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Something I've wondered lately is what will life be like in a post-truth society? we already see examples of this now where a large number of people get their n

Something I've wondered lately is what will life be like in a post-truth society? we already see examples of this now where a large number of people get their news from fake memes on facebook. There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen. What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake? How long before someone uses this technology to frame someone for a crime? Could the FBI create a deepfake of a cartel leader meeting with them and leak it so they think he's a snitch? I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly.

kache_ 4y ago
The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly. The good news is that we've been going through rapid, rapid tech advancements the past 50 years and we're still here.
- mckirk 4y ago
  The thing I don't like about these 'well people have been complaining about this forever' arguments is that, it's entirely possible to have a) people pointing at an issue for a long time and b) still have that issue get progressively, objectively worse over time. There's that example of people pointing out smartphones might be bad for children, then someone counters with 'well thirty years ago people complained about children reading too much instead of playing outside', with the implication being: adults of all ages will find some fault with newer generations, and not to worry so much. But just because it is true that adults will probably always worry about 'new, evil things' corrupting the youth, this does not mean that the 'new, evil things' aren't getting _objectively more dangerous_ over time. Today adults would be happy if children still had the attention span and motivation necessary to read a book. They'd be happy if they themselves still had it, actually. Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I would say.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    >Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I like this analogy. I've had similar thoughts for a while too. Granted I also saw some research that society has been objectively getting better in a lot of areas people think is getting worse (like violence, specifically police abuse) compared to the past. theoretically this is because we have a lot more information now than before, so smaller occurrences are generating a larger impression. that said, I still very much agree with your point and that it is very applicable to specific individualized issues. Saying that people have been concerned for a while and nothing bad has happened yet is accurate for the situation where nothing bad will happen, AND the situation that it was bad then and is worse now, AND the situation where we are approaching a tipping point / threshold where the bad will start.
- andruby 4y ago
  > The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly. While I think that is true in general, I am optimistic that we've seen at least one technology where we were able to constraint ourselves from self-destruction: nuclear weapons. Of course, nuclear weapons tech is not in reach of individuals or corporations, which means there are only a handful of players in this game-theory setting.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > rapid tech advancements the past 50 years and we're still here This is a tautology. At some point the music stops and you aren't here to make the argument that we are still here.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    not entirely tautological. the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today for the first time is very different than the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today GIVEN weve been doing X every day for 50 years. It is still insufficient to say nothing bad will happen, of course
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Thats not the argument. The one you are making is the same one people make when they conflate weather and climate.
      - cupofpython 4y ago
        Conditional probability applies to many things
kleer001 4y ago
Thankfully things that a real are very cheap to follow up on. Questioning some security footage? No worries there's 100+ hours of it to cross check with the footage and three other cameras too. IMHO, consilience and parsimony will save us.
deleted 4y ago
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fxtentacle 4y ago
I believe we'll go back to trusting local experts that you can meet in person to confirm that they are not a bot. Because anything online will be known to be untrustworthy. Most blogs, chat groups and social media posts will be spam bots. And it'll be impossible for the average person to tell the difference between chatting with a bot and chatting with a human. But humans crave social connections and intimate physical contact. So people will get used to the fact that whoever you meet online is likely fake and so they'll start meeting people in the real world again. I also predict that some advanced AIs will be classified as drugs, because people get so hooked on them that it destroys their life. We've already banned abusive loot box gambling mechanics in some EU countries, and I think abusive AI systems are next. We'll probably also age-limit generative AI models like DALL-E, due to their ability to generate naughty and/or disturbing images. But overall, I believe we will just starting to treat everything online as fake, except in the rare case that you message a person which you have previously met in real life (to confirm their human-ness).
- newswasboring 4y ago
  Your second paragraph is very intriguing. I never really thought about this. I wonder if people will actually be able to restrict usage though. Its software, and historically it has been hard to restrict it. Of course cloud based systems have two advantages, software is hidden behind the API and they have really powerful systems. But the former requires a single lapse in security to leak and latter just requires time till consumer hardware can catch up. If I use past data to predict future (which might be a bad idea in this case), it might be almost impossible to restrict AI software.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    I've heard this for years, but software will eventually face its own regulation and barriers to entry much as healthcare and accounting have theirs.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  I want to agree with you, deeply, but the number of people who fall for simple PR/advertising in today's world suggests otherwise. I think we'd have a chance if they taught PR tricks in schools starting at a young age. Or at minimum, if websites that aggregate news would identify sources that financially benefit from you believing what they're saying.
idontwantthis 4y ago
This doesn’t bother me that much because evidence isn’t required to convince millions of people that a lie is true. We already know this. Why make fake evidence that could be debunked when you can just have no evidence instead?
- fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  Different instruments can be used to capture different segments of the population. You’re right there are gullible people who are more likely to believe things with limited or no evidence. But it isn’t necessarily about the most impressionable people, nor is it about installing sincerely held beliefs. Instead, what may be a cause for concern is simply the installation of doubt in an otherwise reasonable person because of the perceived validity of contrived evidence. Not so much that it becomes a sincerely held belief, but but just enough that it paralyzes action and encourages indifference due to ambiguity.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > You’re right there are gullible people who are more likely to believe things with limited or no evidence Often the lack of evidence is the proof of whatever is being peddled. "No evidence for $foo? OF COURSE NOT! Because 'they' scrubbed it so you wouldn't be any wiser! But I have the 'truth' here... just sign up for my newsletter..."
  - astrange 4y ago
    This discussion isn't useful because you're assuming people actually care if something is true before they "believe" it, which they don't, so they don't need evidence. "Believing" doesn't even mean people actually hold beliefs. It means they're willing to agree with something in public, and that's just tribal affiliation.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
beisner 4y ago
So there are information theoretic ways to certify that media is genuine, if you assume trust at least somewhere in the process. Basically just cryptographic signing. For instance, a camera sensor could be designed such that every image that is captured on the sensor gets signed by the sensor at the hardware level, with a certificate that is embedded by the manufacturer. Then any video released could be verified against a certificate provided by the manufacturer. Of course, you have to trust the manufacturer, but that’s an easier pill to swallow (and better supported by our legal framework) than having to try and authenticate each video you watch independently. There are issues that can arise (what if I put a screen in front of a real camera??, what if the CIA compromises the supply chain???), but at the end of the day it makes attacks much more challenging than just running some deepfake software. So there are things that can be done, we’re not destined for a post truth world where we can’t trust any media we see.
- deleted 4y ago
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- bogwog 4y ago
  That's helpful for the legal system, but it's not going to help for attacks designed to cause mass panic/unrest/revolts. If another US president wants to attempt a coup, it'll be much more successful if they're competent and determined enough to produce deepfakes that support their narrative. The only way to prevent stuff like that is to educate the public and teach people how important it is to be skeptical of anything they see on the internet. Even then, human emotions are a hell of a drug so idk how much it'd help.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    US Presidents have had the ability to make false claims based on video of something completely different, create material using actors and/or compromised communications, stage events or use testimony that information has been obtained via secret channels from appointees heading up agencies whose job it is to obtain information via secret channels for a long time now. If anything, recent events suggests the opposite: deepfakes can't be that much of a game changer when an election candidate doesn't even have to try to manufacture evidence to get half the people who voted for him to believe his most outlandish claims.
tomgraham 4y ago
The good news is that public awareness of potentially manipulated media is on the rise. Coupled with good laws, good detection tech - public awareness and media literacy is important. At Metaphysic.ai, we created the @DeepTomCruise account on Tiktok to raise awareness. We also created www.Everyany.one to help regular people claim their hyperreal ID and protect their biometric face and voice data. We think that the metaverse of the future will feature the hyperreal likenesses of regular people - so we all have to work hard today to empower people to be in control of their identity.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  Creating yet another product to monetize is not a solution, it's just more of the problem. It incentivizes a perpetual arms race between fabrication and verification at the cost of everyday users. No thanks.
  - tomgraham 4y ago
    It is free. Protecting individuals' right is more important that making money!
    - random-human 4y ago
      Free but collecting and storing peoples biometric data on your servers (per the FAQ). How do I know it's not a clearview ai clone but with easier data gathering? What is that saying about what the real product is if something is free?
redox99 4y ago
People with some degree of knowledge already know that any photo could be photoshopped. People that don't care will blindly trust a picture of someone with a quote or caption saying whatever, as long as it fits their narrative. This has been the case for photos for almost 2 decades. The fact that you can now do it with video or audio doesn't change that much IMO.
- hutrdvnj 4y ago
  I think it does, because while you obviously couldn't trust images since two decades or so, you could resort to video which wasn't easy to believably deep fake until recently. But if everything online could be a deep fake, how can you find out the truth?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Videos can be faked too, it is just cheaper now.
    - makapuf 4y ago
      It's called special fx, is more than a century old (people are now aware it's fake but remember the word is that the train coming in la ciotat movie made people run out of the movie theatre).
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Photos have been altered for much longer than 2 decades. Think of airbrushing models in magazines (used to be literal airbrushes painting over photos). This has had a serious impact on our perception of beauty and reality.
jkaptur 4y ago
Wasn't this bridge crossed when Photoshop became popular?
- bberrry 4y ago
  It takes some level of skill to produce a convincing Photoshopped image.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    Does that matter when they stakes are as high as these arguments always claim? If we're doomsaying about a "post-truth society", we're talking about high-stakes society-scaled skullduggery. If you're aiming for that level of disruption, easy deepfakes vs hard video/photo editing is not an issue, getting people to trust your made up chain of custody is. - This is like when people worry about general AI becoming self-aware and enslaving mankind... the "boring version" of the danger is already happening: ML models being trained on biased data are getting embedded in products that are core to our society (policing, credit ratings, etc.), and that's really dangerous. Likewise, people worry about being able to easily make fake news, when the real danger is people not being equipped to evaluate the trustworthiness of a source... and that's already happening. You don't even need a deepfake, you tweet that so and so said X, write a fake article saying they said X, amplify it all with some bots, and suddenly millions of people believe you.
MarcoZavala 4y ago
thedorkknight 4y ago
I don't think it'll be way too much different than it has been for most of human history. We really only had a brief blip of having video, which was generally trustable, but keep in mind that before that for thousands of years it was just as hard to know truth. Someone told you stuff about the outside world, and you either had the skepticism to take it with a grain of salt, or you didn't.
mc32 4y ago
I think a bigger question is whether reputable sources --those people trust for whatever reason, would use this technology to prop up ideas and or to create narratives. I don't think it's far-fetched. We've already seen where videos are misattributed[1] to stoke fear or to promote narratives --by widely trusted news sources. [1] This was foreshadowed with "Wag the Dog" but happens often enough in the media today that I don't think use of "deepfake" technology is beyond the pale for any of them.
- ketralnis 4y ago
  It almost doesn't matter now that people have fractured on which sources they consider reputable. Trump called a CNN reporter "fake news" and presumably his followers think of them the same way I think of Fox. I absolutely think that Fox would use technology to lie, and I'm sure Fox fans think that "the liberal media" would. So people are going to think that reporting is fake whether or not it is
  - mc32 4y ago
    Wasn't 'The Ghost of Kiev' almost entirely fake but the news carried it as real?
    - ketralnis 4y ago
      I don't know. How would you "prove" it? Google it, and look for what other people that agree with you think?
      - mc32 4y ago
        Well... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/01/ghost-of-kyiv-propaganda/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/01/ghost-of-kyi... admitted by Ukrainians themselves...
        ketralnis 4y ago
        According to an article you found online. That's exactly my point, if we can't trust news sources then we can't really know anything. Because of my aforementioned distrust of Fox News, if it were written by them I'd dismiss that article out of hand placing no truth value on it either way. I'd expect somebody that distrusts CNN to do the same if it were written by them. "It's confirmed!", "They admitted it!", and other unprovable internet turns of phrase in comments sections are really just "I believe it because somebody I trust said so" and that only has weight as long as trust has weight.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
A skeptic (i.e. someone who cares to verify) not being able to trust media because it might be fake is only a minor problem as long as you have at least one trusted channel. The president, say, can just release the statement on that channel and it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS). If you lose that channel, then you're pretty much screwed because you'll never know which one is the real president. But there are physical access controls on some channels, say the Emergency Alert System, which can be used to bootstrap a trust chain. What will be much more possible is that someone who will not check the veracity of the message will take it at face value without bothering to validate it. This is your news-via-Facebook crowd. At that point, it's less a technical issue than simply people don't want to know the truth. No amount of fact-checking and secure tamper-proofing of information chains of custody will help that.
- toss1 4y ago
  Agree, and it's even worse than that An incredibly small minority of people even understand your phrase with any actual fidelity and depth of meaning: >>it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS) Even fewer of that microscopic minority have and understand how to use the tools required to verify the video cryptographically, AND even fewer know how to fully validate that the tools themselves are valie (e.g., not compromised by a bogus cert). Worse yet, even in the good case where everyone is properly skeptical, and 90+% of us figure out that no source is trustworthy, the criminals have won. The goal of disinformation is not to get people to believe your lie (although the few useful idiots who do may be a nice bonus). The goal of disinformation is to get people to give up an even seeking the truth - just give up and say "we can't know who's right or what's real" — that is the opening that authoritarians need to take over governments and end democracies. So yes, this is next-level-screwed material.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    > AND even fewer know how to fully validate that the tools themselves are valie (e.g., not compromised by a bogus cert). Kind of, but once you have a single verifiable channel back to the source (in this case, some statement by the president) it's now possible for anyone to construct a web of trust that leads back to that source. For example, multiple trustworthy independent outlets reporting on the same statement in the same way, providing some way to locate the original source. This is why new articles that do not link to (on the web) or otherwise unambiguously identify a source wind me up. "Scientists say" is a common one. It's so hard to find the original source from such things. This falls over in two ways: sources become non-independent and/or non-trustworthy as an ensemble. Then you can't use them as an information proxy. This is what is often claimed about "the mainstream media" and the "non-mainstream media" by the adherents if the other. All the fact checks in the world are worthless if they are immediately written of y those they are aimed at as lies-from-the-system. The second way is that people simply do not care. It was said, it sounds plausible, and they want to believe it. So I would say that actually the risks here are social, not technological. Granted, perhaps a deepfake-2'd video might convince more people than a Photoshopped photo. The core issue isn't the quality of the fake, it's that a significant number of people simply wouldn't care if it were fake. Doesn't mean we're not screwed, just not specifically and proximally because of falsification technology, that's accelerant but not the fuel.
berdon 4y ago
Reminds me of Stephenson's "Fall; Or Dodge in Hell" where all digital media is signed by their anonymous author and public keys become synonymous with identities. An entire industry of media curation existed in the book to handle bucketing media as spam, "fake", "true", interesting, etc.
WanderPanda 4y ago
I think society will adapt within 1 generation. The tech is already there (signing messages with asymmetric encryption)
- toss1 4y ago
  And how many use or will use the tech, and how many of those will use it competently, and how many of those are competent to validate and know that their checking technology has not been compromised (e.g., hacking or distributing bad authenticity checkers and/or certs like hacking or distributing bad crypto-wallets)?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    End-to-end encryption was a giant pain in the butt that required dinking around with PGP or whatever, but now it is a pretty mainstream feature for chat apps (once they figured out how to monetize despite it). Tech takes a while to trickle down to mainstream applications, but it'll get there if the problem becomes well known enough.
    - toss1 4y ago
      I agree that e2e encryption is becoming more widespread and "user friendly". However, the friendliness seems inversely proportional with the ability of the users to detect that their tool is failing/corrupted/hacked/etc. So while we might have more widespread tools, we also have a more widespread ability to give a false sense of security.
gadders 4y ago
>> There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen There are also those that wholeheartedly believe Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, or that the Steele dossier was factual.
- dTal 4y ago
  These are not equivalent. Russia did interfere, there were links between Trump and Russia, therefore there is circumstantial evidence that collusion occurred, sufficient to trigger a widely publicized investigation. The allegations of election fraud in 2020 however are 100% alternate universe yarns spun for political gain with no basis in fact whatsoever.
  - gadders 4y ago
    Russia may have interfered but I would imagine it does every year to sew what they percieve to be maximum discord. There are no links between Trump and Russia, and the Mueller and subsequent investigations proved that. Recent trials also proved that the "server links" to Russia from Trump Towers originated with the Hillary campaign. In the 2020 election, plenty of rules were changed to favour postal votes and vote harvesting. Was it sufficient to change the results? No idea. Did it definitely occur? Yes.
narrator 4y ago
Surprise Plot Twist: Maybe we're already living in a post-truth society and you are still sure you know what the truth is. How would you even know that what you were ferociously defending as the truth wasn't a lie? What makes you think you're not smart enough to not fall for lies? Largely, I think most people's means of finding the truth is just to take a vote of the information sources they find credible and go with whatever they say. I was talking with some friends about the California propositions a while back. Some of them were not clear cut which way we should vote on them. Instead of discussing the actual issue, people just wanted to know what various authority figures thought. These were not dumb people I was talking to, and I used to remember an era in the 90s maybe where you could actually have a reasoned debate and come to the truth that way. It seems that's obsolete these days since nobody seems to agree on the basic facts about anything.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Disinformation is very common in traditional news media. This technology just democratizes this tool and allows anyone to engage in it. There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation.
  - corrral 4y ago
    > There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation. Russia seems to be farther along this path than we are and every account I've read of their experience of disinfo isn't that they got better at seeking the truth, but instead just assume everything's a lie & nothing's trustworthy, and disappear into apathy.
    - narrator 4y ago
      Implementing dropout to avoid overfitting on bad data.
wildmanx 4y ago
> I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly. Makes you also think whether anybody from the Hacker News crowd working on any contributing tech is acting ethically responsibly. For myself, I have answered this question with "no", which rules out many jobs for me, but at least my kids won't eventually look me in the eye and ask "how could you?" Sure it's cool tech. But so was what eventually brought us nuclear war heads.
GuB-42 4y ago
There has never been a truth society. This tech will certainly be used to frame someone for a crime, like I am sure Photoshop was used in such a way, and thousands of other techniques. And modern technology offers counters. It is an arms race but because of the sheer amount of data that is collected, I think that truth is more accessible than ever. The more data you have, the harder it is to fake and keep consistent.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  "Cheerleader's mom created deepfake videos to allegedly harass her daughter's rivals" "The girl and her coaches were sent photos that appeared to depict her naked, drinking and smoking a vape pen, according to police" https://abcnews.go.com/US/cheerleaders-mom-created-deepfake-videos-allegedly-harass-daughters/story?id=76437596 https://abcnews.go.com/US/cheerleaders-mom-created-deepfake-...
- jl6 4y ago
  I don’t know, it seems like the existence of widespread, easy photo/video/audio faking technology could be a really strong argument for dismissing any purported photo/video/audio evidence. Wouldn’t it be funny if deepfakes destroyed the blackmail industry?
  - mazlix 4y ago
    I don't much about the blackmail industry, but I would imagine the reverse would be more likely. I would think blackmail works best when being used on things which are actually true. If someone wanted to blackmail me by sharing a fake photo of my cheating on my spouse I wouldn't cave for anything because I know I haven't so I feel confident I have enough other evidence to fight that claim. My location data, who is the "other woman", etc.? On the flip side if I had commit some crime and someone made a deepfake of me doing that crime but they didn't actually have a legitimate photo, I might cave at that point since I would think it's a genuine photo and presumably they know even more about the incident.
VanillaCafe 4y ago
The real problem isn't the veracity of the information, but the consensus protocol we use to agree on what's true. Before the internet, we were more likely to debate with their neighbors to come to an understanding. Now, with the large bubbles we can find ourselves in, afforded by the internet social media, we can find a community to agree on anything, true or not. It's that lack of challenge that allows false information to flourish and is the real problem we need to solve.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  I would be curious if false information is actually more common now. It seems like people regularly believed all sorts of false things not too long ago.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly." I do not think so either, but so far we survived 75+years with nukes around. But you can argue, it was mainly by chance. Technological progress is awesome, but our societies cannot keep up yet. They will have to do heavy transition anyway, or perish. Or rather, we are in the process of transition. 20 years ago most people did not really know, what the internet is, now most are always online. Data mining, personalised algorithms for ad exposing, .. So deepfakes are a concern, but not my biggest. Rather the contrary, when people see how easy it is to fake things, they might start developing a healthy sceptism to illuminating youtube videos.
decafmomma 4y ago
Here's the thing though: in theory, we should already be skeptical of video and audio evidence on its own. Most of our institutions, in theory, do not focus on single mediums for assessing veracity of truth. The strength of claims and our ability to split the difference between noise and truth comes down to corroboration. How many other sources strength and work consistently with a claim? That's, in theory, how law enforcement, intelligence, and reporting should work. In practice, there are massive gaps here and people's attention -> decision is lower than ever. I don't think it's impossible for us to handle deep fakes, but I sense the same fear you have. I think ultimately it is more about our attention spans, and the "urgency" we feel to act quickly, that will be more of our down fall than the ability to produce fakes more easily. You don't in fact need a convincing fake to create a powerful conspiracy theory. Honestly you only need an emotional provocation, maybe even some green text on an anonymous web form.
munificent 4y ago
I think we'll solve it the same way we solved similar transitions when text and image faking became easy: provenance. For many years now, most have understood that you can't take text and images as truth because they can easily be simulated or modified. In other words, the media itself is not self-verifying. Instead, we rely on knowing where a piece of media came from, and we associate truth value with those institutions. (Of course, people disagree on which institutions to trust, but that's a separate issue.)
- kbenson 4y ago
  In other words, the same way we dealt with information before photographs and videos were invented. The answer to how to we deal with the fact that images and videos can't be trusted is to look at what we did before we relied on them. If we're smart about it we'll try to pick out the good things that worked and try to build in safeguards (as much as possible) against the things that didn't, but I won't hold my breath. We're already heading back towards some of the more problematic behavior, such as popularity or celebrity equating to trust.
mrshadowgoose 4y ago
The concerns in your second paragraph can be mostly mititgated using a combination of trusted timestamping, PKI, cryptographically chained logs and trusted hardware. Recordings from normal hardware will increasingly approach complete untrustworthiness as time goes on. The concerns raised in the first paragraph however... the next few decades are going to be a wild ride. Hopefully humanity eventually reaches an AI-supported utopic state where people can wrap themselves in their own realities, without it meaningfuly affecting anyone else. Perception of reality is already highly subjective, most of the fundamental issues are due to resource scarcity/inequality. Most other issues evaporate once that's solved.
- FastMonkey 4y ago
  I think you can technically mitigate some concerns for the people who understand that, but practically it's going to be a very different story. People will believe who/what they believe, and an expert opinion on trustworthiness is unlikely to change that. I think being in the real world and meeting real people is the only way to create a real, functional society. Allowing people to drift away into their own AI supported worlds would eventually make cooperation very difficult. I think it would just accelerate the tendency we've seen with social media, creating ever more extreme positions and ideologies.
efrbwrh 4y ago
I think the uncomfortable truth is that we're already there and it just doesn't matter because everything works on trust anyway. Sure, quality faked media has a ways to go before you're watching an Avengers quality deepfake porn but for groups that care to a professional degree (intelligence agencies, militaries, digital media companies, etc.) the quality is already good enough for intelligently planted media. The real limiter is access to trusted distribution channels for your faked media. A homunculi media consumer who gets their information from AP News/Reuters/Fox News/CNN/LA Times/New York Times/Verified Twitter Professionals/etc. is probably not at all in a position to judge the veracity of the material presented. If they were in a position to make such judgements they wouldn't need to care so much about whichprestigious media outlets they favor. But they do care, precisely because they know that they're gullible and so they want the media outlet that will give them the real truth (which usually means either the truth they like or the truth they don't like but from a brand that conforms to their ideals of what a news media brand should be). If CNN and Fox News both ran the same deepfaked video of Joe Biden shooting his veep with supplementary text stories and such then I wager a good portion of the American populace would believe it had happened and have serious conern.
Zababa 4y ago
> What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake? I don't understand your point. This has been the case for a while. People were editing photos to remove people in the time of Stalin. And even before that, you can lie, write false records, destroy them.
gernb 4y ago
I was listening to "This American Life" and they had a segment on someone who setup an site to give you a random number to call in Russia where you were supposed to give them info about what's happening in the Ukraine. It was someone shocking to hear their side of the story, that Russia is a hero for helping oppresed Russians in Ukraine. But then I stepped back and wondered, I'm assuming that the story I've been told is also 100% correct. What proof do I have it is? I get my news from sources who've been wrong before or who have a record of reporting only the official line. My gut still tells me the story I'm being told in the west is correct, but still, the bigger picture is how do I know who to trust? I see this all over the news. I think/assume the news I get about Ukraine in the west is correct but then I see so much spinning on every other topic that it's hard to know how much spinning is going on here too.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
  I was asked "What are we going to do about Ukraine!?" And I said, "It's a civil war that's been going on for almost 10 years, what is different now?" and their response was "what? I'd never heard that." And I added, "In 2014 there was an overthrow of an elected president there and it started the war." Blank stares. I have a friend who traveled to Europe regularly for tech training, including Ukraine, and he was surprised about how little people know what is going because people's news sources are so limited. (mostly by choice I assume) No special tech needed to manipulate people, just lack of multiple information sources?
  - HyperSane 4y ago
    The president that lost power in 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, was a Russian puppet who refused to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement in favor of closer ties to Russa. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from office by 328 to 0. He then fled to Russia.
    - synu 4y ago
      It’s hard to fathom believing there’s nothing new or relevant happening with the 2022 invasion, or why if there was a lead-in to the conflict that would be on its own a reason to conclude that there’s nothing to be done now.
nathias 4y ago
you could never trust it, now you'll know you can't trust it
brightball 4y ago
Honestly, when people have gone so far as to redefine common words it makes it really difficult to have conversations with people. 1. Hate going from one of the most visceral and obsessive emotions that exists to being tossed around at everything 2. The advent of your truth instead of the truth 3. Constant injections of "x" into every existing word apparently? "Womxn in Mathematics at Berkeley" - https://wim.berkeley.edu/ https://wim.berkeley.edu/ This is all before we get people to understand that having a discussion where some of their points might not be a strong as they think they are...somehow means you're attacking. The world that we have created for ourselves over the last 20 years is weird.
pfisherman 4y ago
I think that people will adapt. Humans are very clever and have been evolutionarily successful because of the ability to adapt to a wide range of environments. Think about how devastatingly effective print, radio, and television propaganda at the time each medium was widely adopted compared to how effective they are now. They still work, but for the most part people have caught on to the game and adjusted their cognitive filters. My guess is that we will see a bifurcation of society into those who are able to successfully weed out bullshit from those who can’t. The people who are able to process information and build better internal models of the world will be more successful, and eventually people will start imitating what they do. Edit: I do think that these tools coupled with widespread surveillance and persuasion tech (aka ad networks), have set up conditions where the few can rule over the many min a way that was not possible before. I do think some of the decentralized / autonomous organization tech - scaling bottom up decision making to make it more transparent and efficient - is a possible counter. Imo, this struggle between technological mediated centralization and top down enforcement and control vs decentralization and bottom up consensus will be the defining ideological struggle of our time.
- azinman2 4y ago
  I think you’re underestimating the power of cognitive biases and violence from those who only believe the information that want to hear.
  - pfisherman 4y ago
    I think there are quite a few recent historical examples of this - WW2, US invasion of Iraq, Russian Invasion of Ukraine, etc. However there is a price to pay for operating on beliefs that do not align with reality. It’s why almost all organizations engage in some form of intelligence gathering. Those who are at an information disadvantage get weeded out. Philip K Dick has a great quote “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
mazlix 4y ago
I don't know exactly what you mean by "post-truth", but I think for the vast majority of human history we've lived in a time where it was rare to have easy/cheap to create and hard to fake records of what happened (photography, videos, audio recordings). In terms of a single photograph though that's been very easy to fake in compelling ways for at least the past 30 years look at lochness and bigfoot photos. Video's harder, but still pretty much all of this is not horribly difficult to fake. We've long been able to edit things out and mix audio to make a compelling video of a cartel leader meeting with them, no need for deep fakes.
mrandish 4y ago
I guess I'm an outlier on this topic because I don't think deep fakes will continue to have significant societal impact after an initial disruptive period of perhaps a few years. During that time DFs will become so common that any impactful example will immediately be suspected and discounted by most people. Yes, there will always be those who choose to believe the unbelievable but the lunatic fringe already believe outlandish claims without the need for deep fakes, thus there will be little net change.

kache_ 4y ago

The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly. The good news is that we've been going through rapid, rapid tech advancements the past 50 years and we're still here.

mckirk 4y ago
The thing I don't like about these 'well people have been complaining about this forever' arguments is that, it's entirely possible to have a) people pointing at an issue for a long time and b) still have that issue get progressively, objectively worse over time. There's that example of people pointing out smartphones might be bad for children, then someone counters with 'well thirty years ago people complained about children reading too much instead of playing outside', with the implication being: adults of all ages will find some fault with newer generations, and not to worry so much. But just because it is true that adults will probably always worry about 'new, evil things' corrupting the youth, this does not mean that the 'new, evil things' aren't getting _objectively more dangerous_ over time. Today adults would be happy if children still had the attention span and motivation necessary to read a book. They'd be happy if they themselves still had it, actually. Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I would say.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  >Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I like this analogy. I've had similar thoughts for a while too. Granted I also saw some research that society has been objectively getting better in a lot of areas people think is getting worse (like violence, specifically police abuse) compared to the past. theoretically this is because we have a lot more information now than before, so smaller occurrences are generating a larger impression. that said, I still very much agree with your point and that it is very applicable to specific individualized issues. Saying that people have been concerned for a while and nothing bad has happened yet is accurate for the situation where nothing bad will happen, AND the situation that it was bad then and is worse now, AND the situation where we are approaching a tipping point / threshold where the bad will start.
andruby 4y ago
> The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly. While I think that is true in general, I am optimistic that we've seen at least one technology where we were able to constraint ourselves from self-destruction: nuclear weapons. Of course, nuclear weapons tech is not in reach of individuals or corporations, which means there are only a handful of players in this game-theory setting.
sitkack 4y ago
> rapid tech advancements the past 50 years and we're still here This is a tautology. At some point the music stops and you aren't here to make the argument that we are still here.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  not entirely tautological. the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today for the first time is very different than the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today GIVEN weve been doing X every day for 50 years. It is still insufficient to say nothing bad will happen, of course
  - sitkack 4y ago
    Thats not the argument. The one you are making is the same one people make when they conflate weather and climate.
    - cupofpython 4y ago
      Conditional probability applies to many things

kleer001 4y ago

Thankfully things that a real are very cheap to follow up on. Questioning some security footage? No worries there's 100+ hours of it to cross check with the footage and three other cameras too. IMHO, consilience and parsimony will save us.

deleted 4y ago

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fxtentacle 4y ago

I believe we'll go back to trusting local experts that you can meet in person to confirm that they are not a bot. Because anything online will be known to be untrustworthy. Most blogs, chat groups and social media posts will be spam bots. And it'll be impossible for the average person to tell the difference between chatting with a bot and chatting with a human. But humans crave social connections and intimate physical contact. So people will get used to the fact that whoever you meet online is likely fake and so they'll start meeting people in the real world again. I also predict that some advanced AIs will be classified as drugs, because people get so hooked on them that it destroys their life. We've already banned abusive loot box gambling mechanics in some EU countries, and I think abusive AI systems are next. We'll probably also age-limit generative AI models like DALL-E, due to their ability to generate naughty and/or disturbing images. But overall, I believe we will just starting to treat everything online as fake, except in the rare case that you message a person which you have previously met in real life (to confirm their human-ness).

newswasboring 4y ago
Your second paragraph is very intriguing. I never really thought about this. I wonder if people will actually be able to restrict usage though. Its software, and historically it has been hard to restrict it. Of course cloud based systems have two advantages, software is hidden behind the API and they have really powerful systems. But the former requires a single lapse in security to leak and latter just requires time till consumer hardware can catch up. If I use past data to predict future (which might be a bad idea in this case), it might be almost impossible to restrict AI software.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  I've heard this for years, but software will eventually face its own regulation and barriers to entry much as healthcare and accounting have theirs.
fartcannon 4y ago
I want to agree with you, deeply, but the number of people who fall for simple PR/advertising in today's world suggests otherwise. I think we'd have a chance if they taught PR tricks in schools starting at a young age. Or at minimum, if websites that aggregate news would identify sources that financially benefit from you believing what they're saying.

idontwantthis 4y ago

This doesn’t bother me that much because evidence isn’t required to convince millions of people that a lie is true. We already know this. Why make fake evidence that could be debunked when you can just have no evidence instead?

fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
Different instruments can be used to capture different segments of the population. You’re right there are gullible people who are more likely to believe things with limited or no evidence. But it isn’t necessarily about the most impressionable people, nor is it about installing sincerely held beliefs. Instead, what may be a cause for concern is simply the installation of doubt in an otherwise reasonable person because of the perceived validity of contrived evidence. Not so much that it becomes a sincerely held belief, but but just enough that it paralyzes action and encourages indifference due to ambiguity.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  > You’re right there are gullible people who are more likely to believe things with limited or no evidence Often the lack of evidence is the proof of whatever is being peddled. "No evidence for $foo? OF COURSE NOT! Because 'they' scrubbed it so you wouldn't be any wiser! But I have the 'truth' here... just sign up for my newsletter..."
- astrange 4y ago
  This discussion isn't useful because you're assuming people actually care if something is true before they "believe" it, which they don't, so they don't need evidence. "Believing" doesn't even mean people actually hold beliefs. It means they're willing to agree with something in public, and that's just tribal affiliation.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - fleetwoodsnack 4y ago

beisner 4y ago

So there are information theoretic ways to certify that media is genuine, if you assume trust at least somewhere in the process. Basically just cryptographic signing. For instance, a camera sensor could be designed such that every image that is captured on the sensor gets signed by the sensor at the hardware level, with a certificate that is embedded by the manufacturer. Then any video released could be verified against a certificate provided by the manufacturer. Of course, you have to trust the manufacturer, but that’s an easier pill to swallow (and better supported by our legal framework) than having to try and authenticate each video you watch independently. There are issues that can arise (what if I put a screen in front of a real camera??, what if the CIA compromises the supply chain???), but at the end of the day it makes attacks much more challenging than just running some deepfake software. So there are things that can be done, we’re not destined for a post truth world where we can’t trust any media we see.

deleted 4y ago
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bogwog 4y ago
That's helpful for the legal system, but it's not going to help for attacks designed to cause mass panic/unrest/revolts. If another US president wants to attempt a coup, it'll be much more successful if they're competent and determined enough to produce deepfakes that support their narrative. The only way to prevent stuff like that is to educate the public and teach people how important it is to be skeptical of anything they see on the internet. Even then, human emotions are a hell of a drug so idk how much it'd help.
- notahacker 4y ago
  US Presidents have had the ability to make false claims based on video of something completely different, create material using actors and/or compromised communications, stage events or use testimony that information has been obtained via secret channels from appointees heading up agencies whose job it is to obtain information via secret channels for a long time now. If anything, recent events suggests the opposite: deepfakes can't be that much of a game changer when an election candidate doesn't even have to try to manufacture evidence to get half the people who voted for him to believe his most outlandish claims.

tomgraham 4y ago

The good news is that public awareness of potentially manipulated media is on the rise. Coupled with good laws, good detection tech - public awareness and media literacy is important. At Metaphysic.ai, we created the @DeepTomCruise account on Tiktok to raise awareness. We also created www.Everyany.one to help regular people claim their hyperreal ID and protect their biometric face and voice data. We think that the metaverse of the future will feature the hyperreal likenesses of regular people - so we all have to work hard today to empower people to be in control of their identity.

SantalBlush 4y ago
Creating yet another product to monetize is not a solution, it's just more of the problem. It incentivizes a perpetual arms race between fabrication and verification at the cost of everyday users. No thanks.
- tomgraham 4y ago
  It is free. Protecting individuals' right is more important that making money!
  - random-human 4y ago
    Free but collecting and storing peoples biometric data on your servers (per the FAQ). How do I know it's not a clearview ai clone but with easier data gathering? What is that saying about what the real product is if something is free?

redox99 4y ago

People with some degree of knowledge already know that any photo could be photoshopped. People that don't care will blindly trust a picture of someone with a quote or caption saying whatever, as long as it fits their narrative. This has been the case for photos for almost 2 decades. The fact that you can now do it with video or audio doesn't change that much IMO.

hutrdvnj 4y ago
I think it does, because while you obviously couldn't trust images since two decades or so, you could resort to video which wasn't easy to believably deep fake until recently. But if everything online could be a deep fake, how can you find out the truth?
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Videos can be faked too, it is just cheaper now.
  - makapuf 4y ago
    It's called special fx, is more than a century old (people are now aware it's fake but remember the word is that the train coming in la ciotat movie made people run out of the movie theatre).
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Photos have been altered for much longer than 2 decades. Think of airbrushing models in magazines (used to be literal airbrushes painting over photos). This has had a serious impact on our perception of beauty and reality.

jkaptur 4y ago

Wasn't this bridge crossed when Photoshop became popular?

bberrry 4y ago
It takes some level of skill to produce a convincing Photoshopped image.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Does that matter when they stakes are as high as these arguments always claim? If we're doomsaying about a "post-truth society", we're talking about high-stakes society-scaled skullduggery. If you're aiming for that level of disruption, easy deepfakes vs hard video/photo editing is not an issue, getting people to trust your made up chain of custody is. - This is like when people worry about general AI becoming self-aware and enslaving mankind... the "boring version" of the danger is already happening: ML models being trained on biased data are getting embedded in products that are core to our society (policing, credit ratings, etc.), and that's really dangerous. Likewise, people worry about being able to easily make fake news, when the real danger is people not being equipped to evaluate the trustworthiness of a source... and that's already happening. You don't even need a deepfake, you tweet that so and so said X, write a fake article saying they said X, amplify it all with some bots, and suddenly millions of people believe you.

MarcoZavala 4y ago

thedorkknight 4y ago

I don't think it'll be way too much different than it has been for most of human history. We really only had a brief blip of having video, which was generally trustable, but keep in mind that before that for thousands of years it was just as hard to know truth. Someone told you stuff about the outside world, and you either had the skepticism to take it with a grain of salt, or you didn't.

mc32 4y ago

I think a bigger question is whether reputable sources --those people trust for whatever reason, would use this technology to prop up ideas and or to create narratives. I don't think it's far-fetched. We've already seen where videos are misattributed[1] to stoke fear or to promote narratives --by widely trusted news sources. [1] This was foreshadowed with "Wag the Dog" but happens often enough in the media today that I don't think use of "deepfake" technology is beyond the pale for any of them.

ketralnis 4y ago
It almost doesn't matter now that people have fractured on which sources they consider reputable. Trump called a CNN reporter "fake news" and presumably his followers think of them the same way I think of Fox. I absolutely think that Fox would use technology to lie, and I'm sure Fox fans think that "the liberal media" would. So people are going to think that reporting is fake whether or not it is
- mc32 4y ago
  Wasn't 'The Ghost of Kiev' almost entirely fake but the news carried it as real?
  - ketralnis 4y ago
    I don't know. How would you "prove" it? Google it, and look for what other people that agree with you think?
    - mc32 4y ago
      Well... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/01/ghost-of-kyiv-propaganda/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/01/ghost-of-kyi... admitted by Ukrainians themselves...
      - ketralnis 4y ago
        According to an article you found online. That's exactly my point, if we can't trust news sources then we can't really know anything. Because of my aforementioned distrust of Fox News, if it were written by them I'd dismiss that article out of hand placing no truth value on it either way. I'd expect somebody that distrusts CNN to do the same if it were written by them. "It's confirmed!", "They admitted it!", and other unprovable internet turns of phrase in comments sections are really just "I believe it because somebody I trust said so" and that only has weight as long as trust has weight.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

A skeptic (i.e. someone who cares to verify) not being able to trust media because it might be fake is only a minor problem as long as you have at least one trusted channel. The president, say, can just release the statement on that channel and it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS). If you lose that channel, then you're pretty much screwed because you'll never know which one is the real president. But there are physical access controls on some channels, say the Emergency Alert System, which can be used to bootstrap a trust chain. What will be much more possible is that someone who will not check the veracity of the message will take it at face value without bothering to validate it. This is your news-via-Facebook crowd. At that point, it's less a technical issue than simply people don't want to know the truth. No amount of fact-checking and secure tamper-proofing of information chains of custody will help that.

toss1 4y ago
Agree, and it's even worse than that An incredibly small minority of people even understand your phrase with any actual fidelity and depth of meaning: >>it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS) Even fewer of that microscopic minority have and understand how to use the tools required to verify the video cryptographically, AND even fewer know how to fully validate that the tools themselves are valie (e.g., not compromised by a bogus cert). Worse yet, even in the good case where everyone is properly skeptical, and 90+% of us figure out that no source is trustworthy, the criminals have won. The goal of disinformation is not to get people to believe your lie (although the few useful idiots who do may be a nice bonus). The goal of disinformation is to get people to give up an even seeking the truth - just give up and say "we can't know who's right or what's real" — that is the opening that authoritarians need to take over governments and end democracies. So yes, this is next-level-screwed material.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > AND even fewer know how to fully validate that the tools themselves are valie (e.g., not compromised by a bogus cert). Kind of, but once you have a single verifiable channel back to the source (in this case, some statement by the president) it's now possible for anyone to construct a web of trust that leads back to that source. For example, multiple trustworthy independent outlets reporting on the same statement in the same way, providing some way to locate the original source. This is why new articles that do not link to (on the web) or otherwise unambiguously identify a source wind me up. "Scientists say" is a common one. It's so hard to find the original source from such things. This falls over in two ways: sources become non-independent and/or non-trustworthy as an ensemble. Then you can't use them as an information proxy. This is what is often claimed about "the mainstream media" and the "non-mainstream media" by the adherents if the other. All the fact checks in the world are worthless if they are immediately written of y those they are aimed at as lies-from-the-system. The second way is that people simply do not care. It was said, it sounds plausible, and they want to believe it. So I would say that actually the risks here are social, not technological. Granted, perhaps a deepfake-2'd video might convince more people than a Photoshopped photo. The core issue isn't the quality of the fake, it's that a significant number of people simply wouldn't care if it were fake. Doesn't mean we're not screwed, just not specifically and proximally because of falsification technology, that's accelerant but not the fuel.

berdon 4y ago

Reminds me of Stephenson's "Fall; Or Dodge in Hell" where all digital media is signed by their anonymous author and public keys become synonymous with identities. An entire industry of media curation existed in the book to handle bucketing media as spam, "fake", "true", interesting, etc.

WanderPanda 4y ago

I think society will adapt within 1 generation. The tech is already there (signing messages with asymmetric encryption)

toss1 4y ago
And how many use or will use the tech, and how many of those will use it competently, and how many of those are competent to validate and know that their checking technology has not been compromised (e.g., hacking or distributing bad authenticity checkers and/or certs like hacking or distributing bad crypto-wallets)?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  End-to-end encryption was a giant pain in the butt that required dinking around with PGP or whatever, but now it is a pretty mainstream feature for chat apps (once they figured out how to monetize despite it). Tech takes a while to trickle down to mainstream applications, but it'll get there if the problem becomes well known enough.
  - toss1 4y ago
    I agree that e2e encryption is becoming more widespread and "user friendly". However, the friendliness seems inversely proportional with the ability of the users to detect that their tool is failing/corrupted/hacked/etc. So while we might have more widespread tools, we also have a more widespread ability to give a false sense of security.

gadders 4y ago

>> There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen There are also those that wholeheartedly believe Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, or that the Steele dossier was factual.

dTal 4y ago
These are not equivalent. Russia did interfere, there were links between Trump and Russia, therefore there is circumstantial evidence that collusion occurred, sufficient to trigger a widely publicized investigation. The allegations of election fraud in 2020 however are 100% alternate universe yarns spun for political gain with no basis in fact whatsoever.
- gadders 4y ago
  Russia may have interfered but I would imagine it does every year to sew what they percieve to be maximum discord. There are no links between Trump and Russia, and the Mueller and subsequent investigations proved that. Recent trials also proved that the "server links" to Russia from Trump Towers originated with the Hillary campaign. In the 2020 election, plenty of rules were changed to favour postal votes and vote harvesting. Was it sufficient to change the results? No idea. Did it definitely occur? Yes.

narrator 4y ago

Surprise Plot Twist: Maybe we're already living in a post-truth society and you are still sure you know what the truth is. How would you even know that what you were ferociously defending as the truth wasn't a lie? What makes you think you're not smart enough to not fall for lies? Largely, I think most people's means of finding the truth is just to take a vote of the information sources they find credible and go with whatever they say. I was talking with some friends about the California propositions a while back. Some of them were not clear cut which way we should vote on them. Instead of discussing the actual issue, people just wanted to know what various authority figures thought. These were not dumb people I was talking to, and I used to remember an era in the 90s maybe where you could actually have a reasoned debate and come to the truth that way. It seems that's obsolete these days since nobody seems to agree on the basic facts about anything.

cwkoss 4y ago
Disinformation is very common in traditional news media. This technology just democratizes this tool and allows anyone to engage in it. There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation.
- corrral 4y ago
  > There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation. Russia seems to be farther along this path than we are and every account I've read of their experience of disinfo isn't that they got better at seeking the truth, but instead just assume everything's a lie & nothing's trustworthy, and disappear into apathy.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Implementing dropout to avoid overfitting on bad data.

wildmanx 4y ago

> I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly. Makes you also think whether anybody from the Hacker News crowd working on any contributing tech is acting ethically responsibly. For myself, I have answered this question with "no", which rules out many jobs for me, but at least my kids won't eventually look me in the eye and ask "how could you?" Sure it's cool tech. But so was what eventually brought us nuclear war heads.

GuB-42 4y ago

There has never been a truth society. This tech will certainly be used to frame someone for a crime, like I am sure Photoshop was used in such a way, and thousands of other techniques. And modern technology offers counters. It is an arms race but because of the sheer amount of data that is collected, I think that truth is more accessible than ever. The more data you have, the harder it is to fake and keep consistent.

fxtentacle 4y ago
"Cheerleader's mom created deepfake videos to allegedly harass her daughter's rivals" "The girl and her coaches were sent photos that appeared to depict her naked, drinking and smoking a vape pen, according to police" https://abcnews.go.com/US/cheerleaders-mom-created-deepfake-videos-allegedly-harass-daughters/story?id=76437596 https://abcnews.go.com/US/cheerleaders-mom-created-deepfake-...
jl6 4y ago
I don’t know, it seems like the existence of widespread, easy photo/video/audio faking technology could be a really strong argument for dismissing any purported photo/video/audio evidence. Wouldn’t it be funny if deepfakes destroyed the blackmail industry?
- mazlix 4y ago
  I don't much about the blackmail industry, but I would imagine the reverse would be more likely. I would think blackmail works best when being used on things which are actually true. If someone wanted to blackmail me by sharing a fake photo of my cheating on my spouse I wouldn't cave for anything because I know I haven't so I feel confident I have enough other evidence to fight that claim. My location data, who is the "other woman", etc.? On the flip side if I had commit some crime and someone made a deepfake of me doing that crime but they didn't actually have a legitimate photo, I might cave at that point since I would think it's a genuine photo and presumably they know even more about the incident.

VanillaCafe 4y ago

The real problem isn't the veracity of the information, but the consensus protocol we use to agree on what's true. Before the internet, we were more likely to debate with their neighbors to come to an understanding. Now, with the large bubbles we can find ourselves in, afforded by the internet social media, we can find a community to agree on anything, true or not. It's that lack of challenge that allows false information to flourish and is the real problem we need to solve.

whimsicalism 4y ago
I would be curious if false information is actually more common now. It seems like people regularly believed all sorts of false things not too long ago.

hutzlibu 4y ago

"I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly." I do not think so either, but so far we survived 75+years with nukes around. But you can argue, it was mainly by chance. Technological progress is awesome, but our societies cannot keep up yet. They will have to do heavy transition anyway, or perish. Or rather, we are in the process of transition. 20 years ago most people did not really know, what the internet is, now most are always online. Data mining, personalised algorithms for ad exposing, .. So deepfakes are a concern, but not my biggest. Rather the contrary, when people see how easy it is to fake things, they might start developing a healthy sceptism to illuminating youtube videos.

decafmomma 4y ago

Here's the thing though: in theory, we should already be skeptical of video and audio evidence on its own. Most of our institutions, in theory, do not focus on single mediums for assessing veracity of truth. The strength of claims and our ability to split the difference between noise and truth comes down to corroboration. How many other sources strength and work consistently with a claim? That's, in theory, how law enforcement, intelligence, and reporting should work. In practice, there are massive gaps here and people's attention -> decision is lower than ever. I don't think it's impossible for us to handle deep fakes, but I sense the same fear you have. I think ultimately it is more about our attention spans, and the "urgency" we feel to act quickly, that will be more of our down fall than the ability to produce fakes more easily. You don't in fact need a convincing fake to create a powerful conspiracy theory. Honestly you only need an emotional provocation, maybe even some green text on an anonymous web form.

munificent 4y ago

I think we'll solve it the same way we solved similar transitions when text and image faking became easy: provenance. For many years now, most have understood that you can't take text and images as truth because they can easily be simulated or modified. In other words, the media itself is not self-verifying. Instead, we rely on knowing where a piece of media came from, and we associate truth value with those institutions. (Of course, people disagree on which institutions to trust, but that's a separate issue.)

kbenson 4y ago
In other words, the same way we dealt with information before photographs and videos were invented. The answer to how to we deal with the fact that images and videos can't be trusted is to look at what we did before we relied on them. If we're smart about it we'll try to pick out the good things that worked and try to build in safeguards (as much as possible) against the things that didn't, but I won't hold my breath. We're already heading back towards some of the more problematic behavior, such as popularity or celebrity equating to trust.

mrshadowgoose 4y ago

The concerns in your second paragraph can be mostly mititgated using a combination of trusted timestamping, PKI, cryptographically chained logs and trusted hardware. Recordings from normal hardware will increasingly approach complete untrustworthiness as time goes on. The concerns raised in the first paragraph however... the next few decades are going to be a wild ride. Hopefully humanity eventually reaches an AI-supported utopic state where people can wrap themselves in their own realities, without it meaningfuly affecting anyone else. Perception of reality is already highly subjective, most of the fundamental issues are due to resource scarcity/inequality. Most other issues evaporate once that's solved.

FastMonkey 4y ago
I think you can technically mitigate some concerns for the people who understand that, but practically it's going to be a very different story. People will believe who/what they believe, and an expert opinion on trustworthiness is unlikely to change that. I think being in the real world and meeting real people is the only way to create a real, functional society. Allowing people to drift away into their own AI supported worlds would eventually make cooperation very difficult. I think it would just accelerate the tendency we've seen with social media, creating ever more extreme positions and ideologies.

efrbwrh 4y ago

I think the uncomfortable truth is that we're already there and it just doesn't matter because everything works on trust anyway. Sure, quality faked media has a ways to go before you're watching an Avengers quality deepfake porn but for groups that care to a professional degree (intelligence agencies, militaries, digital media companies, etc.) the quality is already good enough for intelligently planted media. The real limiter is access to trusted distribution channels for your faked media. A homunculi media consumer who gets their information from AP News/Reuters/Fox News/CNN/LA Times/New York Times/Verified Twitter Professionals/etc. is probably not at all in a position to judge the veracity of the material presented. If they were in a position to make such judgements they wouldn't need to care so much about whichprestigious media outlets they favor. But they do care, precisely because they know that they're gullible and so they want the media outlet that will give them the real truth (which usually means either the truth they like or the truth they don't like but from a brand that conforms to their ideals of what a news media brand should be). If CNN and Fox News both ran the same deepfaked video of Joe Biden shooting his veep with supplementary text stories and such then I wager a good portion of the American populace would believe it had happened and have serious conern.

Zababa 4y ago

> What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake? I don't understand your point. This has been the case for a while. People were editing photos to remove people in the time of Stalin. And even before that, you can lie, write false records, destroy them.

gernb 4y ago

I was listening to "This American Life" and they had a segment on someone who setup an site to give you a random number to call in Russia where you were supposed to give them info about what's happening in the Ukraine. It was someone shocking to hear their side of the story, that Russia is a hero for helping oppresed Russians in Ukraine. But then I stepped back and wondered, I'm assuming that the story I've been told is also 100% correct. What proof do I have it is? I get my news from sources who've been wrong before or who have a record of reporting only the official line. My gut still tells me the story I'm being told in the west is correct, but still, the bigger picture is how do I know who to trust? I see this all over the news. I think/assume the news I get about Ukraine in the west is correct but then I see so much spinning on every other topic that it's hard to know how much spinning is going on here too.

RobertRoberts 4y ago
I was asked "What are we going to do about Ukraine!?" And I said, "It's a civil war that's been going on for almost 10 years, what is different now?" and their response was "what? I'd never heard that." And I added, "In 2014 there was an overthrow of an elected president there and it started the war." Blank stares. I have a friend who traveled to Europe regularly for tech training, including Ukraine, and he was surprised about how little people know what is going because people's news sources are so limited. (mostly by choice I assume) No special tech needed to manipulate people, just lack of multiple information sources?
- HyperSane 4y ago
  The president that lost power in 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, was a Russian puppet who refused to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement in favor of closer ties to Russa. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from office by 328 to 0. He then fled to Russia.
  - synu 4y ago
    It’s hard to fathom believing there’s nothing new or relevant happening with the 2022 invasion, or why if there was a lead-in to the conflict that would be on its own a reason to conclude that there’s nothing to be done now.

nathias 4y ago

you could never trust it, now you'll know you can't trust it

brightball 4y ago

Honestly, when people have gone so far as to redefine common words it makes it really difficult to have conversations with people. 1. Hate going from one of the most visceral and obsessive emotions that exists to being tossed around at everything 2. The advent of your truth instead of the truth 3. Constant injections of "x" into every existing word apparently? "Womxn in Mathematics at Berkeley" - https://wim.berkeley.edu/ https://wim.berkeley.edu/ This is all before we get people to understand that having a discussion where some of their points might not be a strong as they think they are...somehow means you're attacking. The world that we have created for ourselves over the last 20 years is weird.

pfisherman 4y ago

I think that people will adapt. Humans are very clever and have been evolutionarily successful because of the ability to adapt to a wide range of environments. Think about how devastatingly effective print, radio, and television propaganda at the time each medium was widely adopted compared to how effective they are now. They still work, but for the most part people have caught on to the game and adjusted their cognitive filters. My guess is that we will see a bifurcation of society into those who are able to successfully weed out bullshit from those who can’t. The people who are able to process information and build better internal models of the world will be more successful, and eventually people will start imitating what they do. Edit: I do think that these tools coupled with widespread surveillance and persuasion tech (aka ad networks), have set up conditions where the few can rule over the many min a way that was not possible before. I do think some of the decentralized / autonomous organization tech - scaling bottom up decision making to make it more transparent and efficient - is a possible counter. Imo, this struggle between technological mediated centralization and top down enforcement and control vs decentralization and bottom up consensus will be the defining ideological struggle of our time.

azinman2 4y ago
I think you’re underestimating the power of cognitive biases and violence from those who only believe the information that want to hear.
- pfisherman 4y ago
  I think there are quite a few recent historical examples of this - WW2, US invasion of Iraq, Russian Invasion of Ukraine, etc. However there is a price to pay for operating on beliefs that do not align with reality. It’s why almost all organizations engage in some form of intelligence gathering. Those who are at an information disadvantage get weeded out. Philip K Dick has a great quote “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

mazlix 4y ago

I don't know exactly what you mean by "post-truth", but I think for the vast majority of human history we've lived in a time where it was rare to have easy/cheap to create and hard to fake records of what happened (photography, videos, audio recordings). In terms of a single photograph though that's been very easy to fake in compelling ways for at least the past 30 years look at lochness and bigfoot photos. Video's harder, but still pretty much all of this is not horribly difficult to fake. We've long been able to edit things out and mix audio to make a compelling video of a cartel leader meeting with them, no need for deep fakes.

mrandish 4y ago

I guess I'm an outlier on this topic because I don't think deep fakes will continue to have significant societal impact after an initial disruptive period of perhaps a few years. During that time DFs will become so common that any impactful example will immediately be suspected and discounted by most people. Yes, there will always be those who choose to believe the unbelievable but the lunatic fringe already believe outlandish claims without the need for deep fakes, thus there will be little net change.