People are going crazy over deepfakes but we've had Photoshop for a long time and the world hasn't ended. We find ways to verify the content of photos through other means, such as their provenance.
And a big part is that you have prior knowledge. I'll be honest, I didn't realize it was Trump at first. Nor did a friend that I sent the video to that didn't have the prior that all characters were fake. Took him a good minute. That's a meaningful difference.
From the NY Times article:
> The “Sassy Justice” creators said they had spent “millions” of dollars to make the video, including the initial investments to produce the halted movie and set up the Deep Voodoo studio, though they declined to specify the exact cost. “It’s probably the single most expensive YouTube video ever made,” Parker said.
Would make those kind of artifacts much harder to identify
Most likely not, and the parent comment seems to agree with you on that. I think they were just trying to point out, in general, that the arrival of commonplace audio deepfakes might be way more disruptive than video deepfakes, despite a lot of people (including myself) who used to counter-intuitively think that video deepfakes would be more disruptive.
Here's an exploration of a deepfaked Jay-Z reading/rapping the Navy Seal copypasta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZzYoOdIXoQ
Also, it's one thing to say the world hasn't ended, but that's to potentially downplay at a minimum the idea that commercial and widespread use of photoshop hasn't had widespread effects on body and self-image, creating and interacting with arguably culture-bound psychological issues such as anorexia, bulimia, unnecessary surgery, self- harm, suicide, etc. Or to take examples from non Anglo culture, eyelid removal, skin whitening, nose surgery, etc.
it's true that the world hasn't ended, but that's a thought terminating cliche. there's a lot of evidence it's creating and created significant harm and significant effects.
https://boingboing.net/2008/07/10/iran-you-suck-at-pho.html
(and of course, you certainly have missed the fakes that didn't get noticed!)
Focusing first on 'changing the meaning in a believable way'. Believability is a subtlety bordering on a truism. If it's believable, we would often deem it to have "not sufficiently changed the meaning". If it "sufficiently changes the meaning", does that make it no longer believable?
Second, it's arguable that the whole point of being a good photographer/photo-editor is to make an altered image look "believable" or "impactful" without triggering the brains uncanny valley or rejection response. That's fundamentally why we photo-edit.
For a start, there's actually lots of explicit examples from history:
- Lincoln/Calhoun composite
- Stalin editing opponents during purges
- John Kerry + Jane Fonda in US election
- George bush holding book upside down reading to school child
-etc etc etc.
Those examples are just the obvious things that a general man on the street would accept as photoshopped, and the ones that I know are 'shopped. There's a whole bunch of photography techniques involving telephoto lenses into crowds doing the rounds worldwide to make people look more numerous and close together (to spark social distancing outrage), framing and cropping like of trump's inauguration to make it look more crowded than it really was, and arguably "Hunter biden finger-lake tattoo child-molesting" stuff currently doing the rounds on the internet's seedier sites, but I don't know how/whether they're photoshopped, and you get the photographer's dilemma of discussing the lay person's belief that effects done "in camera" are "real" but effects done "out of camera" are "'shopped": a distinction which is often effectively meaningless.
Then we have the general "mass photoshopping" phenomenon, where practically every commercial image one sees has been explicitly edited to create some effect and giving the idea that the subverted-reality is just 'normal' and not in anyway actively subversive: be it skin that doesn't look like actual skin; eyes, hair and teeth standards and colours that are practically biologically impossible; general biological-hair removal; slimming, shaving and exaggerating the respective female body parts; slimming and expanding male body parts.
And practically everyone's doing it: take Kamela harris' officially supplied photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Kamala_H...
You can zoom in on the eyebrow and hairline to see such poor use of the blur tool that they barely even bother hiding it any more.
Now, as per my previous point you can argue "oh yeah, sure all our pictures and images are messed with and touched up, but it's not harmful and that's not really changing the photo!".
To that I repeat my initial observation: no, it does indeed seem to have a harmful affect in terms of body-loathing, a drive to self-hatred and consumption, and general reality distortion. It can be picked up upon and observed via the way it expresses itself differently in different societies and different ethnicities by observing the peculiar culture-bound mental illnesses and aesthetic phenomenon that appears as each is exposed to different photo-editing ideals and cultural mores.
And then there's the second point that these deep-fakes will actually be the next level. If we see, and know, that there are problems with our photoshopped media while the common man has folk-beliefs about the objectivity of the photographic media, imagine what's possible once we see that disconnect begins to apply to video + sound as well. It's probably going to get worse. Much much worse.
And remember, with doubtful photos, we have the belief in the authority of sound + video recordings to fall back on. Once we remove the authority of sound + video, we no longer have any effective authority to determine the factual nature of the media we're viewing. The deepfakes aren't generally quite there yet, but in 5 - 10 years, they'll be better. And they only have to get to a baseline where a significant number of people are fooled by them, or at least create enough of a reasonable doubt to allow them to dismiss or accept positions they disagree/agree with, before it becomes a real problem.
Yesterday there was a fake Trump tweet with a zillion upvotes on Reddit, and that’s just text. Text is trivial to fake, so maybe the chain of trust we see in text is what we’ll see with everything else moving forward. “An anonymous source within the White House provided this footage,” being countered with, “you can’t trust anonymous sources!” It will come down to who you trust, just like it always has.