How do you feel about this probably being most used by bad actors trying to screw with society and elections?
This seems like wishful thinking. Having knowledge and having the resources to do something with it are two very different things.
I fail to see where playing out the "but others are doing it too" card exempts the responsibility of those who either lower or eliminate the barrier to entry to these attacks.
every AI sound/word/picture editor i've ran into says something along the lines of "we're releasing this data set to help stay secure in this day and age of easy counterfeiting of X.", but they never really mention how you apply the data in an adversarial way against itself -- they just sort of hand-wave that part.
Same with fake AI generated Obama video and sound, and earlier data-set generated chatbots; it's plastered all over the projects things like "Since these methods are available we think that it's important that this data is disseminated so that other's can use it to validate real world data sources", but again -- how?
We have the real data, we have the fake data -- how is this diff done, exactly?
I'm willing to bet it isn't as easy as all the AI researchers who release this stuff claim it may be.
With the data public its more akin to driveby ssh login attempts. Not being important doesn’t mean your not under attack and people can take the necessary precautions.
There are few reasonable ways to "take precautions" against nuclear weapons and there are few reasonable ways to "take precautions" against something like this short of swearing off of social media entirely.
Without reasonable defences, all you really accomplish is ramping up proliferation.
I agree with your approach though.