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Comment by Threeve303 | Hacker News Reader

Just imagine all of the conspiracies and "fake news" backed up by somewhat realistic looking videos. The concept of truth and shared realities was already under attack so maybe deepfakes will be the final blow in the arms race. Taken to an extreme, this could cause non deepfaked video evidence itself to come under question. This would be unfortunate as things like body cams and smartphone cameras have provided the average person with a kind of power they never had before. I guess the pendulum always swings back.

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In my experience it seems like you could upload a video where nothing actually happens and if you put the narrative you want in the title people will just run with it.

To me, this means that we vitally need a cryptographic verification method that can track the image as produced by a verified microchip and through a custodial blockchain recording each edit of that image file. Then giving all media players the ability to verify and produce a certificate of authenticity.

I bet there are some security challenges there, but this is the only way I can think of in order to protect the Republic from purposeful misinformation by differentiating between real and edited/fake,synthesized, footage going forward.

I want something like this, but given the already enormous power cost of Bitcoin to maintain a paltry few Gb of data, and the petabytes of video produced by humanity every hour, it's not obviously possible to me even with the cleverest hash tree algorithms imaginable.

I appreciate the concern but it has to be said that there are lots of blockchain solutions many magnitudes more efficient than Bitcoin. Also there are crypto projects that already deal with streaming video: For example: https://www.thetatoken.org/ Bitcoin has the air in the room, but not the most advanced tech.

You're right, proof of work is not necessary. But I still can't imagine a blockchain that scales to encompass all the media humanity produces. (I'm not saying it's impossible -- math can be surprising.)

This is my fear. Currently, deep-fakes are fun. We share text messages of Donald Trump singing YMCA and everyone has a good laugh. But as you said, we're also a nation that easily falls for conspiracies. Everything from Q-Anon, Moon Landings being faked, and 9/11 being spearheaded by George Bush, Jr. Someone mentioned you can be the next multi-billionaire by creating a cryptographic watermark with validation, which at first sounds good. However, the obvious issue is that those who believe in these conspiracy theories won't trust "cryptographic watermarks".

Basically, anything and everything can be faked. And people will trust what confirms their biases.

Unfortunately, I personally see no solution to deep-fakes. The worms are out of the can, and we now have to question everything we see, which is A LOT to ask of people. Even if governments band together to "ban" deep-fakes, tightly regulating the internet to track deep-fake origins, or a more sinister "1984" approach, you still have the obvious issue that deep-fakes can be created by those who regulate the masses (our governments).

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