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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

What's good about letting every script kiddie use it? I'm thinking, the less usage the better?

I agree that provenance could become more important, but I don't see it changing how memes spread. For a lot of people it's just entertainment and they don't care whether it's true.

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> What's good about letting every script kiddie use it?

I think parent was making a point that once this tech is in the hands of the common man, it's value for sophisticated players might diminish strongly. Same way as an undisclosed 0day in a high value target (say IOS), is extremely valuable. Once it gets disclosed and everyone knows about it, people can come up with workarounds and eventual fixes, rendering the threat basically defanged.

I'm leaning towards the same school of thought. I'd rather see this tech widely accessible and hence all video/picture material henceforth considered completely untrustworthy, than living in the misguided notion that video evidence is trustworthy.

> I'm leaning towards the same school of thought. I'd rather see this tech widely accessible and hence all video/picture material henceforth considered completely untrustworthy, than living in the misguided notion that video evidence is trustworthy.

This is why I am all for the current hype and the apps. Everyone that has access to electronic media should now that videos are now more easily to manipulate than ever. This undermines the attack vector of supporting fake news with fake videos. (At least it should, I do not know about the psychological side of it. Maybe even knowledge of a video's falsehood does not diminish its impact that much. Still I think it is best to make video fakeability common knowledge.)

I used to work for a company who made verifiable audio and video for law enforcement. Even a constant running timecode could be circumvented in the early 90's. (They used to use a dedicated audio channel to encode a hash of the last few seconds - on analogue). It actually takes a lot of effort to show that a video hasn't been/could not have been doctored.

On the flip side, this enables revenge porn deepfakes and person to person harm on a much, much more common level. If you are someone who becomes briefly famous on the internet, expect that a TON of harmful or disturbing videos of "you" will show up in short order. I'm not sure we have good regulations and laws in place to protect people against the misuse of this tech yet.

I understand, but I believe it is obvious now that technology like this cannot be legislated away or controlled. The moment that people discovered that ML can be used to generate fakes was the point of no return.

There's not a single thing in the chain of tools and knowhow required to produce this that can be kept out of the hands of malicious actors.

The best course of action now is to rapidly educate people of the implications and hope that the initial wave of abuse will be without too many casualties.

Think about Photoshop - back before it existed people assumed magazine ads had real people (not carefully, manually edited py artists). Photoshop and tools like it became commonly available. Over time the tools being more widely available caused more people to scrutinize and be suspicious of what they saw. Ads featuring heavily manipulated photos had the opposite of their original Intent. People picked up the term 'shopped to mean an image was fake or being deceptive. Kids in middle school learn how to do it.

Now, when you see a before and after photo, or an advertisement, the default is to assume it has been manipulated. That change came about with broad access to once-rare tools.

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