That 'live' city council meeting from 3 weeks ago still gives me the creeps

I was watching a city council meeting from Austin streamed online, the one about the new zoning law. Something felt off about the mayor's blinking, it was too regular, like every 2 seconds on the dot. Then I noticed the audio didn't match her lip movements when she said 'public hearing.' I paused and scrubbed back 3 times, and on the third watch I saw a weird glitch around her ear where the background warped. I found out later the original meeting was from last year and they had stitched in a different mayor's face using AI. It's scary what they can do now to fake local government stuff. Has anyone else spotted these fakes in small town meetings or am I just being paranoid?

3 comments

3 Comments

fionafoster10d ago

Haven't we all learned by now that blinking is the tell? My cousin is a video editor and he says the audio drift thing is super common with deepfakes because the compression algorithms can't handle sync for more than 20 seconds. Honestly, if they're gonna fake a zoning meeting, at least spring for the premium AI package so the ears don't glitch out.

holly70910d ago

@fionafoster has got the right idea about those compression algorithms, they really do mess up the audio sync after a bit. It makes you wonder if the folks running these meetings are even aware their mayor is a glitchy deepfake or if they just think she had a bad haircut that day. Maybe someone should start a GoFundMe for the premium AI package so at least the ears don't look like they're melting.

flores.emma10d ago

Actually the audio sync issue isn't really from compression algorithms per se. It's more about the timecode mismatches between the video and audio tracks when they get transcoded separately. Compression can make it worse but the drift itself starts from a bad multiplex or the original recording having different frame rates for the audio and video streams. I work with video files a lot and I've seen perfectly compressed deepfakes with no glitches on the ears but still fall out of sync because someone didn't check the sample rates matched.