Went to a town hall meeting in Austin and the mayor's speech looked totally off

They had a big screen showing him talk about the new park, but his mouth moved weird, like it was out of sync with his voice. My buddy next to me pulled up a clip from a different event on his phone and the mayor's face looked totally different, way more tired and angry. How can we trust anything from a public official if their basic video feed might be touched up?

5 comments

5 Comments

juliarodriguez2mo ago

Makes me glad my webcam is so bad it can't even get my face right... let alone fake it.

jessej233mo ago

Whoa, that's a new level of creepy. It's not just about making someone look better. What if they're using this tech to change what a person is actually saying in real time? Imagine a feed that swaps out a phrase like "raise taxes" for "cut taxes" before it hits the public stream. We already have voice changers and deepfakes. A live, subtle edit on an official broadcast would be the ultimate gaslighting tool. You couldn't trust your own ears.

granthunt3mo ago

Forget swapping words, that's the obvious part. The real horror is changing the tone and emotion in real time, making a calm answer sound angry or a lie sound totally sincere. You'd have no way to know if the person on screen ever actually felt the way they're being made to look.

the_olivia2mo ago

Yeah, the "no way to know" part is what gets me. I always figured you could spot a fake if you looked close enough. But tweaking the tone like that, making someone sound sure when they were hesitant, that's different. It breaks the last bit of trust you could have in a live feed. Changes the whole game.

emeryc213mo ago

But that "ultimate gaslighting tool" would be caught instantly by the other side's broadcast.

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