John Wojcik pays tribute to a black US activist who spent six decades at the forefront of struggles for voting rights, economic justice and peace – reshaping US politics and inspiring movements worldwide
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Should we be worried about the latest video editing technology?
The newest video manipulation software in the wrong hands could be a tool for mass misinformation, yet the researchers who created the software are dismissive of its disruptive effects. Rox Middleton, Liam Shaw and Joel Hellewell look at the facts
Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of the first lunar landing mission Apollo 11 on July 20 1969
[Nasa/Neil A Armstrong/Creative Commons]
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IN early June 2019, a fake video of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, began to circulate around the social media platform Instagram. In it, he appeared to thank a shadowy organisation called “Spectre” for helping him manipulate people into willingly divulging their personal information to him.
The video, which is still available to watch on YouTube, looks authentic, but was in fact generated by an algorithm that is able to mimic human voices and facial appearances. Worryingly, other algorithms exist that can do the task even more convincingly.
An international team of scientists, working with Adobe — the company that is responsible for Photoshop, commonly used to create doctored images — have created software that can alter the words that people say in a video of them speaking.
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