Nor any of the follow-up articles I posted. Given onslaught of fabricated "news" that spread around the last election, this type of ML technology is almost guaranteed to play a role in the next one.
With such power, if all it takes is one douchebag to cause massive harm very quickly, then you should also believe it is possible for person to do massive good very quickly.
I'm not sure that applies for this technology. What massive good could be done by making a fake video of someone talking?
On the other hand, there's a difference between being doubtful something is real, and being aware that people speaking in public have an agenda, and a large portion will utilize half-truths and lies more often than not.
The difference between "the President lied about WMDs and got thousands killed over it", and "maybe the president didn't actually say that - archive footage might be false".
But now that I think about it, the most damage will come from making people even more incredulous... of everything.
It will become even harder to use evidence to prove a point. Uninformed people will just say "yeah sure, it's probably faked".
On the other hand... who could blame them?
Democratic institutions not only functioned but were put into effect before the advent of recorded or transmitted audio and video. Mass media has already been distorting the truth for over a century.
"Trust nothing you read online" becoming commonplace is something to be celebrated!
This is in fact happening, to everyone's benefit. Only in matters of vague mass policy (do we need giant walls? can markets sell health?) has it been largely corrupted by corporate propaganda. Which is probably not terribly worse than before. That scale has always been a big enough target to make it worth the effort to corrupt.
Right now, faking an interview via real-time 3d rendering plus capture of facial expressions would cost a ton of money. So anyone trying to do so would need (for e.g. to damage a competitor's reputation) both deep pockets and something valuable to gain from it (and would need to factorize the cost of getting caught, etc).
If this tech goes mainstream in the future, the cost would be so low that I can imagine some nasty things happening.
Hopefully there will be ways to detect this as this technique is further explored, so I'm not saying it's a "catastrophic development", but it certainly made me think more than just "oh wow, this is very neat!", which it also did by the way. It's incredible the kind of things researchers are able to achieve.
Just like (to pick a hopefully safely historical example) no president would record himself conspiring to perform illegal activities?
Aside from the negative or comedy use cases, I could see this being used in video games, and probably other similar applications for narratives; based on the methodology it sounds near trivial to sync it up to any audio. Really incredible work -- love seeing this kind of research, which I've been much more exposed to doing while gamedev than I ever had been when doing web/app dev.
what is old is new again