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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Sci-fi author John Varley covered this in one of his novels.

In a society where anything digital can be manipulated, the veracity of a speech or event depends on a network of trust and people who witnessed the event in real life. If someone made a speech in front of hundreds of live, physically present spectators, these spectators can then verify the authenticity of any recording, and as long as there people in that group that you trust (directly, through your trusted network, or perhaps as journalists of good standing) you can trust that the recorded speech is what was said.

Conversely, a recording of a world leader saying they recommend Coca-Cola to prevent tooth decay wouldn't have any credibility at all if no one credible was actually there to witness it.

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This doesn't work that well in practice:

- Humans can lie

- Human memory is too fallible to serve as this verification, particularly for every detail

- Small details with big impact can be changed in a verified speech without some people noticing

Of course if someone reliable records the actual speech, any copy can be checked against that. I'm not sure why human memory would be considered superior, as humans have poor memories and can lie.

How can you tell a true copy from a false copy? What makes one recording more true than the other, if you can only compare it against a reality which no longer exists (because it's in the past)?

I have a simple manufacturing tweak patent for the recorder devices on my table to do so.

What happens when there's a global pandemic and everyone is forced to stay home and not attend witness any of these speeches, but instead has to watch the broadcast over the internet and/or TV?

Heh

Cool idea for a sci-fi story.

Then we just generate the speeches and let public figures do more work dealing with the pandemic, because it doesn't matter at that point.

Ideally anyways. Realistically, we probably just argue on the internet about which talks were real (in this case generated by the person pictured in them).

So you'd need a bunch of GPT-3+ stuff to corroborate the deepfake, exciting! Where do you determine the "troll-line" in a trust network? You can build it over time I suppose? Though that kind of leads to similar echo-chamber stuff, right?

As an anecdote, I know real humans who do truly believe deepfaked political videos. They were genuinely surprised to know that Pelosi can talk like a normal human.

That’s a great point. Tons of people already don’t CARE about the facts, and consider fact-checkers to be just as biased as the statements they are checking. Just having 30%-90% of the population react to a deepfaked outrageous video will already be a huge damage even if 10% are stickler skeptics.

“A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”

> and consider fact-checkers to be just as biased as the statements they are checking

Aren't they? I can come up with examples off the top of my head, let alone with a search. This is my favourite[1]:

> The fact-checker for the New Yorker who mistook a Marine veteran’s tattoo for a Nazi symbol has resigned, saying the “small mistake” has ruined her life.

"mistook" is being kind. Take a look at her Twitter feed[2] and tell me if you think she's less biased than the stories that would've passed across her desk, because her feed is incredibly partisan. Do you think she managed to remain impartial while she was still employed as a fact checker? I wonder if she intended or wanted to be impartial, let alone managed it. I also wonder how that kind of person comes to be part of a team of fact checkers, which brings into question their impartiality. How was she able to make this “small mistake” and no one else on that team caught it? Perhaps they lack editorial oversight like Snopes[3], the Snopes that employs people who are obviously biased:

> Of particular interest, when pressed about claims by the Daily Mail that at least one Snopes employee has actually run for political office and that this presents at the very least the appearance of potential bias in Snopes’ fact checks, David responded “It's pretty much a given that anyone who has ever run for (or held) a political office did so under some form of party affiliation and said something critical about their opponent(s) and/or other politicians at some point. Does that mean anyone who has ever run for office is manifestly unsuited to be associated with a fact-checking endeavor, in any capacity?”

I'd say it was unbelievable but it's really not[4].

> Snopes appears to be actively engaged in an effort to discredit and deplatform us.

Dropping one's scepticism because someone calls themselves an impartial fact checker strikes me as being in the same realm as following the orders of a complete stranger because they have a uniform and claim authority over you or a situation, i.e. unwise.

[1] https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/new-yorker-staffer-resigns-aft...

[2] https://twitter.com/chick_in_kiev

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

[4] https://mailchi.mp/babylonbee/reparations-for-everyone-83635

Maybe there needs to be created a "Witness Coin" ledger, where events happened if enough people say they did.

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