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Original w:light stage used in the 1999 reflectance capture by w:Paul Debevec et al at the w:University of Southern California.

It consists of two w:rotary axes with w:height and w:radius control. A w:light source and a w:polarizer in front of the light source were placed on one arm and a camera and the other polarizer on the other arm. See picture below, for what they did to the captured reflection.

Original image by Debevec et al. – Copyright ACM 2000 – https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=311779.344855 – Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

Image 1: Separating specular and diffuse reflected light

(a) Normal image in dot lighting

(b) Image of the diffuse reflection which is caught by placing a vertical polarizer in front of the light source and a horizontal in the front the camera

(c) Image of the highlight specular reflection which is caught by placing both polarizers vertically

(d) Subtraction of c from b, which yields the specular component

Images are scaled to seem to be the same luminosity.

Original image by Debevec et al. – Copyright ACM 2000 – https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=311779.344855 – Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

When the camera does not exist, but the subject being imaged with a simulation of a (movie) camera deceives the watcher to believe it is some living or dead person it is a digital look-alike.

In 2017-2018 this started to be referred to as w:deepfake, even though altering video footage of humans with a computer with a deceiving effect is actually 20 yrs older than the name "deep fakes" or "deepfakes".^[1]^[2]

When it cannot be determined by human testing or media forensics whether some fake voice is a synthetic fake of some person's voice, or is it an actual recording made of that person's actual real voice, it is a pre-recorded digital sound-alike. This is now commonly referred to as w:audio deepfake.

Real-time digital look-and-sound-alike in a video call was used to defraud a substantial amount of money in 2023.^[3]

Welcome to Stop Synthetic Filth! wiki, an open w:non-profit w:copylefted w:public service announcement wiki that contains no pornography and that anybody can edit anonymously or with a free account available upon reasonable request.

This is a wiki about discovering ways of stopping and minimizing the damage from synthetic human-like fakes i.e naked digital look-alikes and digital sound-alikes that result from covert modeling i.e. thieving of the human appearance and of the naked human voice.

Adequate Porn Watcher AI (concept) #SSF! wiki proposed countermeasure to synthetic porn: Adequate Porn Watcher AI is a 2019 concept for an AI to protect the humans against synthetic filth attacks by looking for porn that should not be.

How to protect yourself and others from covert modeling

Biblical explanation - The books of Daniel and Revelation, wherein Daniel 7 and Revelation 13 we are warned of this age of industrial filth, is for those who believe in Jesus.

As of 1 November 2024 the wiki has 23 articles with 4,556 edits.

Synopses of SSF! wiki in other languages in wordpress

#SSF!'s predecessor domain is Ban-Covert-Modeling.org #BCM!. It will expire on Wednesday 2029-03-14, unless renewed.

Get in touch

If you have any questions you can contact Juho Kunsola through the contact form or the chat at the SSF! wordpress or alternatively leave a note on my my talk page
Stop Synthetic Filth is stop_synthetic_filth_org@d.consumium.org on diaspora*
Stop Synthetic Filth is @stopsyntheticf on twitter

Introduction Since the early 00's it has become (nearly) impossible to determine in still or moving pictures what is an image of a human, imaged with a (movie) camera and what on the other hand is a simulation of an image of a human imaged with a simulation of a camera. When there is no camera and the target being imaged with a simulation looks deceptively like some real human, dead or living, it is a digital look-alike.

Now in the late 2010's the equivalent thing is happening to our voices i.e. they can be stolen to some extent with the 2016 prototypes like w:Adobe Inc.'s w:Adobe Voco and w:Google's w:DeepMind w:WaveNet and made to say anything. When it is not possible to determine with human testing or testing with technological means what is a recording of some living or dead person's real voice and what is a simulation it is a digital sound-alike. 2018 saw the publication of Google Research's sound-like-anyone machine 'Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis' at the w:NeurIPS conference and by the end of 2019 Symantec research had learned of 3 cases where digital sound-alike technology had been used for crimes.^[4]

Then in 2018 at the w:Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) the work 'Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis' (at arXiv.org) was presented. The pre-trained model is able to steal voices from a sample of only 5 seconds with almost convincing results

The Iframe below is transcluded from 'Audio samples from "Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis"' at google.gituhub.io, the audio samples of a sound-like-anyone machine presented as at the 2018 w:NeurIPS conference by Google researchers.

Have a listen.

Observe how good the "VCTK p240" system is at deceiving to think that it is a person that is doing the talking.

Therefore it is high time to act and to ban unauthorized synthetic pornography, build the Adequate Porn Watcher AI (concept) to protect humanity from visual synthetic filth and to criminalize covert modeling of the naked human voice and synthesis from a covert voice model!

Covert modeling poses growing threats to

The right to be the only one that looks like me (compromised by digital look-alikes)
The right to be the only one able to make recordings that sound like me (compromised by digital sound-alikes)

And these developments have various severe effects on the right to privacy, provability by audio and video evidence and deniability.