Produced by | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author | Wooden boy
Editing, cartography 丨 Slag County
Title Map 丨 "The Book of Veles"
This article was first published on the tiger sniff young content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the face, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
If you think you still have some ability to recognize the truth and falsity of the news, then you may wish to try the following set of pictures.
There are normal real shots in the 5 pictures, there are artificial modeling, can you tell how many fakes and how many real?
The answer is four false and one true, and only the last one is a real picture without processing. The relationships between the characters and scenes in other pictures are derived from 3D modeling, pure fictional works.
A little difficult? No need to be frustrated.
Don't say it's you, even a professional news photographer may not be able to distinguish.
Not long ago, a fake news book made up of the above fake images just fooled one of the world's top photojournalists and won a Hesse Award (World Press Photo Contest).
"The Book of Veles" wins the "Open Form Award" in Europe at the Holsay Prize
For up to 6 months after publication, none of the readers, including the judges of the professional photo contest, found that the content of the book was purely fabricated, and even when the author bought the trumpet to expose the fact that he was fake, the reader took the initiative to jump out to defend him.
This is Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen's The Book of Veles.
In the visual "Turing Experiment" in the Book of Veles, the entire human army is destroyed.
Jonas Bendiksen never imagined that this prank would last so long.
As a Magnum photographer who has won a 2-time Holsai Award, it's his daily job to focus on the news scene in the corner of the world.
Photographer Jonas Bendiksen, born in 1977
At first, he just wanted to go to the city of Veles, north Macedonia's world-famous fake news producer, and photograph the young people who were producing fake news here.
At this point, there is not a hint of falsehood - although it is a fake news story to tell, but this matter is really true. BuzzFeed, The Guardian and many others have reported on how fake news in Veles City helped Trump pull himself into the information war to win the 2016 U.S. election.
As long as you honestly follow this path and finish the photo and publish it, it is another qualified documentary photography work.
BuzzFeed: How teenagers in the Balkans are using fake news to deceive Trump supporters
But when Bendiksen began investigating the origin of the city's name, a nasty and exciting plan popped into his mind.
He discovered that the city of Veles got its name from a Slavic primitive natural religion, the Veles.
Just mention the name of the god Velez, and you can pick up a long chain of lies and deception from the long river of history.
This god is the god of chaos, magic and deception, often transforming into the form of a bear or a cow, wandering among the mountains and wilderness, and can be called the "Slavic loki".
As one of the few primitive deities in the Slavic nation-state where traces of sacrifice can be widely found, the scriptures about him were once important roots-seeking texts in Slavic nationalist circles.
For a long time, how to confirm the life and beliefs of their people in the seventh and eighth centuries in the text was a matter of distress to the Slavs. It wasn't until 1919 that Russian officer Fyodor Izenbek accidentally found a mysterious plank engraved with the Veles Book.
After years of deciphering, it was discovered that this scripture recorded the story of the early Slavic national epic that the Slavs had been diligently seeking. If they found the treasure, they immediately invited the Book of Veles into the museum and classroom and compiled it into primary school textbooks.
But decades later, more researchers have analyzed and found that the Book of Veles may not exist, but is just a forgery carefully concocted in the special political environment of the last century.
Veles.
A god of lies known as the Book of Lies, a small town of lies named after the god of lies.
Struck by this sense of intertextuality, Bendiksen decided to use his work to add another link to the nine chains of lies—a fake news book about Veles.
In an interview with Magnum News Agency, he introduced: To this end, he first quickly learned about the 3D character modeling software commonly used in the computer game and film industries on YouTube, and then purchased some character prototypes and created a series of original characters with different costumes and details.
"The amount of money I spend on virtual costumes for these digital characters is about 10 times what I've spent on my own wardrobe over the past few years."
Bendiksen demonstrates the character modeling process
The actors are in place, and the next step is to set up the scene.
Bendiksen took his camera and set off for the city of Veles, where he photographed parks, factories, offices, all the scenes that interested him, and recorded the specific light conditions of a particular scene with a special 360-degree camera.
On the computer, he converts these photos into 3D space, and then invites the prepared "modeled actors" into the stage to adjust their moods, poses, and lights according to the original scene.
Finally, press enter, snap, and an excellent and emotionally charged news picture is made.
The three characters in this picture are the characters in the modeling above, do you see it?
Not only are the characters fake, but there is not a single word of truth in the book that appears to come from a live interview.
"There is no code of ethics in cyberspace. Cyberspace is open to everyone who has a computer. ”
"We didn't do anything illegal. Wouldn't you want to share these news? I don't care if these things are true or not, what matters is that people believe in these things they are looking at. ”
These direct quotes are all automatically generated by AI.
And it's not so expensive lab-level AI, just a free trainable text creation system that can be searched casually on the Internet.
The system, called GPT-2, has done its initial training on millions of real websites, like a cream cake that's already done with a basic plaster, and you can build on that, feeding it specific text to form the specific text style you need.
Introduction page for GPT-2
Bendiksen brought all the reports in the English-language media about the fabrication of fake news in Veles, as well as interviews he obtained in The Veles, and fed them into the system.
Then take the 5,000 words of text output by the system, pick and choose, transpose and paste, and form the text we see in the Book of Veles now.
"Suddenly: Putin has just announced an international arrest warrant against George Soros, and he wants Soros's old life or ...
"I didn't write a word." Bendiksen said triumphantly.
Even the large section of the pseudo-scripture "The Book of Veles" is a fabrication of AI.
"I typed the entire Book of Velez into AI, and lo and behold, I had countless computer-invented 'ancient scriptures' to fill in the blanks."
On the left is Bendiksen's fake verses in the Book of Veles forged using AI
It's just so easy to write.
In the first year of writing The Book of Veles, Bendiksen only visited the city of Veles twice, and the rest of the time he was bored at home and "closed doors" to the computer.
In April 2021, the Book of Veles was officially published in the UK.
Given that the entire production process did not use any sophisticated technology, but only a beginner's work of a half-hanging 3D modeler, Bendiksen was ready to be quickly debunked by his peers.
"Usually, my Magnum colleagues are very sensitive, and they can always see through the fake garbage at a glance."
This time, however, Magnum's photographer's eagle eyes collectively failed.
They didn't hesitate to praise Bendiksen's new work, and no one questioned why the photos looked so dark, gloomy, and full of rough grain.
In August 2021, before the truth of the Book of Veles was revealed, Magnum's official Twitter account was still enthusiastically recommending the fake book, and now this recommended article is no longer retrievable
Readers who bought the new book also gave extremely enthusiastic feedback, praising Bendiksen for providing interesting and enlightening content, and retweeting the Book of Veles to Instagram commenting:
"Fortunately, in this day and age, there are still people doing serious news like the Veles story."
Another reader tweeted praise for The Book of Veles
Perhaps the endorsement effect of celebrities is really far more powerful than we think, and for a full six months from April to September, the dubious Book of Veles did not receive even a single star of doubt.
Bendiksen received a series of requests from different media outlets, hoping to reprint his work.
He could hardly believe that no one really had recognized his clumsy little lies. So he decided to give the Book of Veles, and the entire photojournalism industry, an even more terrifying ultimate test.
He signed up for the prestigious Visa Pour l'Image festival in France and sent the organizers an ultra-high-definition full-resolution PDF of all the pictures in the book.
Bendiksen hoped that "the curator who had to select the best work of the year from a large number of pictures every year" would be able to identify these computer-generated fake pictures, but instead he received an invitation to show the nightly screening at the Perpignan Photography Festival.
At the Perpignan International Press Photo Festival, the work is on display
The Book of Veles is not invulnerable, on the contrary, it is very suspicious.
Just as legend has it that the craftsmen who made fakes in ancient times always left a little secret hint for future generations, Bendiksen also arranged many flaws and hints in the Book of Veles.
He added the bear element to many of his pictures, as if in the deserted streets of Veles, you may have a head-on encounter with these large predators at any time.
In fact, if you think about it, this is somewhat unreasonable, even if Veles is already a ruined industrial city, but the good villain is also a inhabited town, how can bears be allowed to roam around the town.
Moreover, there are almost no large-scale mountain forests near Veles, which are not suitable for bears to inhabit.
Satellite imagery of the city of Veles and its surroundings
The bear appears for only one purpose: to suggest that Velez, the god of lies, has quietly transformed into a bear and sneaks between the pages.
The humanoid model in the picture below also hides the same flaw.
The dummy hangs a necklace around its neck, which is an inverted A-shaped double bar symbol.
This symbol is the "Seal of the God Velez", which symbolizes the calming and exorcism of evil spirits, and blesses the lost people in the forest to embark on the right return.
The left page is blank, without any words interfering with the line of sight, and the dummy raises one eyebrow, as if provoking the reader outside the screen: Don't you feel that something is wrong?
In the previous pages, the Book of Veles describes this symbol
Even a search of Wikipedia reveals that the so-called ancient scriptures donkey lips are not right for the horse's mouth, and even the wiki screenshots of the Book of Veles are processed products.
The Book of Veles adds a completely false explanation that wikipedia doesn't have
If you look at it with a skeptical eye, you will find that the book is full of doubts.
But the reality is that Bendiksen spilled crumbs on the ground, but no one bent down to pick them up.
In the end, Bendiksen had to buy a small self-blackening for 40 US dollars.
He manipulated the woman named @Chloe Miskin to question:
"I'm from the town of Veles, and I saw the Book of Veles at the Perpignan Press Photo Festival. There are some things that are very wrong with this report, and I know some of the inside scoops. I'm 100 percent sure none of his pictures are real fake newsmakers. ”
It is also implied that the characters appearing in the book are actors that Bendiksen paid for.
Facebook snub named after @Chloe Miskin
To Bendiksen's surprise, his photographer friends, when they heard about the question, not only did not believe it and investigate, but instead voluntarily began to defend him.
It wasn't until a photographer named @duckrabbit pointed out that the heroine's profile page on Bendiksen's profile was dressed exactly the same as a female interviewee in The Book of Veles that the prank scam was finally solved.
When @duckrabbit asked questions, Bendiksen was overjoyed, and after 6 months, under all kinds of hints, someone finally saw through his ruse. He couldn't wait to jump out and admit everything, and confessed the whole process to the Magnum News Agency in detail:
"Thanks to @duckrabbit, I can finally be an honest and good citizen again."
@duckrabbit responded to him: "I am the terminator of the fake photojournalist."
The story of the Book of Veles proves to us how gullible we are to fake news today, and how cheap it is to make fake news.
And then the story of the city of Veles will tell you how profitable and amazing the business of making fake news is.
Many believe that it was North Macedonia, a group of ten or twenty-year-old fake newsmakers, who instigated the fanaticism of the Trump camp during the 2016 US election and put the most deviant president in US history into power.
In fact, young people in Weasley have been joking, "We should put a memorial to Trump, who is our god of wealth."
This lost former industrial town has been struggling with the dying industries since the decline of its pillar industries. Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991, no public buildings have been built here except for a theater.
Unemployment is nearly a quarter, young people can't find jobs, people can't afford to make a decent living even if they go out to work, and just a few years ago, the Willes were synonymous with the "Frankfurt Mafia".
A casual shot in The City of Veles can capture a wave of gloom and melancholy like an abandoned amusement park, the words of the corrupt government cannot be believed a word, and the young people here have no hope for the future and are extremely confused.
Until some of them suddenly discovered the fake news business.
The operation mode of the Veles counterfeiting workshop is very simple:
Build a news site, edit some fake news stuffed in, give them a tempting headline, and then post the headline on Facebook to lure it.
Every user click that is attracted will form revenue through Google advertising, one cent at a time, accumulating into more, as long as you have enough clicks, you can get a very considerable income.
CNN纪录片：This fake news machine gears up for 2020
According to BuzzFeed, a successful fake news maker in Veles city can make $5,000 a month, and at the highest level of traffic, it can get three thousand a day.
In these small counterfeit workshops, even the lowest-end jobs can be paid 350 to 500 euros a month, while a reporter for North Macedonia's national television station is only 300 euros a month.
As a fake interview in the Book of Veles puts it:
"We don't have a job here that makes more money than doing this. It's not really a serious job, but it's real money. ”
Most of the operators of these websites are young people with flexible minds, and many of them start running websites just to earn some extra money and save themselves a start-up fund for college.
But they soon found that the job was so profitable that the best could earn a lot of money that their peers might not make in their lifetime, and gradually, no one mentioned the dream of saving enough money to go to college, and one by one they turned to full-time and worked hard.
CNN纪录片：This fake news machine gears up for 2020
According to The Guardian, in 2016, there were at least 140 well-documented Fake Velez news stations operating, including 7 large teams and hundreds of lone rangers.
But local counterfeiters in Veles argue that the number of actual fake news sites far exceeds this statistic:
"50% of young people here are involved in these sites. I estimate that we have 3000-5000 active websites participating during the US election. ”
A web designer also revealed that between 2015 and 2016, he designed at least 300 fake news websites to create fake news, which has become a prominent science in this small city of just over 46,000 people.
CNN纪录片：This fake news machine gears up for 2020
Some conspiracy theories say that the massive amount of disinformation in Favor of Trump released by the Veles during the U.S. election is the result of the intervention of "outside forces."
But in the eyes of the Veles, where there is any external force, only money plays a role.
Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the "external forces" from the United States have to go to North Macedonia to set up a fake news base, you know, the official language of this place is Slavic Macedonian, and most people are not fluent in English.
Publish fake news because fake news will always have more audiences than real news.
Facebook was chosen because Facebook's user click value is four times that of other platforms.
Choose the United States because users in the United States have the highest click value in the world.
Write specifically about Trump because news that favors Trump will generate far more clicks than left-leaning news.
At the end of the day, everything is economically oriented.
CNN纪录片：This fake news machine gears up for 2020
Making fake news is really a lucrative business.
You only need to brush up on the outrageous news of the right-wing websites in the United States every day, and then give them a streamlined rewrite and a more sensational headline, and you can be ready to reap the benefits of the Political Struggle in the United States.
Hillary Clinton in 2013: "I would like to see people like Trump running for office who are honest and can't be bought off." ”》
"Mike Penns says: Michelle Obama is "the crudest first lady we have"
"Pope Claims to Support Trump"
The young willis sat in front of his battered computer desk, coldly watching the popular sentiments on the other side of the ocean in full swing, and weaving the most touching lies with the most unconcerned mentality.
The adaptor even complained while rewriting: "Will anyone believe this kind of outrageous news?" How stupid would people have to be to believe this news? We North Macedonians who grew up being deceived by the government don't believe it, and I even think that if they really think it's true, then that's the punishment they deserve. ”
This passage was rewritten by AI in the Book of Veles as follows: "If those politicians are stupid enough to allow this to exist, then perhaps they deserve it." ”
They never think they are wrong, on the contrary, they firmly believe that making money is my skill, and believing that it is your incompetence.
Like a bunch of bloodthirsty mercenaries, the Veles have no political stance, only economic claims. In 2016, most of them didn't even think Trump would win the election, and they were ready to turn fake news sites into sports and health when Trump lost the election and the traffic feast dissipated.
As a result, Trump's unexpected victory brought another 4 years of traffic dividends, but the Willes people did not expect much from the future. They still feel that this is just a quick sum of money, like a sturgeon migrating in the spring, which will one day disappear without a trace.
So they threw all this money at today, and over the years, Veles's most developed industries are nightclubs and bars, and green money from the United States quickly turned into luxury cars and fine wine, and then flowed back to the global capital chain.
After the international community became aware of the butterfly effect of this group of young people, the city of Weasley quickly became the center of public condemnation.
A study in Nature showed that a facebook post on Election Day could lead to an additional vote of 340,000 people. So these young people in North Macedonia, who only want to make money and buy alcohol, undoubtedly affect the fair and just domestic affairs of the United States.
According to the New Yorker, even Obama was eagerly discussing with his staff the "crazy conspiracy theory" that the small city had created on Facebook.
Journalists from all over the world rushed to the town of Veles to try to hear the confessions of those in power here for causing trouble to the international situation.
But Slavsho Chadiev, the mayor of Veles, is proud of this, arguing that fake news has given little Veles a name on the world map.
"They didn't do anything illegal within the framework of their country's laws."
"Where is there morality in politics?" Can morality still be called politics? ”
"It's just a real way to make quick money, like you call the 'American Dream.'"
CNN纪录片：This fake news machine gears up for 2020
Today, discerning a fake piece of news with the naked eye alone has become an almost impossible task.
Although artificial intelligence technology is still 18,000 miles away from the real brain in science fiction movies, the rigorously trained AI fools ordinary humans more and more easily.
Journalism is one of the most easily imitated genres of all texts, and its emphasis on rationality and the abandonment of sensibility are the strengths of AI.
This kind of text generated with a marketing number generator, each AI can randomly sort out millions of pieces
At the same time, the threshold of image counterfeiting technology is getting lower and lower, and the fidelity is getting higher and higher.
On a website called "This Person Doesn't Exist," every time you refresh it, you can see the face of an ordinary person with wrinkles, freckles, thick pores, and even subtle emotions, like every human face that has been through the vicissitudes of time. But they don't exist in the world, they're just electronic products made by AI.
In these faces, you don't even feel the uncanny valley effect that virtual idols often bring.
Without the use of technical means such as image search, even a professional photographer may fall into a completely indistinguishable dilemma as when facing the Book of Veles.
If it weren't for the machine showing the horse's feet, would you recognize that this lady is not a real person?
The cost of counterfeiting is getting lower and lower, and the fidelity of fake news is getting higher and higher, which inevitably makes people worry, will our information world be expelled by bad money in the future, and eventually completely shrouded in fake news?
But in fact, calm down and think about it, throughout history, fake news has never been absent.
From Zhu Yunjiao's refuge in Nanyang to the legend of the water monkey that has been popular for centuries, each era can pick up several world-known fake news.
Just like the gossip of the three sisters and six wives in the streets and alleys, it always enriches the social and entertainment life of the people.
@Infinitus Bright shows the coverage of rumors about water monkeys on the mainland in the middle of the last century in the video
How come to this day, we have begun to worry about fake news to scratch our hearts and scratch our livers?
Perhaps because the sudden expansion of the information flow in the Internet age has made the opportunity and frequency of exposure to fake news rise, suddenly increasing the sense of existence of this "old friend".
Sensory, fake news is flooding social media inexorably, and repeated debunking and counter-debunking is exhausting.
We're used to blaming all this on Pandora's box of new network technologies, and condemning algorithms that blindly pursue traffic for traffic for ruining serious news.
It is true that the emergence of new technologies and new things is always changing the world, and the world is always inevitably stressed in the early stages of change.
Like the Gutenberg printing press that set Martin Luther's "deviant" pamphlet on fire, the rise of cafes in the 17th century transformed the public communication space for urbanites.
They were both harshly criticized by the Pope, with the former banned by the Pope and the latter accused of distracting people from their work and study like Internet cafes.
But today, when these innovations have long since become routine, we find that it is never technology that is at fault, but people whose minds fail to keep pace.
Blaming technology will only make us ignore the things behind the technology that really deserve attention.
In the past, with the mass media as the authoritative source of information, I believed that the traditional editorial mechanism could bring us reliable information to some extent.
In the era of social media, the power to push information was suddenly ceded to the algorithm that ruled everything, and the authority of mass media was also delegated to social platforms.
The huge amount of unfiltered and verified information is thrown in front of us, so that while we gain press freedom, we also have to face a difficult problem - you need to learn the skills that only those news editors needed to master in the past, and how to distinguish between the heavy and the true and false in the massive amount of information.
Don't think that discerning the news is a simple matter, a 2017 stanford university study pointed out that to complete this job, it takes a high degree of professionalism.
The researchers then selected 10 historians with Ph.D., 25 Stanford undergraduates, and 10 professional fact-checkers to assess their ability to discern sociopolitical news online.
The results were unexpected, with only professional fact-checkers passing the test of fake news, and both Stanford undergraduates and historians were caught in the trap of fake news.
The researchers found that both undergraduates and historians tended to rely on websites with "authority" and use that authority as the primary source of information to make judgments, while fact-checkers would browse as many sources as possible on the same topic in a short period of time and synthesize each source to draw conclusions.
Compared with ordinary people, fact-checkers will use a variety of methods such as image anti-search and time retrospection, and at the same time, they are less deflected by emotional news.
This operation is certainly much more troublesome than reading in a straight face, and excessive rationality will also make us lose a lot of the absurd pleasure of watching outrageous fake news.
But that is the price of freedom, and no one can be free from equal responsibility while being free.
This is perhaps the truth of the social media era that the Book of Veles most wants to tell us:
The "truth" of the news is never given by others, but your own judgment with a huge amount of information.
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