The fear of fake videos is overblown. What amounts to a screenshot of a headline can get 30k upvotes and comments on Reddit without anyone asking for a source. That tendency is what worries me, not the medium.
I can imagine a world where false tweets/videos/headlines are generated specifically for you to keep engagement levels high. The outcome would be not only do we not know the truth, but no one can agree on the truth. It’s something that currently exists in our society, but technology can make the split bigger.
Those are much less sophisticated than the sorts of stuff this enables.
Pointing out a qualitative similarity does not mean quantitative differences don't exist, and quantitative differences sometimes create qualitative differences as emergent properties on a higher level, e.g. that of society. Denying this truth (and downvoting me for saying so) is idiotic.
We are in for a grave period in history indeed.
There's other cool stuff that will come of this but the fact that this is the idea mentioned every single time shows a severe lack of imagination in our sphere.
Faked images are super popular and effective and are used to reinforce biases.
Major outlets like Fox News that traffic in false information have bad reputations and also good reputations among others.
You are right that this is isn't a technical problem though. Why bother faking a video or photo when fake words (misquotes and lies) are 10000 cheaper and just as effective?
We’re entering an era of radically different scale where anyone will be able to manipulate imagery. Our environment could be saturated with fake media in a way it’s never been before.