Police and gendarmerie forces seized thousands of liters of counterfeit booze in raids at illegal distilleries and dozens were arrested over the deaths.
Most deaths and hospitalizations were discovered stemming from the use of household cleaners in alcohol production. Experts say the astronomical prices of alcoholic drinks push consumers toward bootleg drinks. Experts advise consumers to purchase drinks from licensed, trustworthy dealers and to check authenticity tags on the bottles, which allows them to find out if the product is genuine via an app. Of course there are other reasons, some of which might cause one to question the rationale — even mental stability — of the perpetrators, or liken their stunts to juvenile pranks rather than fraud.
But financial woes and avoiding incarceration take the top spots. To do so, the couple staged a canoeing accident in which Darwin allegedly disappeared. Because his body was never found, the insurance company paid Anne only half of the policy amount. Anne Darwin confessed that John was indeed the man in the photo, and the Darwins were sentenced to more than six years in prison for multiple counts of fraud and deception.
In her book Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud , Elizabeth Greenwood exposes how she put serious thought into how to escape repayment of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans she accumulated, but pseudocide never entered her mind.
Her plan was to evanesce without a trace to a white-sand beach somewhere in the Caribbean — that is until a friend raised the notion of faking her death. GANs might also be used to generate new audio from existing audio, or new text from existing text — it is a multi-use technology.
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.
But once she started thinking about deep fakes, she realized that if they spread beyond the trolls on Reddit they could be even more dangerous. They could be weaponized in ways that weaken the fabric of democratic society itself. Citron, along with her colleague Bobby Chesney, began working on a report outlining the extent of the potential danger.
As well as considering the threat to privacy and national security, both scholars became increasingly concerned that the proliferation of deep fakes could catastrophically erode trust between different factions of society in an already polarized political climate. Anyone with access to this technology — from state-sanctioned propagandists to trolls — would be able to skew information, manipulate beliefs, and in so doing, push ideologically opposed online communities deeper into their own subjective realities.
Citron and Chesney are not alone in these fears. While these disturbing hypotheticals might be easy to conjure, Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, is not willing to bet on deep fakes having a high impact on elections in the near future.
Hwang believes that that this is partly because using machine learning to generate convincing fake videos still requires a degree of expertise and lots of data.
At the same time, Hwang acknowledges that as deep fakes become more realistic and easier to produce in the coming years, they could usher in an era of forgery qualitatively different from what we have seen before. Machine learning will not only automate this process, it will also probably make better forgeries.
Nonetheless, research into machine learning-powered synthetic media forges ahead. A video accompanying the research paper depicted a researcher opening his mouth and a corresponding moving image of Barack Obama opening his mouth; the researcher then moves his head to the side, and so does synthetic Obama.
Christian Theobalt, a researcher involved in the study, told me via email that he imagines deep video portraits will be used most effectively for accurate dubbing in foreign films, advanced face editing techniques for post-production in film, and special effects.
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