Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as a silly but clear example of how cutting and reordering real footage can fabricate meaning without any deepfake technology.
What it is
A 2012 parody dub that splices clips of Barack Obama speaking into a performance of Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'. It is a short comedic mashup built entirely from re-ordered snippets of his real speech.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2012 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Cites ChuckMcM · 2012-09 · on “New Content-Delivery Tech Should Be Presumed Illegal, Says Former Copyright Boss”
"We are now getting misleading Techdirt stories secondhand through Slashdot. It's interesting to see how far this game of telephone might go." You know when I was watching President Obama's cover of the hit single "Call me maybe" [1] I was thinking the same thing. Kidding aside though, the two things that the Youtube spoof and this have in common are taking snippets of actual "stuff" and mashing them together into something that the person making the mashup finds useful/amusing/entertaining. As HN and Reddit and slashdot before them seep into the journalistic consciousness there are pretty clear efforts to craft a message based on selective sampling. By drilling into the sources for all the
Cites aliakhtar · 2016-11 · on “Adobe Voco 'Photoshop-for-voice' causes concern”
> I'm sure with a lot of dedication any amateur can already collect enough unique sounds and and snippets from prominent people to fake sentences [this video]
Cites JoshuaDavid · 2020-08 · on “Stopping deepfake news with an AI algorithm that can tell when a face doesnt fit”
While video is currently unlikely to be entirely fabricated at this point, you might be surprised at what can be accomplished with camera angles, choosing the start and end times of your clip, and cuts and reordering of clips: for a silly example of this, see "Obama sings Call Me Maybe"[1]. Videos can also be staged with varying levels of convincingness. If you are digging for evidence, the source of your information must be taken into account. Deepfakes will probably be detectable in retrospect, even if they are not detectable at the time of publication, so if you stick with sources with a long history of only publishing real information, you're probably still fine even in the age of deepfa