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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

For me, one reason not to freak out about this is Photoshop.

It's been around for decades. Perfect photographic fakes (literally called "photoshops") are possible. Yet is there a great crisis of fake photographs taking over the news? Not really. The actual "fake news" barely even bother with photoshop (and those for whom it works, don't care about the quality). It's somehow still fairly easy to get context and at some point, you just have to trust a news outlet, just like you had to trust them for text-based news.

All we see is a trend of making it easier for people to subscribe to a bubble of "news" that fits their world view. The quality of the fakeness barely factors into this.

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Maybe, but I've found that a lot of viral images are doctored in one way or another.

Here are some links to recent examples of doctored photos. I know I've seen at least the deceptive image of cops "pointing a gun at children" when they were actually not on the front page of Reddit, so it's not like manipulated images have no effect:

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/884-Pr...

http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/891-Count-o...

That said, remember that not all alterations are digital:

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/590-Un...

That blog is frightening and informative - it gives some idea of the sheer scale of misinformation we have to cope with now.

The other reason not to freak out about this is that we're already far down the path the people think deep fakes are creating.

Reddit and Twitter and the internet prove that people will react to an image of text by the tens of thousands, going straight into their brain. All of us have been guilty of this at some point.

To me it's naive to freak out about Photoshop and video deepfakes because it reveals that you're completely unaware of the degree of "shallowfaking". A screenshot of a headline or tweet spreads in a way that a deepfaked video can't, and it apparently goes right past our bullshit detector in a way that video can't.

The issue with deepfakes is this: at least in the other cases you outline, it's possible to be skeptical and weigh evidence-- including direct photographic and video evidence that is unlikely to be safe (while it may have been possible to fake before, it's been labor intensive and presents more risk that it'd have been messed up). In turn, we can evaluate the credibility of media sources based on how they agree with other evidence that we have directly evaluated.

As it becomes possible to fake more and more stuff, we're going to lose that. Different silos are going to have different, meticulously supported versions of the facts with an equivalent degree of direct-evidential and reputational support. And it's not clear to me as an individual one ever disentangles this.

This would be more concerning if the public was actually well informed currently. At present, most media companies have wildly lowered their content standards, normalized clickbait titles that sometimes outright lie, all the while ramping up "it's an op-ed so it's not a lie it's just an opinion!" pieces. At the same time we've never been more interested in what government agencies have to say including what they have to say about the government itself. This world of a semi-informed populace doesn't exist, the public is already choosing information from sources that appeal to their emotions rather than logic. What person on the street actually has a nuanced understanding of an industry they're not participating in? How many have any real idea what government contractor work actually looks like in those same industries or understands what the warzones their government operates in are actually like? Most don't even understand other cultures that vaguely resemble their own, just look at how few westerners have the vaguest understanding of sex culture across asia. The only thing people know anymore is memes and rhetorical factoids. You can't poison a toxic well.

While video is currently unlikely to be entirely fabricated at this point, you might be surprised at what can be accomplished with camera angles, choosing the start and end times of your clip, and cuts and reordering of clips: for a silly example of this, see "Obama sings Call Me Maybe"[1]. Videos can also be staged with varying levels of convincingness.

If you are digging for evidence, the source of your information must be taken into account. Deepfakes will probably be detectable in retrospect, even if they are not detectable at the time of publication, so if you stick with sources with a long history of only publishing real information, you're probably still fine even in the age of deepfakes.

The arguable lack of journalistic sources with a demonstrated history of integrity is its own problem, but not one that is made significantly worse by the presence of deepfakes.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc

> is there a great crisis of fake photographs taking over the news?

Well, yes. Many newsworthy photos and video clips are doctored, and they sway the public discourse in subtle ways. That we haven't yet seen significant public outcry is as much a testament to their subtlety as it is to their effectiveness.

I'd argue voice and video are substantially more persuasive than static images

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