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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

DeepFake technology seems like it makes "bearing false witness" into an arms race.

Who does the better job of framing the opponent?

Does X start off getting busted, as though framed by Y, only to have the truth be X framing Y to appear as though framing X?

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Not really. Experts can still detect if something is a deep fake, and the punishment for trying to pass one off as evidence is severe.

Adding another area of a court proceeding that relies on "experts" is already a problem. Even when the deep fakes become good enough that they can't reliably detect them, they will continue to claim they can.

And if they wrongly testify that a genuine video is fake, it's much harder to claim that they submitted false evidence.

> Not really. Experts can still detect if something is a deep fake

Currently. Currently, experts only can determine if something is a deep fake.

Considering that we're still in the infancy of deepfakes, this is not a reliable defence against deepfakes being used as evidence.

Yeah, if there's one thing the worldwide politics of the last several years has shown us, it is that punishment is swift and severe when governments knowingly lie to their citizens.

Well they didn't need high tech means to do that, did they?

Lying to citizens and willfully falsifying evidence in a court of law are different things that are treated very differently.

> Experts can still detect if something is a deep fake

For how long?

Hard to predict the future. I predict a very long time (going from 99.9% perfect to 100% is really hard). Regardless though, today is not that day.

DeepFake technology democratizes the ability to produce believable fakes. Before only countries and large institutions could do so.

And that may not be a good thing. Now we won't just hear the occasional lying about WMD in far-away-country, which is bad, but if your government wants to trick you, they'll succeed nonetheless. Now it can easily be the idiot neighbor who fakes some nonsense about you and can damage your reputation for life with the right tools, until the general public has caught up and understands that a video can't be trusted anymore.

The end-game is witness signature; where a third party observes and records at least a record of a signature so that the message is authenticated to a specific time by a witness. Ideally to multiple witnesses, who all cooberate that the other witnesses saw the same thing.

One could have written the same thing about Photoshop, couldn't they have?

I suppose, but how many court cases turn on a photo?

I've heard[0] that much more than they should, at least in the US. If that's the case, then there's a more fundamental problem of justice system that has no clue about how technology works.

We have to first graduate to "sender can write anything in From: header of an e-mail" levels of understanding of technology before tackling deep learning.

[0] - I'm very much going by anecdotes here, so if they aren't representative, my whole comment is irrelevant.

A substantial amount of evidence heard in court is outright junk science. Photos are the least of their problems.

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