generated personalities, complete with their own fake social media accounts.

2) Televised Putin speech was AI generated. (He never moves his hands in recent speech.)

I found these claims from popular US YouTube host, Jake Broe. He sources the claims from elsewhere.
See these claims in his YT video here (first 4 minutes).
.

Source: https://youtu.be/Gq3P_UZiSTg?si=SU39Oob6mTD724m9


What do we think ?
 
1. Does happen and is possible, but, there has been no formal studies or research on this yet and should absolutely not be taken as any sort of quantity reflection.

2. No pretty unlikely, the entire basis of that claim has come from the idea his hands don't move. If you watch the video, his hands do move, he just doesn't make animated hand movements. You don't need to zoom in but it might be helpful, but you can tell he's making the same sorts of micro-movements our hands would in similar positions.
Screenshot (8769).png

Red spots are the key areas to watch.
 
my first guess would be that he has developed some kind of tremor in the hand he's holding down

but "Putin doesn't want to do this any more" as a rationale with no evidence to back it up, as support for a sensationalist claim? why?
 
my first guess would be that he has developed some kind of tremor in the hand he's holding down

but "Putin doesn't want to do this any more" as a rationale with no evidence to back it up, as support for a sensationalist claim? why?
If my memory serves me correctly, Putin grabbing the table so as to not let a tremor show, purportedly because he might have parkinsons or some other condition, date at least as far back as 2022. TBH, I'm both disinterested and uninterested in such claims, as if they're confirmed, I wouldn't react particularly, and if they're disproved, I wouldn't react particularly either - it changes nothing tangible.

Superficial support from a goo-goo for ``Putin grabs table'':
External Quote:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...tin-health-holding-table-russia-b2063102.html
Video of Vladimir Putin gripping table during meeting sparks fresh ...
Apr 22, 2022 ... Vladimir Putin's health has been called into question again after a video showed him tightly clutching a table throughout a meeting with ...


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-t34S1wT_4

Grimacing Putin tightly grips desk, chews lip in surreal new footage
Aug 30, 2022 ... A grimacing Vladimir Putin is seen tightly gripping his desk as his most trusted general reports to him with a straight face that invaded ...
 
If my memory serves me correctly, Putin grabbing the table so as to not let a tremor show, purportedly because he might have parkinsons or some other condition, date at least as far back as 2022. TBH, I'm both disinterested and uninterested in such claims, as if they're confirmed, I wouldn't react particularly, and if they're disproved, I wouldn't react particularly either - it changes nothing tangible.
exactly, it's not sensational at all
"he's getting old, and he doesn't want people to notice" is a "duh" fact
 
However, the claim of the video being AI is a more interesting one to me. Alas I've not had a chance to watch it yet. One of the problems about such claims is that different AIs can have different tells. Parts of the image being suspiciously moving are just as much of a tell as parts of the image being suspiciously stationary. A couple of years ago, lipsynch and insides of mouths were the most obvious problems, but everything that is recognised as a problem in generation N is used as a focus in supervised learning for generation X+1. (And of course, you evolve a adversarial deepfake detector AI at the same time as you evolve a deepfake generator, and just get them to co-evolve, so you don't need to waste human effort on supervised training.)
 
exactly, it's not sensational at all
"he's getting old, and he doesn't want people to notice" is a "duh" fact
Yeah one thing I hate about claims like this is people try to play behavioral analyst but then entirely don't even try to do it properly. What he is specifically doing there is a documentable behavior (with humans, not just Putin individually), so we can start there. Him "hiding" shaking hands could absolutely be it, but it could also just be a form of relaxing the hands, it is an appliable "power" behavior (with types like Putin and etc this can become conditioned and not consciously thought of but could be in any given situation), it could also even be nervousness.
I use both of the final two forms there but I don't find it comfortable like some folks do. For myself at least, it also presents differently, when I do the intentional behavior form of it, I will layer them one on top of each other, without interlocking my thumbs (this keeps more of the hand shown). When I am nervous, instead I will interlock my thumbs and keep one "hidden" under my hand where I can rub my palm/lightly fidget without it being noticeable.

If we play "that behavior is weird" we have to chop through stuff like this, including individual behavioral presentation and patterns of such, before we jump too "that's AI". The crux area there is like FatPhil mentioned, in any given "generation", there are some tells we can look for. Unfortunately "still hands" is not a hard flag, but can definitely be one - given this context, it should especially NOT be the first hypothesis, even if you present it as one (which you should still properly assessing it, but recognizing context w the vid also unlikely hypothesis). These flags are also an indicator to assess, not conclusionary.
 
1. Does happen and is possible, but, there has been no formal studies or research on this yet and should absolutely not be taken as any sort of quantity reflection.

2. No pretty unlikely, the entire basis of that claim has come from the idea his hands don't move. If you watch the video, his hands do move, he just doesn't make animated hand movements. You don't need to zoom in but it might be helpful, but you can tell he's making the same sorts of micro-movements our hands would in similar positions.
View attachment 73553
Red spots are the key areas to watch.

Now I've watched some of it, at normal speed, rather than Anton Gerashchenko's comedically sped up version, I agree. Specifically:
- There are natural looking small motions of the hands consistent with him having chosen a rigid posture leaning on the desk, I adopt a similar pose quite frequently.
- The tie/hand interactions are nothing unusual of a bandwidth-limited DCT-based video encoding.
- The chair movement aligns with the movement of the bulk of his body as you would expect from an old wooden chair with some give. Some motion artefacts exists, but they're consistent with the block-based motion estimation in the video encoding.
- The mouth rendering had none of the unnatural looking problems generative AIs were historically prone to produce.
- In the small segment I saw, there were no movement/synch issues (if someone can supply me with or point me towards the whole thing in broadcast-quality, I'll happily rewatch with a couple of local Russian speakers, to see if anything is spotted).

So my personal view on the fakeness question is that on the "weak" to "none" scale of evidence, this is closer to the latter.
 
The other aspect of this is that most AI deepfakes are casual efforts meant to fool people relatively cheaply and easily (or to demonstrate how cheap and easy the technology is).

If you generated this for real -- and not in realtime -- with the budget of a major nation-state, you'd have some skilled VFX artists with practiced eyes clean up the footage before sending it out, so none of the usual "AI tells" would be present.
 
The other aspect of this is that most AI deepfakes are casual efforts meant to fool people relatively cheaply and easily (or to demonstrate how cheap and easy the technology is).

If you generated this for real -- and not in realtime -- with the budget of a major nation-state, you'd have some skilled VFX artists with practiced eyes clean up the footage before sending it out, so none of the usual "AI tells" would be present.

You raise a good point, but there's still no coherent reason and motivation - or even what the intended message is. If Putin can't appear because he's sick, why would they release a video that makes him look sick? If they're putting so much effort into the delivery of the narrative, surely they'd spend as much effort making the narrative itself make sense?
 
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