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> I could very well be wrong about this, and usually I fall more on the e/acc side, but I think deepfakes are perhaps the gravest immediate concern of AI. I do

> I could very well be wrong about this, and usually I fall more on the e/acc side, but I think deepfakes are perhaps the gravest immediate concern of AI. I don't think they're a concern at all, other than that they will ruin the evidentiary value of photographs. They'll do that whether or not the general public has access to them. The concern about fake pictures of people naked is stupid. The same process mentioned above happens to naked pictures of people: they lose evidentiary value. General access to the ability to make deepfakes not only makes it so people won't believe what they see now, but also won't believe actual revenge porn. It simply ceases to be a problem. You can claim it's a fake, and no one can disprove it. This is a reason for celebration. The standard response for that has been for people to simply claim that it won't matter, and that people will destroy the life of some young innocent girl if a mean boy spreads fake pictures of her naked. The answer is that people who harass a young girl are guilty of harassment, and should be jailed. You shouldn't be harassing people even if naked pictures of them are real, which they often are. And if you'd attack a person over pictures that you could fake up yourself in five minutes, you're either a) a moron or b) somebody using the photos as an excuse, and it would be a benefit for society for you to be locked away from it. I suspect a lot of people really worried about deepfake porn deep down are worried about their ability to properly identify and harass the harlots if people won't believe the pictures that you send to their family and friends anymore. From my perspective, they're literally fighting to preserve revenge porn.

ssalka 2y ago
> ruin the evidentiary value of photographs This is going to be a monumental issue when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold. Maybe watermarking will help with that. More likely people will develop tools to circumvent watermarking technology (either on the imprinting side, or on the verification side). > people won't believe what they see now, but also won't believe actual revenge porn. It simply ceases to be a problem. This may be a comforting way to think about it, but it won't work in all cases. Consider instead of revenge porn, the case of CSAM – that will never be a solved problem until 100% of it is wiped from the face of the earth and it is never produced again. Making it less believable because there is so much AI-generated equivalents out there is a not a solution to the problem, it exacerbates the problem.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold Full faith in photography was never a thing. If anything, the advent of photography came alongside yellow journalism. Trust is an institution. You can't build institution on solely technology.
  - ssalka 2y ago
    Good context. But the fact is, a great many people – perhaps even the majority of people – are quite used to looking at a photograph and fully trusting that it depicts something which actually happened. As they say, seeing is believing. Even with CGI being what it has been since the 70s, it's still appropriate to apply Occam's Razor in many cases, and to simply say that because it looks real, it probably is.
ultimafan 2y ago
I think the problem is that people aren't necessarily logical or rational about such things. I know someone (family friend) who was the victim of similar harassment with (clearly) photoshopped images being sent anonymously to her work, family, friends on social media. The fact that they were fake didn't diminish the humiliation or stress she went through and I don't think she ever really recovered from the trauma of having some anonymous asshole harassing and stalking her and her family online. It eventually stopped but she was afraid of it starting again for a long time. "It's fake" isn't much of a comfort to someone being harassed and being afraid of harassment escalating in one way or another. And it getting easier and easier for crazy people to do this with less and less effort doesn't help the issue at all regardless of what laws are passed. Finding better ways to deal with these people is a good thing but enabling them to make it easier isn't, in my opinion. I think for a lot of people it's easy to die on the hill of technological progress and freedom at any cost when the consequences haven't happened to you or a loved one.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  We definitely need to crack down more on harassment and stalking and not worry so much about what form that harassment and stalking takes. It's insane that you can have someone all over you, sending you unwanted messages, following you, or generally targeting you with misery that falls short of physical assault, and the police won't do anything about it until you're physically hurt. It shouldn't matter if the harassment is phone calls at 4AM or deepfakes. Harassment is harassment.
  - ultimafan 2y ago
    I agree. But the internet age feels like it unfortunately has made this much more difficult than it should be. People over share on social media and make themselves too visible because they aren't aware of the consequences- or don't assume there are people out there sociopathic enough to harass someone to that extent. The pool of potential suspects when they're acting anonymously has grown from whoever is in your local community to whoever has an internet connection in the world. Not uncommon to hear of such harassment, blackmailing cases and such where the perpetrator doesn't even live in your own country where police could do anything about it even if they had their name and real evidence.
acdha 2y ago
> The concern about fake pictures of people naked is stupid. The same process mentioned above happens to naked pictures of people: they lose evidentiary value. This is too narrow: it presumes rational contexts where evidence will be evaluated critically, and it assumes a mild, uncreative attacker but harassers are good at exploiting social norms. The damage caused by this kind of harassment isn’t seeing yourself nude as much as wondering or knowing what other people will think, and there’s no way to undo that. Even if people _say_ they believe that the pictures are fake, the victim may be wondering whether that’s really true for the rest of their life. The other thing to think about is that we’re really just getting started. Most of the deepfakes which the average person has seen are fairly mainstream porn nudes: there’s a huge control issue but in general there are worse things than people thinking you have a star’s body. We’re going to see those worse things soon: it won’t be a porn fantasy but things designed to degrade and more targeted - if the target had body issues, exaggerating them; punishing the person who rejected someone by faking them looking not like a porn star but less attractive and having degrading sex with someone unpopular, knowing that a bunch of people are going to think “well, he would say that”; make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; etc. Because the attacks are being directed by humans, they’re going to adjust and find what works. Anything which forces an official investigation is going to be especially bad because we can’t just ignore things like child abuse so it’s going to be like SWATing where there’s an ugly period where the wrong teenager can get an incredibly high-leverage response with a single message.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  > make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; The harm comes from falsely accusing someone of rape, not the deepfake itself. This can be done with or without a deepfake. As a counterpoint: if a group of boys find their teacher is really hot and they use Stable Diffusing inpaint her clothes to create a fictional naked photo, where's the harm? They could also just use their imaginations to fantasize about what she'd look naked. I don't really see that much different - they're essentially delegating the imagination to the computer. The typical response is that if the teacher discovers these photos, that discovery could be disturbing for her. I do agree. But at the same time, if these boys walk up to her and tell her "I just jacked off to fantasies of you last night", that's also probably disturbing too. Like the first scenario, the deepfake is tangential to the actual harm: the harm stems from telling another person that you've fantasized about them sexually - not the exact nature of whether that fantasy was produced by a human brain or a silicon one.

ssalka 2y ago

> ruin the evidentiary value of photographs This is going to be a monumental issue when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold. Maybe watermarking will help with that. More likely people will develop tools to circumvent watermarking technology (either on the imprinting side, or on the verification side). > people won't believe what they see now, but also won't believe actual revenge porn. It simply ceases to be a problem. This may be a comforting way to think about it, but it won't work in all cases. Consider instead of revenge porn, the case of CSAM – that will never be a solved problem until 100% of it is wiped from the face of the earth and it is never produced again. Making it less believable because there is so much AI-generated equivalents out there is a not a solution to the problem, it exacerbates the problem.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold Full faith in photography was never a thing. If anything, the advent of photography came alongside yellow journalism. Trust is an institution. You can't build institution on solely technology.
- ssalka 2y ago
  Good context. But the fact is, a great many people – perhaps even the majority of people – are quite used to looking at a photograph and fully trusting that it depicts something which actually happened. As they say, seeing is believing. Even with CGI being what it has been since the 70s, it's still appropriate to apply Occam's Razor in many cases, and to simply say that because it looks real, it probably is.

ultimafan 2y ago

I think the problem is that people aren't necessarily logical or rational about such things. I know someone (family friend) who was the victim of similar harassment with (clearly) photoshopped images being sent anonymously to her work, family, friends on social media. The fact that they were fake didn't diminish the humiliation or stress she went through and I don't think she ever really recovered from the trauma of having some anonymous asshole harassing and stalking her and her family online. It eventually stopped but she was afraid of it starting again for a long time. "It's fake" isn't much of a comfort to someone being harassed and being afraid of harassment escalating in one way or another. And it getting easier and easier for crazy people to do this with less and less effort doesn't help the issue at all regardless of what laws are passed. Finding better ways to deal with these people is a good thing but enabling them to make it easier isn't, in my opinion. I think for a lot of people it's easy to die on the hill of technological progress and freedom at any cost when the consequences haven't happened to you or a loved one.

ryandrake 2y ago
We definitely need to crack down more on harassment and stalking and not worry so much about what form that harassment and stalking takes. It's insane that you can have someone all over you, sending you unwanted messages, following you, or generally targeting you with misery that falls short of physical assault, and the police won't do anything about it until you're physically hurt. It shouldn't matter if the harassment is phone calls at 4AM or deepfakes. Harassment is harassment.
- ultimafan 2y ago
  I agree. But the internet age feels like it unfortunately has made this much more difficult than it should be. People over share on social media and make themselves too visible because they aren't aware of the consequences- or don't assume there are people out there sociopathic enough to harass someone to that extent. The pool of potential suspects when they're acting anonymously has grown from whoever is in your local community to whoever has an internet connection in the world. Not uncommon to hear of such harassment, blackmailing cases and such where the perpetrator doesn't even live in your own country where police could do anything about it even if they had their name and real evidence.

acdha 2y ago

> The concern about fake pictures of people naked is stupid. The same process mentioned above happens to naked pictures of people: they lose evidentiary value. This is too narrow: it presumes rational contexts where evidence will be evaluated critically, and it assumes a mild, uncreative attacker but harassers are good at exploiting social norms. The damage caused by this kind of harassment isn’t seeing yourself nude as much as wondering or knowing what other people will think, and there’s no way to undo that. Even if people _say_ they believe that the pictures are fake, the victim may be wondering whether that’s really true for the rest of their life. The other thing to think about is that we’re really just getting started. Most of the deepfakes which the average person has seen are fairly mainstream porn nudes: there’s a huge control issue but in general there are worse things than people thinking you have a star’s body. We’re going to see those worse things soon: it won’t be a porn fantasy but things designed to degrade and more targeted - if the target had body issues, exaggerating them; punishing the person who rejected someone by faking them looking not like a porn star but less attractive and having degrading sex with someone unpopular, knowing that a bunch of people are going to think “well, he would say that”; make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; etc. Because the attacks are being directed by humans, they’re going to adjust and find what works. Anything which forces an official investigation is going to be especially bad because we can’t just ignore things like child abuse so it’s going to be like SWATing where there’s an ugly period where the wrong teenager can get an incredibly high-leverage response with a single message.

Manuel_D 2y ago
> make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; The harm comes from falsely accusing someone of rape, not the deepfake itself. This can be done with or without a deepfake. As a counterpoint: if a group of boys find their teacher is really hot and they use Stable Diffusing inpaint her clothes to create a fictional naked photo, where's the harm? They could also just use their imaginations to fantasize about what she'd look naked. I don't really see that much different - they're essentially delegating the imagination to the computer. The typical response is that if the teacher discovers these photos, that discovery could be disturbing for her. I do agree. But at the same time, if these boys walk up to her and tell her "I just jacked off to fantasies of you last night", that's also probably disturbing too. Like the first scenario, the deepfake is tangential to the actual harm: the harm stems from telling another person that you've fantasized about them sexually - not the exact nature of whether that fantasy was produced by a human brain or a silicon one.