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Comment by mjw_byrne | Hacker News Reader

Deepfakes are surely no more a "problem" than photoshopped still images?

Everyone knows that a still image can be altered to (convincingly) depict something that never happened. So, a still image is not considered good evidence of anything unless it has a verifiable provenance, chain of custody etc. Presumably that wasn't always the case, but now that photo editing tech is universally accessible, we all know we can't trust a still image unless its authenticity can be corroborated somehow.

The deepfake tech merely puts video into the same category of (un)trustworthiness. The potential for abuse depends on people's trust that video is always authentic. So the "solution" is simply to make it as widely-known as possible that video is now easy to fake.

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The volume alone might be a problem. It takes some Photoshop skills to pull off an acceptable fake. If there's a turnkey website that can spit them out en masse, that's something different than having to actually hire a human to do it by hand.

Previously it took at least one CGI artist to convincingly fake video, probably several. This inherently limits how much of a problem it can be, because it doesn't scale. AI scales.

I mean- either deep learning AI automation is going to be important and useful, or it isn't. If replacing all drivers with robots is important, then automated turnkey fakery has the potential for disrupting something, isn't it?

I agree, but I think my original point covers this - if video proves to be very easy to fake at scale (e.g. using your example of a turnkey website) then that should result in equally large-scale scepticism about video as evidence. The internet may drown in annoying deepfake-based memes but as long as everyone knows its all fake, there seems little potential for the kind of serious harm people are worried about (reputational damage, election meddling etc.)

> ...as long as everyone knows its all fake,

There's a shockingly large number of people who aren't even convinced that election meddling took place in 2016, or that propaganda was disseminated to many people on social media, despite unanimity from US intelligence.

If we as a society can't all agree that these things even happened, how can we hope to properly educate people on the existence/prevalence of fake video? It seems like common sense to many people, but we can't assume that everyone will accept these truths based on the political rhetoric we've seen in the last few years.

US intelligence doesn't enjoy a reputation for trustworthiness, to put it mildly. But if people can just go online, upload a video and get back a "hilarious" deepfake, that's an irrefutable demonstration that video-meddling is easy and widely-available, isn't it? They can literally see for themselves how accessible the faking tech is.

Text can be convincingly faked at scale. Most meme images are widely reused photos. We do have Snopes and other fact-checkers, but it's only a partial solution.

And yet, fake news does seem to be a problem. Checking provenance of facts and statistics is often skipped, even by journalists, let alone on Twitter.

This suggests that people will have lots of fun resharing deep fakes and won't care much that they're fake, as long as they express some emotion that they agree with.

Give people a fake that they want to believe in, and it's going to be very hard to talk them out of it.

I would think that the same tech you can use to graft a face onto a person in a video could be used to do it on a still.

This is a good point, I hadn't really thought about it but the credibility of photos has cratered in the past decade.

Deepfakes' destruction of the credibility of videos is still worse because it totally removes the ability of a random citizen witness to capture evidence. This has been useful in the past, e.g. for documenting police brutality or just-developing events like shootings.

In a way this is a very undemocratic development -- putting the power of deepfakes in the hands of ordinary people is going to make everybody a less credible witness, no?

This aspect is what scares me the most. Nowadays evidence can be easily fabricated and everybody has reason to be a skeptic.

The whole Cambridge Analytica debacle started blowing up after deepfakes gained notoriety and started getting banned on most sites. The whole time I was watching the undercover documentary Channel 4 released I kept thinking, "this 'found footage' could easily be a hoax"

> it totally removes the ability of a random citizen witness to capture evidence

The police/etc have the same problem.

> putting the power of deepfakes in the hands of ordinary people is going to make everybody a less credible witness, no?

"Ordinary people" have a major advantage: parallelism and redundancy. Making one fake and disseminating it to many people is efficient and cheap. Faking many videos in a way that avoids easily discovered contradictions is very hard. Evidence always needs to be corroborated.

The problem isn't so much that fake videos will be used to lie. It's that valid video evidence can be dismissed as Fake News with some credibility. This could be bad for the overall definition of "truth".

Video of the Prime Minister/President taking bribes? Eh, you can't trust these videos these days!

In the court of public opinion, yes, this is true - video is no longer proof that something happened. I guess that's a price we pay for technological progress. Presumably at some point it will be possible (and easy and accessible) to generate body fluids with someone else's DNA in them, at which point DNA evidence will suffer a similar hit.

In a court of law, presumably video will now be subject to the same scrutiny as photos. IANAL but I imagine photos do not "stand alone" - the side that uses them has to make a convincing argument that they are trustworthy.

Right. Evidence is more than a singular "smoking gun" photo or video. You typically rely on a whole collection of corroborating evidence to build a case.

It's the court of public opinion that worries me. That court is very important to the functioning of a liberal democracy. If the facts themselves are always open to suspicion, a society cannot defend itself very well against tyranny.

I'd have to agree. In fact, I'm actually glad to see some pushback against the seemingly indelible veracity of photographic imagery.

Photos, and by corollary video, haven't been incontrovertible for at least two decades, and Hollywood movies are a clear demonstration of that fact.

We won't really be able to rely on pictures as proof, at some point in the immediate future.

Unfortunately, in an ever-more terrifying far-flung future, where eye surgery becomes sufficiently advanced, we won't even be able to trust our eyes. After that, I think it's probably just game over.

I really just don't have a strategy to countermand that one.

I think the pictures-as-proof is a straw man. There are a lot of people that believe what they see if it reinforces their existing beliefs. If you make videos of Trump saying something bad, people on the left will believe it, even if the provenance is weak, and people on the right will be inclined to disbelief. A similar fake video with Obama or Clinton will have an opposite effect. Much of that effect can be had without any provenance at all due to the general ability of videos to circulate, usually though social media, with little to no real “authoritative source” to validate them.

I think the general public is learning how to be sceptical, albeit slowly. It used to be the case that merely being published counted as authority (I remember reading about UFO abductions and thinking "this is a real book! There must be some truth to it!" In my defence I was eight years old) but the internet is forcing everyone to be less naive.

That being said, movements like the anti-vaxxers and the flat-Earthers are testament to people's ability to believe whatever the hell they want.

I think your faith in the public to be discerning is hopelessly naive. The evidence is all around us that people just don’t care. You don’t even need to photoshop images anymore, just write down a few specially-crafted words and people just run with it. Altered images go largely undetected by the vast majority of people, and video will be even worse. Video just has a truth to it way more than any other medium.

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