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Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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