- We've already had sophisticated image editing capabilities for a long time, and it hasn't substantially changed how newspapers, blogs, and social media accounts share photos. In particular, I see screencaps of Twitter threads all the time, even though they're trivial to fake. For whatever reason, people already seem to be OK with this. Maybe image editing did upset everything and I'm just too young to remember, but in either case, it doesn't look to me like the world fell apart.
- We've had (relatively) sophisticated audio editing capabilities for a somewhat lesser period of time, and that hasn't changed the landscape of how I see audio reported on. Reporters still use audio as evidence in articles, we haven't seen a wide spread of proprietary chains of trust, anything like that.
- We've seen decent evidence that deepfakes aren't required to currently fake video content to the point that you can deceive people. Deceptive cutting, slowdown, etc... seems to be enough. For people who want reasons to distrust a video, those methods also seem to be adequate. I regularly encounter people who'll look at body-cam footage and say, "well, you don't know, it doesn't show the full context." I'm skeptical deepfakes will make this situation worse -- at most I suspect they'll just further divide us into groups who research sources and groups who don't.
- Deepfakes are getting better, and I keep on getting told that they're eventually going to be perfect, but again, in practice I can't help but compare it to Photoshop. It turned out that with Photoshop, people's ability to spot fakes improved at roughly the same rate as the technology, to the point where I don't think it would be trivial for me today to make a fake photo of a politician that wouldn't get quickly identified as such on Reddit or Twitter. I've seen some really impressive AI generated content that blows me away, but right now I can still tell that it's all fake. I haven't seen anything that can consistently produce results that fool me beyond the most straightforward, boring use-cases. And I'm not an expert on this stuff, if it's good it should be able to fool me.
In theory, deepfakes are concerning, and I get why people are concerned about them. The technology will get better, it will be easier and easier for anyone to make a video saying anything they want. In theory, I agree with all of that. I just don't see a lot of practical evidence that it's going to be any better or worse than what we have right now.
If I hadn't grown up in an era where people were making what to me sounded like similar claims about Photoshop, I would be more worried.