You can have 1000 of companies that act fair and don't use AI for malicious purposes, but there it that one company or community that doesn't... and then someone sends you gay porn with your face in it.
The corollary is a little more worrying: any kind of incriminating document about a politician or public figure will be dismissed as a fake immediately. I mean, they already do that, but that'll be even harder to figure out what's real and what's not.
That "grab them by the pussy" tape? Obviously fake. I mean, you don't even see the guy talking, just the audio, how gullible can you be?
That girl running away from the napalm bombing? Obviously fake. I mean you're going to tell me that all of her clothes burned but she's still fit enough to run? Everybody around her wears clothes. Come on man, are you new here?
That chinese guy standing in front of a military tank with groceries? Come on, I can do a more convincing fake in 10 seconds on my smartphone. There, look, I just did.
We have a brave new world ahead of us where you won't be able to trust anything you see or hear through any media, no matter how convincing it seems. That's pretty terrifying IMO.
I remember a while ago stumbling upon a conspiracy theory forum where people were claiming that a video of an interview with Julian Assange was a fake because there were a few strange visual artifacts around his face sometimes. Given that the quality of the video was very good and the oddities were rather minor (possibly encoding artifacts) I dismissed it as the usual tinfoil hattery.
I think in the future I won't be so sure anymore. I'm not sure if the technology to make such a good quality fake already exists but it's probably a matter of years before we get there. If some people with too much time on their hands manage to make somewhat convincing porn montages for free on the internet what can big three letter agencies do? What does the state of the art look like? What will it look like 10 years from now?
- Create a special "evidence camera" that allows photos taken with this camera to be used as an evidence.
- When you take the photo, the camera posts digital fingerprint of the photo on the blockchain.
- To prove that camera internals have not been tampered with, it also signs the fingerprint with the "camera private key". The private key is destroyed when the camera case is opened: for the sake of the argument let's say that the value of the air pressure inside the tightly locked camera case is the private key.
- The public key of the camera is publicly known, so everyone can verify the validity of the private key.
You want proof of the veracity of the audio or visual evidence but the person(s) taking it and getting it out to public view desperately need to not be identified. Or at least they can't be connected to any network while collecting evidence (i.e. video of something unseemly happening in China/Somalia/DRC).
Deepfakes are a very hard problem and solely technical solutions are unlikely. A mix of context, reputation of the recording provider, and technical analysis is far more likely to be the right approach than any flavor of the month technology, be it block*, Erlang, Rust, or capsules.
By extension, any scheme to prove the truth of arbitrary measurements (audio, video, anything else) is vulnerable to manipulation of the measured value itself. The only way to be sure that something isn't fake is to experience it yourself (at least until virtual reality improves far enough to make even personal experience unreliable).
Anyone can correct me if I'm being a bit dramatic but personally, it feels like we are very much already there.
Hey- at least i brought a keg of beer.
PS: 1. Policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI.
I never knew that research in Security was so deeply underfunded, that you had to write pleas into a paper. Jobsecurity research - its really that dangerous.