Is no one else deeply afraid of this future?
Deep fakes are just like Photoshop, but instead of pictures, we can generate complex shapes in all sorts of signal domains.
If you restrict the technology, it becomes the tool of state actors. If it's wide open, it's just a toy. Society will learn to accept it just as they did with Photoshop.
I'm actually really excited by the potentials it unlocks. Our brains are already capable of reading passages in other people's voices and picturing vivid scenes without them ever existing. Deep models give computers the ability to do the same thing. That's powerful. It'll unlock a higher order of creativity.
Old and busted: "pic or it didn't happen."
New hotness: "in person witness or it didn't happen."
The real security hole for forgery is at the point of injection. Tracking a forgery along with a block chain doesn't prove it's not a forgery.
One thought is a camera sensor that cryptographically signs (watermarks) photos or video frames on the sensor before they are touched by anything else. It's not perfect since a highly sophisticated adversary could get the secret key out of the chip, but it could definitely make it quite a bit harder to fake photos. Nothing is ever perfectly secure. All security amounts to increasing the work function for violating a control to some decent margin above the payoff you get from breaking the control.
I could see certified watermarking camera sensors being used by journalists, politicians, governments, police, etc.
The problem is people just don't care. See "cheap fakes" like slowing down a video of Pelosi and claiming she's drunk. People actually believe that garbage. No amount of fancy math can fix that.