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Comment by IAmAtWork | Hacker News Reader

Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

Its same with deepfakes.

I am not happy or supporting either but with rise in computational power some things are unavoidable.

Police always used photo id databases in manhunts. And deepfakes existed in Victorian era.

We need to make sure that auditing agencies monitoring the government and offices and non profits protecting civil rights also gets technological and financial boost.

Everything else is just attacking the windmills.

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>Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

"Nuclear weapons are not a big deal, we used rocks and arrows for the same purpose in the past anyway..."

The similarities between past and present are irrelevant to draw conclusions from without also having the difference in mind.

And the difference here is one of scale. Dosage makes the cure or the poison.

It’s not the same though, because when done manually it is possible to be overloaded with the sheer volume of imagery to comb through.

Like saying someone is able to manually throw a grenade so we might as well just carpet bomb everything.

"Sometimes a difference in scale makes a difference in kind" (heard in a CGPGrey video, but I'm sure the quote predates it)

Something like it goes back a couple of thousand years or more, see the note about Stalin and "Quantity has a quality all its own." at https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&old...

>because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

That's exactly the difference. Because it was laborious and therefore expensive the techniques used to be reserved for when they were actually warranted. Now because it's cheap and easy those techniques get used for petty crimes.

Guns existed before machine guns, you do have to consider the consequences of a bifurcation (loose speak)

Yeah, and the difference between drinking a glass of water and drowning is also just one of scale and rate. Same for a pat on the back, and being violently attacked -- it's just physical impact, the only difference is the speed.

> I am not happy or supporting either

Then don't.

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