Yep, this is my reaction too. People are conflating two fundamentally different problems. One is having the ability to know what's real, the other is actually k

Yep, this is my reaction too. People are conflating two fundamentally different problems. One is having the ability to know what's real, the other is actually knowing. Ability is what interests me most. Faking this sort of content - a continuous, closeup shot of the President saying something - has basically never been possible before. If a total stranger had showed you this video in 1969, it would have been clearly authentic. Not clearly truthful, you wouldn't trust that the landing had really failed as opposed to e.g. Nixon recording speeches for both outcomes. But you could be pretty sure it wasn't an imposter or an edit or anything except the real Nixon on camera. Deepfakes challenge that ability, but I don't think they'll destroy it. Official sources will sign video. Untrusted sources will use verified timestamping and other methods to prove specific claims about their footage. Actual knowledge, on the other hand, can't be destroyed by deepfakes because we already don't have it. There are a hundred ways to lie to people - with photoshopped images, deceptive editing, or just lying and having people trust that the evidence exists somewhere. People who aren't easily fooled today will become skeptical about video footage too. People who are easily fooled are already fooled, have been fooled since before photography straight through to the present, and will just stay that way. "Banning political deepfakes" or anything similar is not just a case of closing the barn door after the horses have left, but without ever getting the horses into the barn.