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Comment by remir | Hacker News Reader

Impressive stuff, and this is only 2019 tech. Now, imagine this kind of technology in 10, 20 or 30 years. Things will get weird for sure.

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People keep saying this, but we've had Photoshop in the general public's hands for decades now and I can't remember even a single fake photo causing any sort of ruckus. Everyone seemed to realize that photos can be perfectly faked at about the same time photos could be perfectly faked.

Because photos aren't the same thing as feeding text to a machine that can spit out dialogue in the voice of someone else. Same thing with "deep fake".

Use the Snap filter that changes your gender, now add a realistic voice... that’s just not the same as photoshop.

We are very quickly reaching the point where real recorded audio and video will not be distinguishable from generated ones. I'd say it will happen well before 30 years.

I cannot say what overall effect it will have just yet, but law enforcement will definitely have a harder time collecting evidence.

Tamper-resistant/evident video cameras that digitally sign the footage?

and publish the signature on the blockchain for time stamping

We also have GANs that can generate realistic-looking faces now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxPcy5Gr4). How long before we can generate fake videos fluidly?

I would expect that pretty soon, we'll start seeing a lot of fake online/dating profiles with generated pictures and text. Probably a lot of chatbots posing as attractive women trying to scam people. Seems it should also be possible to condition a GAN to generate pictures that look like someone specific. These bots could try to pass themselves off as people you know.

Deep fake videos already exist, and will fool most people for short videos. You might start to suspect something if you deep faked a feature length movie though. Combine a deep fake with Faux Rogan and we can expect 2020 to have a video of Joe Rogan taunting and then fighting a chimpanzee.

If you don't need a physical relationship, an intelligent-enough GAN-bot might be appealing for a lot of people.

Life is going to be weird if virtual girls/dolls go from fringe otaku culture to realistic, relatively normal household items.

People also seem to be wanting to get more drugged up, plastic, and bio-engineered.

Maybe in the future the average person is the meeting somewhere in the middle.

I'm personally somewhat worried about the way modern society enables people to have less and less physical interactions. Imagine a future where it's commonplace to attend an online university, work from home, get goods, food and groceries delivered by a robot (don't even have to talk to a driver). Now, if we had chatbots that passed the Turing test, and always basically told you what you wanted to hear without ever challenging you, then what?

I'm worried we're going the way of Japan and its 'herbivore' culture. A world where people have given up on dating because it's too complicated. Other human beings are uncomfortable to interact with, so everyone retreats into their own little bubbles and gets more and more of their needs met by machines... On an individual basis, it a seductive idea to have an idealized robotic partner that does exactly what you want when you want it and doesn't have any needs of its own, will never leave you, but what will that do to humanity as a whole?

Yea. I think think the most likely scenario our civilization exists in is that we are coming up on a bunch of Great Filters, and this is just another one of them.

There's probably virtually infinitely many (just as life has infinitely many ways to kill an individual or group in pre-modern times).

Also, just as in prehistory, it would have taken visionary and moral heroes to build for their future's survival. But today, the role of those who have those concerns is not important in civilization anymore...

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