Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

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> I kind of feel like that's going to have to be the outcome at some point in the near future -- in fact, as soon as really convincing yet nasty deepfakes of senators and representatives start making the rounds and spreading on Facebook, I suspect a new law will get passed incredibly quickly.

Ugh, that is the type of free-speech infringement that people should be worried about, not all this stuff about how YouTube taking down videos is government censorship.

A really good deepfake is still fiction. Really good writing is fiction. Really poorly-written fake "news" blogs "reporting" lies as truth is fiction. These are all allowed to exist (in the USA) because of the 1st Amendment. It is the price that we pay for living in a free society, that the government cannot tell you "your fiction is not allowed."

Textual accounts of real events, and lies about real events, have existed for ages. Sometimes the lies are more convincing than the truth. Audio recording and doctored audio has existed for ages. Photography and doctored photos have existed for ages. Video recording and doctored video has existed for ages. We'll survive another flavor of doctoring just fine without the government's help.

No, copying and 'reporting on' / parodying / sampling etc. are very different things.

A writer who makes a book that is word-for-word the same as another book is infringement.

Making a pixel-perfect copy of a photo, from scratch, is an infringement.

Copying a song, perfectly, is infringement.

Whether something is a 'lie or the truth' - or 'which one is more convincing' doesn't really matter.

With 'deepfakes' we're going to have to get serious because people will literally be putting words in other people's mouths, creating fake representations of other people, it's going to cause problems. This issue may not actually fall under copyright.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prince

I feel like you've replied to the wrong comment - I'm not defending copyright infringement, misuse of celebrity likeness, or the content of this video.

I'm specifically addressing the notion that the government would carve out a free-speech exception for "deepfakes", like "deep fakes of Politicians / Celebrities are illegal." Which would be clearly unconstitutional, because you are forbidding creation of a creative, expressive work.

Whether the works that you are free to create, regardless of format (photoshopped image, deepfaked video), violate some other law - libel/slander - is separate as well. Yes, they certainly could, just like a photoshopped image today could be libelous.

> Really poorly-written fake "news" blogs "reporting" lies as truth is fiction. These are all allowed to exist (in the USA) because of the 1st Amendment.

Not if it’s libel. And a convincing deepfake that harms someone’s reputation could easily be interpreted as an act of defamation by the creator, which would mean it’s not protected speech.

Yes, certainly. And that's somewhat my point - the freedom to create these fictitious works is already limited by existing laws, we don't need new ones specific to this medium.

There's no reason to think libel laws wouldn't apply to deep fakes the same way the apply to a photoshopped image, or a textual lie.

Pop stars on YouTube ? Fair use & freedom of speech ? Deepfakes will be used to cause a war in the near future where people are killed and who are we going to point our DMCA take down requests at then ? What will the third world victims of some hate story stirred up by AI doctored footage care about first amendment protections in America ? Deepfakes are a clear and present existential danger to ourselves and others and at this point I'm afraid you are correct, there is no good solution. God help us all once we can't even believe what we see anymore.

They can already cause a war just by lying about certain classes of weapons being "found" so I don't think deepfakes will help much in that regard.

You can't believe what you see right now. I remember watching people doing insane things on Facebook back in 2011 but it was all fake. Nothing has changed.

>but it was all fake.

You mean like scenes shot with actors to imply certain events happening? ex. scenes protests in some city when it's actually just a bunch of actors making it look like a protest is happening?

Exactly. Propaganda and misdirection has been a constant for a few thousand years.

The harder lesson is learning to catch yourself and see past it before getting manipulated.

The hardest lesson is not knee jerking and giving those who want to control you the tools to limit everyone's speech to just approved material. (China, Iran, Vietnam, North Korea, these ring a bell? VERY slippery slope.)

> Deepfakes will be used to cause a war in the near future where people are killed and who are we going to point our DMCA take down requests at then ?

Wars are started based on disinformation, black propaganda and/or false flags anyway.[0] Nobody (at least who wasn't already spoiling for a fight) is going to start a war just because of a deepfake posted to Youtube.

> What will the third world victims of some hate story stirred up by AI doctored footage care about first amendment protections in America ?

This video was taken down, rightly or wrongly, due to American law. It's quite likely deepfakes are actually 'more legal' in some countries outside the US, due to differences in legislation.

For example, depending on political/sexual content, an Iranian or North Korean video host may be less interested in taking down a deepfake of Jay-Z than Youtube.

> Deepfakes are a clear and present existential danger to ourselves and others

The real danger with deepfakes (and other technology that the rich and powerful don't like, such as encryption) is overreaction and people tripping over themselves to call for even more limits on their own free expression.

> God help us all once we can't even believe what we see anymore.

And God help us all when we have no way to speak out any more. As shown in the link below, we never could believe what we see.

[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ever-growing-list-of-admit...

I think you're ignoring an approximately 5,000 year history of humans using propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies to manipulate each other. Nothing new here except perhaps a little broader perception of the level of misinformation actually generated.

We (ok, mostly those in power or who want to be) constantly feed each other the most manipulative, self interested lies for personal/organizational benefit, 24/7/365.

Life has always revolved around either being manipulated, or knowing that that's the point of what you hear, and putting in the effort to find out more before forming an opinion.

Hence investigative journalists, etc etc.

> God help us all...

Umm, we've all been deceived about almost everything since forever. There's no sudden worsening here, just a newer level of verification required.

A little broader? You mean reaching everyone on the planet for almost no cost? This is a huge difference, it used to be only nation states and huge actors could spread and maintain disinformation on this level, now an individual can do it with a GPU.

One set of shared delusions is not the same as an anarchy of delusions.

It didn't take many people to create the Spanish American War. The news papers were not states or even large actors, though of course they did have a platform that most others did not.

Gotta fight fire with fire. Use a neural net to detect deep fakes.

http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/1811.08180v3

Major benefit: eventually, all the news networks will be able to decide that instead of whatever each candidate said, they all actually agreed that Medicare for all was the right choice, and that it will be the center of their platform.

And once elected, they'll be stuck doing it, or the news networks will decide that it did happen, and no one will be able to figure out that it actually was not. At that point, is there any difference?

So the law will be whatever Rupert Murdoch (or Mark Zuckerberg) says it should be? That's not a world you want to live in.

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