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What the original commenter is saying, and what I will agree will happen, is that the behavior of automatically trusting video as evidence will go away. I think this is actually a good thing if it encourages people to dig deeper into the sources of information.

> If you reject a dude he can just make a deepfake porn video with you and release it as revenge.

This will be troubling at first, but again in the long run it will likely just lead to people not taking these sort of videos seriously and interpreting them as a joke / weird stuff on the Internet. This already essentially happens with Photoshop and celebrities.

> And we live in a time when "facts" already don't matter much anymore and people are just looking to find evidence that supports their claim alone rather than the truth

This is how human beings have been since the beginning of time. There is no "Golden Age of Rationality" that we are exiting.

> What the original commenter is saying, and what I will agree will happen, is that the behavior of automatically trusting video as evidence will go away.

This is doubtful. People still believe in pictures despite it's so easy to forge. People believe obvious oral lies. Hell, people believe tweets.

The video medium is incredibly powerful, and the damage it can do is huge.

We are going to suffer for this, and most people won't even understand why.

I am observing increasing number of people is now seriously believe in "Moon Hoax". Definitely more than back in 70-80th. Why is that? Generation of YouTube? Deliberate propaganda?

Don't forget the Flat Earth movement.

I don't think anything about that is "deliberate propaganda".

It's just nutjobs gathering and gatherings of nutjobs creating more nutjobs. It's much easier these days with "social" media.

Well, it's also the fact that people have learned how to monetize this stuff effectively. I mean, even the first fakes were monetized (stuff like shocking photos of fairies would be sold, the people who took them would travel the country and speak about their 'amazing discoveries) but, nowadays, you can just write a book about the Earth being flat because all you need to make money off of it is a few contrarian people or conspiracy theorists.

Even Alex Jones, a figure so obviously deranged with claims that sound like satire, has been selling supplements and merch. All because these days anybody has a platform and monetizing lies is easier than ever. People will believe anything, especially if it's 'published in a scientific magazine', nevermind that the publication has no credibility, reliable sources, or academic integrity. This is how anti-vaxxers got their start, after all.

What is the actual social impact of the flat earth thing, though? Is flat earth creating new nutjobs? Does it really have the power to draw from the ranks of the rational, or is it drawing in people who would have fallen for something absurd eventually? I'd be curious to find out what social conditions predispose people to believing it.

This might not be a popular answer, but I think the hope is that a rube would "fall for" something positive that happens to be correct and/or beneficial. eg, suppose somebody believes in modern physics, not because they understand it all, but because they know this is the "right" idea.

This is obviously less ideal than someone actually understanding an idea they profess to hold, but it's far better to have support around beneficial ideas. It's not hard to imagine a lot of important issues fitting into this: support for liberalism and demoracy, support for global warming, support for coherent ideas about vaccines, etc. These all require broad public support, and the truth of the matter is that many people generally don't spend much time evaluating why they believe what they do.

I understand this is not a perfect point of view: eg, who gets to decide what the "best" ideas are.

They have big conferences about it, as long as no one is hurt all good with that, but truly doubt that people aren't being hurt by this delusion.

It's an illness that demands rejection of overwhelming proof, it leads down dark paths, much like how arsonists become murderers these things need to be cutoff at the stem. There's nothing wrong with that

OK, but are there actually more people who believe in this now, or are you just more aware of it?

>The video medium is incredibly powerful, and the damage it can do is huge.

I fully agree. Even if rationally, one rejects a video is fake, it does have the potential to influence the subconscious.

> it will likely just lead to people not taking these sort of videos seriously

Will courts interpret it seriously? It is quite different from funny GIFs if you can completely fake appearance of a politician in an appropriate place doing bad things. We did have different scandals in recent years ('grab'em by pussy', austrian leader of right party, etc.) and it is certainly more to come in upcoming years. How much of that content will be not fake with 100% certainty?

> Will courts interpret it seriously?

I doubt it. All it takes is a defense attorney showing the jury their own faces merged into a deep fake porn.

I disagree and propose that we are indeed exiting a golden age of objectivity that evolved alongside Western Civilization the past century at the least if not longer.

We developed as a world because the most important nations did not peddle obvious distortions of facts in matters of fundamental importance (that all people are equal, that no one deserves to die, that the world needs preservation, and recently, that man has indeed harmed this planet irreversibly). Of course, every nation in history has been hypocritical and done grave acts that go against these beliefs, but at the least they'll not try to reason it as right, but often just hide them from public.

Now, we have the major leader of most of the important countries misrepresenting fundamental facts for their political gain, and close to a majority of their population is ready to believe them for myriad reasons. Facts have always been misrepresented by politicians but never this brazenly so, and never at this scale.

"Fake news" is not a phrase that involves any technology in and of itself, and if you were right, then this phrase should have been in lexicon for ages. But it hasnt, has it? People a decade or two back would contest facts, but never had I heard anyone say "facts don't matter" till 2015 or so. Things have changed, and not to be iterative, ignorance of this change again shows the inabilities of even the "enlightened" or whatever it is the people around here would like to call themselves to cope with change. Only time will tell where this will lead us.

This is a very historically-ignorant view. Every culture and state since the beginning of time has manipulated information to suit its needs.

We don’t even need to back that far: the beginning of the Iraq war, not even twenty years ago, was rife with “fake news.” The fact that the buzzword didn’t exist doesn’t mean that the phenomenon didn’t exist.

The modern world with its social networks makes it so much easier to do on a large scale, though.

https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-a...

Certainly the sheer volume of fake information available today is orders of magnitude different.

With deep fakes easily available I believe the pornographic video material ultimately will have the same weight as a rumor, it's somewhat true for photos today. We definitely need a common way to propagate trusted information, but keeping videos as absolutely trustworthy is not possible anymore.

Right, and I'd say the sooner this is demonstrated to the public at large (perhaps not with pornography), the better.

Next is legislation that outlines the rights on individuals and provides a process for reporting and removal of content, a la DMCA. We have existing laws for non-consensual pornography, but it might be interesting to allow the option to treat them like copyrighted content. If a video is profitable, pornographic or not, why not allow people to collect on that?

The next catch-up phase is to release client-side tools to allow people to seamlessly render template content on their home equipment, circumventing any public distribution / "make available" clauses.

I also think long term this'll be a boon for sex worker acceptance and reintroduce some skepticism into the public evaluation of media.

My grandfather was a retired military officer, and late in his life they shot a battle scene for a movie down the street from where he lived. He saw the set and effects in action and was deeply affected by it, saying it was indistinguishable from reality to him, and if that was the level of control they had over video these days, how could he ever trust anything he saw on the news again?

Interesting times.

> "What's the equivalent of this in the distant past?"

There are so many versions depending what time and what place. If its an elder in ancient times then what they say is the truth. If its in a caste society then the truth is determined by your blood. In chivalry, truth is based on reputation. 19th century truth is written in a book. 20th century it was written in the paper. World war 2 is a period where truth was what was said by leaders, both political and scientists. Post world war 2 until 21th century and truth was anything said on the TV (in many places a single channel).

With the exception of the caste system, I would say that there is a need for a healthy balance between trust and distrust. It also seems that balance generally will occur after a while, but not before a lot of damage happens. Deep fake in that sense is not ushering in a new dark age, but it will likely take a bit of time before people find a balance in how to perceive video evidence.

> if you reject a dude he can just make a deepfake porn video with you and release it as revenge

But the woman in this example could take the same video and put the faces of a thousand other people on the person in the video.

>Of course, people still exist that believe the moonlanding videos were faked, but their hypothesis hinges on the government spending extraordinary amounts of money to produce the fake.

Are you truly suggesting here that the government would never make a fake video about a moon landing because it would cost too much to make this video?? So instead they sent humans to the moon and brought them back safely to earth because that's all their budget would allow?

> because anyone with a computer

How is that different from anything else nowadays? That's what computers do for us.

Making calculations, decrypting text, generating art, developing a software.

All of these used to be harder and more manual and time-consuming. Now, anyone with a computer or a phone and an app can do these things way easier, and I'm sure there are better examples I failed to think of.

It only makes sense that even the "bad" uses of a computer will be benefitted by computer progress.

I challenge anyone worried about how facts don't matter to people anymore due to the tech bubble/fake news/propaganda campaigns to prove they ever really did.