8 ms·

It is also so devastating that you can no longer believe anything published online, even if it looks legit. This is going to be one more dimension to misinform

It is also so devastating that you can no longer believe anything published online, even if it looks legit. This is going to be one more dimension to misinformation on the net. Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a fake.

DougN7 5y ago
I agree - this is going to make finding the truth so much harder once it’s weaponized as it surely will be. How can representative democracy flourish when you can no longer tell who you want to represent you?
krastanov 5y ago
This feels like it has been true since forever, just with other media. A picture with a made up quote seems exactly as damaging. Good journalists will continue vetting sources and unscrupulous TV personalities will continue showing whatever fits their narrative without vetting.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It has been true only to a certain level. Photos can be faked and videos can be mislabeled, but as long as it happens it small enough number it is possible to have people point it out and make a fuss about it. This changes when individual people with no resources at all can make convincing fakes and wield it as a weapon to sow disinformation, to have it then picked up by "major" media, all information on the net becomes pretty useless.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    Again, this was always true, we relied on news agencies and such to be gatekeepers of what is true. Sometimes a random video pops up and people believe it shows X and then it propagates but it's something completely different (e.g. people beating up immigrants on the streets in northern Italy -> traditional krampus celebrations; Junker drunk at some event -> Junker suffers from lombalgia; Berlusconi mimicing a sexual act on some woman -> it was a comedian skit; Britney Spears sex tape -> it's a random pornstar ...) People will learn to be doubtful of random internet videos just as they have learned to be doubtful of random internet articles. Or not, since they haven't yet, but it's not a qualitative change.
  - Fricken 5y ago
    The majority of Covid disinformation was spread by 12 people with limited resources. They didn't need deepfakes. Deepfakes add nothing of substance to the liar's toolkit. It's easy to lie to people so long as you're saying things that validate their shitty emotions. Conversely, it's extremely hard to tell people the truth when it goes against their shitty emotions.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Tangent, but: Emotions can't be shitty. You can miscalibrate your emotional responses to situations, much as you can sear your conscience. But the emotions themselves - the full range are valid human feelings, from fury to transcendent joy.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        "valid" seems sort of weasel-wordy here.
        NateEag 5y ago
        Okay, I'll phrase it more strongly: Emotions as such are good, from sorrow to rage to joy. Each one is a good response to some situations, as far as I can tell. Your emotional response can be misplaced, so that you experience an inappropriate emotional in some situations. As noted elsewhere in the thread, you can also be inspired by your emotions to inappropriate (and just terrible) behavior. The emotions themselves, though, are not shitty. Recognizing them and understanding where they're coming from can be tremendously helpful in aligning your actions with reality and your own values, and even in discovering what your own values are. I share this perspective not out of a sense of superiority but in the hope that it helps someone else avoid my mistakes.
        robertlagrant 5y ago
        I don't see the point in saying emotions are automatically good, but also inappropriate. This just seems like a segregation of two concepts that don't need separating. E.g. saying "I think people of type X are bad so I feel hatred towards them" is a good emotion but misplaced, vs is a bad emotion? I don't see the useful distinction.
  - dahart 5y ago
    > It has been true only to a certain level. […] as long as it happens it small enough number it is possible to have people point it out and make a fuss about it. I think the opposite is true. This isn’t a historical perspective, you’re using logic to speculate. Historically speaking, there have been fakes that reached huge numbers of people, and they were more damaging then than they are today because they were more believable; the public had not yet conceived that photos could be faked, and it was not possible to see evidence of fakery. Today, everyone knows photos and videos can be faked. I don’t know of any deep fake videos yet that have tricked a large number of people or been used for political purposes. Maybe it has happened, I don’t know, do you know? But there have been lots of influential faked photos. Just Google a little to find hundreds of historical examples of famous and misleading doctored photos. (Lots of overlap in these lists, because some of the photos are famous). https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/history.pdf https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/history.pdf https://delmarwatsonphotos.com/photographs/famous-photographs/ https://delmarwatsonphotos.com/photographs/famous-photograph... https://www.quora.com/What-historical-photos-are-highly-misleading https://www.quora.com/What-historical-photos-are-highly-misl... https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-photos-history-2011-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-photos-history-2011-8 https://www.ranker.com/list/historic-images-that-were-retouched/stephanroget https://www.ranker.com/list/historic-images-that-were-retouc... https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=29607 https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=29607 https://www.pinterest.com/yosomono/faked-images-everyone-thinks-are-real/ https://www.pinterest.com/yosomono/faked-images-everyone-thi...
- psychomugs 5y ago
  Since the inception of photography, all photographs have been lies [1,2]. The only remedy is critical thinking and awareness and skepticism on the part of the recipients, which is being outpaced by the technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard#Self_Portrait_as_a_Drowned_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard#Self_Portrait... [2] https://i.redd.it/nh45pwigrhc21.jpg https://i.redd.it/nh45pwigrhc21.jpg
kikokikokiko 5y ago
I remember watching "The Running Man" when I was a kid and thinking that the scene were Arnold loses the fight to the Jesse Ventura guy, that in the movie was a "Deep Fake", was so unrealistic... man, we are already there. Nothing can be believed anymore.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
another-dave 5y ago
Would be good if content publishers did something like digitally signing their content along with embedded metadata so if e.g. you see a video circulating you can see that the BBC attested that it was released by them & its original air date was such & such. Or if you see a quote claiming to be from Emmanuel Macron or Boris Johnson, you can see it was released with a digital signature from a Guardian journalist & they add whatever date/time/location details they want to validate the information. If instead I release something (on Twitter or wherever) that I say is a screen-capture of my TV, _I_ add the metadata (originally seen on BBC on 27 Jul, 1:55pm) and sign and then you know that you only trust it as much as you trust _my_ reputation rather than the BBC. Wouldn't solve the problem entirely but it might create a bit of an audit trail for stuff and encourage people not to trust unvetted material.
- Goz3rr 5y ago
  Metadata that would swiftly be destroyed by the first twitter/facebook user reposting a screenshot/screenrecording from their phone
  - db_admin 5y ago
    While still maintaining a verifiable origin
  - another-dave 5y ago
    Exactly, so if I upload something and say "Look what I just recorded off the BBC!" you _shouldn't_ believe me if creating a deep-fake becomes as easy as recording the real thing. In that scenario, you'd want people to say "but wait, there's no signature on this, it could be fake" and then only trust the video as much as you trust the source (not the claimed source).
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Lack of the right kind of metadata would be the first tell.
- barrkel 5y ago
  Then, when someone videos an atrocity, they need to choose between publishing publicly (risking retribution) or publishing anonymously (if they even know how) and risk being disbelieved.
liotier 5y ago
> Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a fake Back to text and the good'ol credibility of the messenger. Digital commodified journalists and now the need for credibility will let them get out of anonymity again.
bongoman37 5y ago
I think we'll eventually see hardware that cryptographically signs the content as soon as it is produced with timestamp, but then that could be fooled by someone creating a deepfake, projecting it on a high resolution screen and then photographing with another camera. Or we wouldn't believe things unless they are captured by multiple cameras at different angles and maybe future GANs will be able to cover that. We are seeing the beginning of an arms race!
- visarga 5y ago
  As of recently we can recreate 3D space in the weights of a neural network Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuH79E8rdKc&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuH79E8rdKc&t=5s
danparsonson 5y ago
Not to mention the politicians who are recorded doing something genuinely shady and will wave it away as fake news - this is happening already even without deep fakes.
tarsinge 5y ago
How do you already believe something written is legit? Does it not just put video on par with text?
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Normally you try to think and reconcile it with knowledge and experience you already have. The problem is when everything you have ever learned is suspect.
tvirosi 5y ago
This has been true since forever though. (It's such a weird point.) Very believable photoshops have been possible since forever, but you generally only believe images that are verified by a trusted source. Even ridiculously fakable things like "someone telling you a thing is true" (without having photographic evidence of it) has somehow not been completely eroded as a communication channel by deceptive agents because of reputation and trust holding it all up.
nIHOPp6MQw0f5ut 5y ago
This has been a possibility for decades but only for those with large budgets. Now that it is more widely accessible more people actually know it can be done.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > This has been a possibility for decades but only for those with large budgets. Yep. You don't need CGI if you can search a large population for someone who looks like insert-public-figure-here and make up the difference with makeup.
tshaddox 5y ago
Does anyone actually determine what to believe this way? Like if you read a quote from a politician in a large newspaper, you don’t believe it’s real, but if you see a cell phone video of the politician saying something at a rally, you do believe it’s real? Personally my confidence in the veracity would be the opposite. There’s nothing special about video that makes it fundamentally harder than text to distort, edit, or even outright fabricate.
- xfitm3 5y ago
  What would a detective or a jury believe? Video or testimony?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Presumably they would believe (or at least be instructed to believe) neither implicitly.
Geee 5y ago
The problem is actually opposite. People won't believe anything because they assume that what they are seeing is a deep fake. It's happening already. If you see videos online of Trump / Biden / someone notable there's always someone claiming that it's a deep fake if they don't like what they see.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Isn't it exactly the same problem rather than opposite of it?
  - Geee 5y ago
    Yes, it is.
RandomLensman 5y ago
As long as everyone wants their information for free, this will be just another layer of icing on the cake of misinformation. Good, clean, and reliable information is expensive and needs a fair bit of work. I can see why most people have forgotten that but it might come back them and then this will be way less of a problem.
gorwell 5y ago
"Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a fake." This is actually already the case with Biden and Trump video clips even without being deepfaked. Often they are presented out of context to the point of completely reversing reality. It's helpful to assume any clip is fake by default, especially if it's a viral one that makes one side look bad. By the time deepfakes are common, it'll be best practice to assume fake by default.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Doesn't even need an actual quote taken out of context, just a headline (or a thousand) will already have an effect because people scan and can't be bothered to read the contents, until it becomes a background idea stuck in someone's head. People also forget where they read something, people forget details, and they simplify things over time.
thefourthchime 5y ago
To be fair, this tech has been around for years and I've yet to see it be used successfully in social media misinformation. The stuff I see on my in-law's facebook is usually some clunky meme photo with shocking text. A video needs to actually be watched, that takes more effort, and then it would be widely debunked as fake. The "fake news" memes are usually at least partially true which helps convince people that the misinformation is legit.
- wussboy 5y ago
  “I’ve yet to see it used successfully…” As far as you know. By definition, wouldn’t its successful use mean you didn’t know it was successfully used?
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Idk seems like an overstated problem. People will be less likely to believe leaks or supposed hot mic recordings, but the majority of what politicians and other public figures say happens in public view which makes it difficult to fake. You already don't really know if a video you see on Facebook has been carefully re-cut to change the meaning or tone of what the speaker was saying, so I think the fact that we can more easily wholesale create videos doesn't really change much. If you want to know if something is real the best option is still to cross reference multiple sources and if possible multiple recordings.
madeofpalk 5y ago
> you can no longer believe anything published online When has this not been the case?
- NateEag 5y ago
  Fifteen years ago it was not feasible for a random person with an axe to grind to publish a convincing video of a specific person doing something they did not actually do. It's about to become pretty low-effort for a random person with an axe to grind to do that. It's not that you can no longer believe anything published online - it's that video evidence without provenance was relatively reasonable to trust for a few years, and it's about to stop being so.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-... Nothing new under the sun
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Maybe it could mean journalism will be professionalized again, when trust isn’t as simple as taking a video on your phone or writing a blog post… if we’re lucky.
anoraca 5y ago
It's probably safer if people stick to primary sources with good reputations anyway, right?
- derptron 5y ago
  Are there any news outlets left with any credibility?
minsc__and__boo 5y ago
>It is also so devastating that you can no longer believe anything published online, even if it looks legit. I don't buy these sky is falling arguments. Deep fake video will have about as much impact as photoshop has had.
planb 5y ago
I say it every time this comes up: People don't care if something looks legit. They care if it supports their views. Nothing will get worse just because the fakes get better. It might even help when it's common knowledge that everything can be faked by a 14 year old on their PC.
- kinjba11 5y ago
  But people do care if it looks legit. Something that is legit supports their views better, even if it just looks legit and is actually counterfeit. But totally agreed it needs to be common knowledge that everything digital can potentially be bogus. This stuff should be taught in schools from an early age honestly.

DougN7 5y ago

I agree - this is going to make finding the truth so much harder once it’s weaponized as it surely will be. How can representative democracy flourish when you can no longer tell who you want to represent you?

krastanov 5y ago

This feels like it has been true since forever, just with other media. A picture with a made up quote seems exactly as damaging. Good journalists will continue vetting sources and unscrupulous TV personalities will continue showing whatever fits their narrative without vetting.

lmilcin 5y ago
It has been true only to a certain level. Photos can be faked and videos can be mislabeled, but as long as it happens it small enough number it is possible to have people point it out and make a fuss about it. This changes when individual people with no resources at all can make convincing fakes and wield it as a weapon to sow disinformation, to have it then picked up by "major" media, all information on the net becomes pretty useless.
- riffraff 5y ago
  Again, this was always true, we relied on news agencies and such to be gatekeepers of what is true. Sometimes a random video pops up and people believe it shows X and then it propagates but it's something completely different (e.g. people beating up immigrants on the streets in northern Italy -> traditional krampus celebrations; Junker drunk at some event -> Junker suffers from lombalgia; Berlusconi mimicing a sexual act on some woman -> it was a comedian skit; Britney Spears sex tape -> it's a random pornstar ...) People will learn to be doubtful of random internet videos just as they have learned to be doubtful of random internet articles. Or not, since they haven't yet, but it's not a qualitative change.
- Fricken 5y ago
  The majority of Covid disinformation was spread by 12 people with limited resources. They didn't need deepfakes. Deepfakes add nothing of substance to the liar's toolkit. It's easy to lie to people so long as you're saying things that validate their shitty emotions. Conversely, it's extremely hard to tell people the truth when it goes against their shitty emotions.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    Tangent, but: Emotions can't be shitty. You can miscalibrate your emotional responses to situations, much as you can sear your conscience. But the emotions themselves - the full range are valid human feelings, from fury to transcendent joy.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      "valid" seems sort of weasel-wordy here.
      - NateEag 5y ago
        Okay, I'll phrase it more strongly: Emotions as such are good, from sorrow to rage to joy. Each one is a good response to some situations, as far as I can tell. Your emotional response can be misplaced, so that you experience an inappropriate emotional in some situations. As noted elsewhere in the thread, you can also be inspired by your emotions to inappropriate (and just terrible) behavior. The emotions themselves, though, are not shitty. Recognizing them and understanding where they're coming from can be tremendously helpful in aligning your actions with reality and your own values, and even in discovering what your own values are. I share this perspective not out of a sense of superiority but in the hope that it helps someone else avoid my mistakes.
        robertlagrant 5y ago
        I don't see the point in saying emotions are automatically good, but also inappropriate. This just seems like a segregation of two concepts that don't need separating. E.g. saying "I think people of type X are bad so I feel hatred towards them" is a good emotion but misplaced, vs is a bad emotion? I don't see the useful distinction.
- dahart 5y ago
  > It has been true only to a certain level. […] as long as it happens it small enough number it is possible to have people point it out and make a fuss about it. I think the opposite is true. This isn’t a historical perspective, you’re using logic to speculate. Historically speaking, there have been fakes that reached huge numbers of people, and they were more damaging then than they are today because they were more believable; the public had not yet conceived that photos could be faked, and it was not possible to see evidence of fakery. Today, everyone knows photos and videos can be faked. I don’t know of any deep fake videos yet that have tricked a large number of people or been used for political purposes. Maybe it has happened, I don’t know, do you know? But there have been lots of influential faked photos. Just Google a little to find hundreds of historical examples of famous and misleading doctored photos. (Lots of overlap in these lists, because some of the photos are famous). https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/history.pdf https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/history.pdf https://delmarwatsonphotos.com/photographs/famous-photographs/ https://delmarwatsonphotos.com/photographs/famous-photograph... https://www.quora.com/What-historical-photos-are-highly-misleading https://www.quora.com/What-historical-photos-are-highly-misl... https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-photos-history-2011-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-photos-history-2011-8 https://www.ranker.com/list/historic-images-that-were-retouched/stephanroget https://www.ranker.com/list/historic-images-that-were-retouc... https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=29607 https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=29607 https://www.pinterest.com/yosomono/faked-images-everyone-thinks-are-real/ https://www.pinterest.com/yosomono/faked-images-everyone-thi...
psychomugs 5y ago
Since the inception of photography, all photographs have been lies [1,2]. The only remedy is critical thinking and awareness and skepticism on the part of the recipients, which is being outpaced by the technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard#Self_Portrait_as_a_Drowned_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard#Self_Portrait... [2] https://i.redd.it/nh45pwigrhc21.jpg https://i.redd.it/nh45pwigrhc21.jpg

kikokikokiko 5y ago

I remember watching "The Running Man" when I was a kid and thinking that the scene were Arnold loses the fight to the Jesse Ventura guy, that in the movie was a "Deep Fake", was so unrealistic... man, we are already there. Nothing can be believed anymore.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

another-dave 5y ago

Would be good if content publishers did something like digitally signing their content along with embedded metadata so if e.g. you see a video circulating you can see that the BBC attested that it was released by them & its original air date was such & such. Or if you see a quote claiming to be from Emmanuel Macron or Boris Johnson, you can see it was released with a digital signature from a Guardian journalist & they add whatever date/time/location details they want to validate the information. If instead I release something (on Twitter or wherever) that I say is a screen-capture of my TV, _I_ add the metadata (originally seen on BBC on 27 Jul, 1:55pm) and sign and then you know that you only trust it as much as you trust _my_ reputation rather than the BBC. Wouldn't solve the problem entirely but it might create a bit of an audit trail for stuff and encourage people not to trust unvetted material.

Goz3rr 5y ago
Metadata that would swiftly be destroyed by the first twitter/facebook user reposting a screenshot/screenrecording from their phone
- db_admin 5y ago
  While still maintaining a verifiable origin
- another-dave 5y ago
  Exactly, so if I upload something and say "Look what I just recorded off the BBC!" you _shouldn't_ believe me if creating a deep-fake becomes as easy as recording the real thing. In that scenario, you'd want people to say "but wait, there's no signature on this, it could be fake" and then only trust the video as much as you trust the source (not the claimed source).
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Lack of the right kind of metadata would be the first tell.
barrkel 5y ago
Then, when someone videos an atrocity, they need to choose between publishing publicly (risking retribution) or publishing anonymously (if they even know how) and risk being disbelieved.

liotier 5y ago

> Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a fake Back to text and the good'ol credibility of the messenger. Digital commodified journalists and now the need for credibility will let them get out of anonymity again.

bongoman37 5y ago

I think we'll eventually see hardware that cryptographically signs the content as soon as it is produced with timestamp, but then that could be fooled by someone creating a deepfake, projecting it on a high resolution screen and then photographing with another camera. Or we wouldn't believe things unless they are captured by multiple cameras at different angles and maybe future GANs will be able to cover that. We are seeing the beginning of an arms race!

visarga 5y ago
As of recently we can recreate 3D space in the weights of a neural network Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuH79E8rdKc&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuH79E8rdKc&t=5s

danparsonson 5y ago

Not to mention the politicians who are recorded doing something genuinely shady and will wave it away as fake news - this is happening already even without deep fakes.

tarsinge 5y ago

How do you already believe something written is legit? Does it not just put video on par with text?

lmilcin 5y ago
Normally you try to think and reconcile it with knowledge and experience you already have. The problem is when everything you have ever learned is suspect.

tvirosi 5y ago

This has been true since forever though. (It's such a weird point.) Very believable photoshops have been possible since forever, but you generally only believe images that are verified by a trusted source. Even ridiculously fakable things like "someone telling you a thing is true" (without having photographic evidence of it) has somehow not been completely eroded as a communication channel by deceptive agents because of reputation and trust holding it all up.

nIHOPp6MQw0f5ut 5y ago

This has been a possibility for decades but only for those with large budgets. Now that it is more widely accessible more people actually know it can be done.

a1369209993 5y ago
> This has been a possibility for decades but only for those with large budgets. Yep. You don't need CGI if you can search a large population for someone who looks like insert-public-figure-here and make up the difference with makeup.

tshaddox 5y ago

Does anyone actually determine what to believe this way? Like if you read a quote from a politician in a large newspaper, you don’t believe it’s real, but if you see a cell phone video of the politician saying something at a rally, you do believe it’s real? Personally my confidence in the veracity would be the opposite. There’s nothing special about video that makes it fundamentally harder than text to distort, edit, or even outright fabricate.

xfitm3 5y ago
What would a detective or a jury believe? Video or testimony?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Presumably they would believe (or at least be instructed to believe) neither implicitly.

Geee 5y ago

The problem is actually opposite. People won't believe anything because they assume that what they are seeing is a deep fake. It's happening already. If you see videos online of Trump / Biden / someone notable there's always someone claiming that it's a deep fake if they don't like what they see.

lmilcin 5y ago
Isn't it exactly the same problem rather than opposite of it?
- Geee 5y ago
  Yes, it is.

RandomLensman 5y ago

As long as everyone wants their information for free, this will be just another layer of icing on the cake of misinformation. Good, clean, and reliable information is expensive and needs a fair bit of work. I can see why most people have forgotten that but it might come back them and then this will be way less of a problem.

gorwell 5y ago

"Now you will see videos of politicians saying something and even then you cannot be sure whether this is actual video or a fake." This is actually already the case with Biden and Trump video clips even without being deepfaked. Often they are presented out of context to the point of completely reversing reality. It's helpful to assume any clip is fake by default, especially if it's a viral one that makes one side look bad. By the time deepfakes are common, it'll be best practice to assume fake by default.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Doesn't even need an actual quote taken out of context, just a headline (or a thousand) will already have an effect because people scan and can't be bothered to read the contents, until it becomes a background idea stuck in someone's head. People also forget where they read something, people forget details, and they simplify things over time.

thefourthchime 5y ago

To be fair, this tech has been around for years and I've yet to see it be used successfully in social media misinformation. The stuff I see on my in-law's facebook is usually some clunky meme photo with shocking text. A video needs to actually be watched, that takes more effort, and then it would be widely debunked as fake. The "fake news" memes are usually at least partially true which helps convince people that the misinformation is legit.

wussboy 5y ago
“I’ve yet to see it used successfully…” As far as you know. By definition, wouldn’t its successful use mean you didn’t know it was successfully used?

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

Idk seems like an overstated problem. People will be less likely to believe leaks or supposed hot mic recordings, but the majority of what politicians and other public figures say happens in public view which makes it difficult to fake. You already don't really know if a video you see on Facebook has been carefully re-cut to change the meaning or tone of what the speaker was saying, so I think the fact that we can more easily wholesale create videos doesn't really change much. If you want to know if something is real the best option is still to cross reference multiple sources and if possible multiple recordings.

madeofpalk 5y ago

> you can no longer believe anything published online When has this not been the case?

NateEag 5y ago
Fifteen years ago it was not feasible for a random person with an axe to grind to publish a convincing video of a specific person doing something they did not actually do. It's about to become pretty low-effort for a random person with an axe to grind to do that. It's not that you can no longer believe anything published online - it's that video evidence without provenance was relatively reasonable to trust for a few years, and it's about to stop being so.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-... Nothing new under the sun

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Maybe it could mean journalism will be professionalized again, when trust isn’t as simple as taking a video on your phone or writing a blog post… if we’re lucky.

anoraca 5y ago

It's probably safer if people stick to primary sources with good reputations anyway, right?

derptron 5y ago
Are there any news outlets left with any credibility?

minsc__and__boo 5y ago

>It is also so devastating that you can no longer believe anything published online, even if it looks legit. I don't buy these sky is falling arguments. Deep fake video will have about as much impact as photoshop has had.

planb 5y ago

I say it every time this comes up: People don't care if something looks legit. They care if it supports their views. Nothing will get worse just because the fakes get better. It might even help when it's common knowledge that everything can be faked by a 14 year old on their PC.

kinjba11 5y ago
But people do care if it looks legit. Something that is legit supports their views better, even if it just looks legit and is actually counterfeit. But totally agreed it needs to be common knowledge that everything digital can potentially be bogus. This stuff should be taught in schools from an early age honestly.