Deepfakes Are Going to Wreak Havoc on Society. We Are Not Prepared | Hacker News Reader

Deepfakes Are Going to Wreak Havoc on Society. We Are Not Prepared

forbes.com

20 pointsjawns8 comments

Why didn't we face a similar apocalypse when Photoshop became ubiquitous?

It doesn't feel like "video evidence" is something people regularly use to determine truth. Political pages on Facebook and cable news seem to be what are primarily guiding people's political persuasions.

>Why didn't we face a similar apocalypse when Photoshop became ubiquitous?

Photoshop is still a manual process. You needed a skilled person to create the manipulation. Unlike a computer where you only need to feed it a picture and you get an output in minutes.

>Photoshop is still a manual process. You needed a skilled person to create the manipulation.

Does that matter? If I am looking to produce images that might have a devastating political impact to opponents the consequences aren't about how fast one can produce them, but how low the bar to entry is for one to produce a doctored image.

Photoshop, and tools like it, gave the public at large the capability to develop doctored images. Deepfakes seem to do the same thing that Photoshop did: lower the bar to entry for doctoring videos. You don't need tens of thousands of dollars and a large production team to create a fake video now.

Deep fakes out of the box are easy to spot, even to an untrained eyes. There’s chromatic artifacts and other things. Even though they are amazingly good quality, humans are well evolved to spot weirdness with faces.

I think the opposite argument works as well. There is so much obviously fake crap floating around the web that, apparently, people believe that I don't think good photoshop and deepfakes actually add anything to the mix.

The scale-up in propagation. We didn't have such an efficient propagation mechanism as WhatsApp and Facebook and Twitter.

The scale-up in believability. Moving images are that much more convincing than static images.

Entertainment outlets, esp. Fox news and far right news, launder edited images and clips from social media. There isn't a Walter-Crokite or the old CBS 60 minutes to fall back on.

Back then, we didn't have the likes of Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Duterte armed with these mass-media tools. There's every reason to be afraid.

Eh, was your mom on the Internet all day 10-15 years ago?

My mom wasn’t, but now she is on the Internet 24/7. There’s a lot more people on the web to make the apocalypse happen.

Could be since videos were always an option before.

Now there's not much to fall back on if videos become too difficult to distinguish what's real or not. Is there anything beyond video that we can trust when looking for information?

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