If it were to become common, society would quickly learn to take all video with a grain of salt. We already question suspicious images. If the exact line of how a photo got to you from the camera is unknown people quickly exclaim things to be Photoshopped.
I don’t think expanding our questioning to video is that far of a societal jump.
In reality, the people who follow populist movements are both firmly in the grasp of illusory ideas and hold a very lucid understanding of their place in the world. They are riled up by fiery rhetoric but they are also well aware, whether consciously or not, that they have little to gain from a return to the neo-liberal order in which they have no useful economic role, no community (whether real or imaginary) to come back to, no access to the wonders of a globalization, and no real cause or culture to believe in other than competing against their neighbors for a slightly better place in the rat race.
In San Francisco you can see the end logic of this trajectory. An elite with highly paid and satisfying jobs served by a pauperized underclass of Uber drivers and mini-job holders who only have a crumbling public infrastructure to support them and no prospect of being a socially engaged citizenry.
My point is that its effects are more pronounced, more reliable, and significantly harder to correct in the presence deepfake style media. People who are trying harder to make honest evaluations of the world will be making more committed arguments for dishonest points if they fail to identify the inauthenticity of a deepfake message, a problem which is purposefully more likely due to the inherent design of a deepfake message.
We don't need to talk about people who are intending to be manipulated, we need to talk about the people who are not intending to be manipulated who will nevertheless be disarmed by new technology.
Deep Fakes or not, I think people are largely already comfortable with questioning the authenticity of videos.
Images are not reality, and society has yet to grasp that distinction despite the pervasiveness of images and how long they've been around. No amount of effort will ever make images into reality, nor reality as harmless as images. People do wish for, and maybe not unreasonably so, the ability to trust their eyes and initial perceptions. They want the picture they see on a screen and perform significant acts of interpretation upon to reach some belief that it represents something that happened in reality to be proven correct. But it almost never is. The difficulty of communicating with images is just as large as communication with language, it's just not acknowledged when images are involved.
The Magritte painting that I refer to isn't photorealistic, so what he was getting at wasn't really a prompt to doubt the reality of images, but a maybe subtler point that images and reality, even undoctored photographs or videos of reality, are fundamentally and profoundly different things. The 'treachery' of images is that our intuition tells us the exact opposite. We have a long history of putting our intuition to the side when it's really necessary, so I do think there's a possibility that people could come to see images and reality as more distinct than they currently do. I didn't mean to suggest that we should totally dismiss every image, that really wouldn't be any kind of solution, but simply change how much inherent weight we believe they carry. The language people use when they talk about imagery, constantly conflating images with the things they represent, tricks an awful lot of people in an awful lot of circumstances.
> The solution was already known decades ago.
I understand what you're saying, I just don't think that that'll change - our brain wires itself to think in shorthand as much as possible, images are part of that shorthand for reality.
This just happened a few days ago and it was basic alterations and despite being authenticated as an altered video there are still those who:
-Deny it was altered
-Spread it for the sole purpose of misinformation
People will weaponize this technology like they do all others and gladly welcome it with open arms. We simply need to develop ways to identify and prevent abuse of powers.