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We're in an uncanny valley. When deep fakes are good enough to fool people consistently, and cheap and low skill enough to become ubiquitous, people will stop t
by hirundo 6y ago
We're in an uncanny valley. When deep fakes are good enough to fool people consistently, and cheap and low skill enough to become ubiquitous, people will stop trusting any video or audio by default. It becomes futile to waste influence ops on it. Now, good ones are difficult enough to produce that they are plausible in the right context.
Given that legislative and law enforcement efforts are unlikely to roll back this tide, especially from foreign actors, the better path is forward: more deep fakes, cheaper and easier tools, lower friction methods of vouching for content, yielding less gullible consumers.
- dpflan 6y agoAnd more research into deepfake generation and detection methods. I'm sure there will be an arms race of sorts for detection and methods to reduce signatures of deepfake in the generated images.
- Jeff_Brown 6y agoThis comment somewhat contradicts its parent comment. Deep fake detection research will postpone the day nobody trusts video and audio. I don't know which is better. It's very hard for me to imagine the world where nobody believes such things. Will we continue to have a third of US society believing in an alternate reality? Will people start signing every statement cryptographically, so that nobody can put fake words in their mouths? Will the need to track the reputations of news providers (rather than taking the videos they provide at face value) render spewers of nonsense less influential?
- dpflan 6y agoDeepfake detection will not be an in-lock-step-antithetical-force to deepfake ubiquity. It does not necessarily postpone, it will have to live with and be the "immune system" if you will. The first successful deepfake that gets us all and proves the warnings correct will certainly ignite fervent research (and maybe policy and law) into mitigation/control of the technology. It would be used certainly as misinformation to legitimize an egregious act that succeeds and leaves everyone dumbfounded for X amount time necessary for whatever the egregious act is to succeed. Or there could be small scale, minor alterations of speech that disrupt automated systems meant to scour the internet for such-and-such person talking about such-and-such thing. Deep faking CEOs, quarterly reviews, etc. But, alas, yes, even without deepfakes, society is susceptible to reality distortion.
- nathias 6y agoI'm not that optimistic, they will just believe video/images provided from their trusted source (like they do now), but the source will have more power over what reality it presents to its followers.
- asdff 6y agoBefore we had digital cameras, anyone could manipulate images in a darkroom. We did it in high school, it's not hard. The world didn't end with this disinformation, we just labeled the moon landing deniers as conspiracy theorists and moved on with our lives.