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Comment by vincentriemer | Hacker News Reader

The community of people making deepfakes even approaching this quality is astonishingly small (think 3-4 people), requires absurd hardware (either A100s or A6000s), and the Luke one is even more of a outlier as this deepfaker has the support of ILM, one of the best VFX studios in the industry. All this is to say I'm not especially scared — especially when these "best of the best" deepfakes still have obvious tells.

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Not weighing in on whether one should be frightened or not, but just pointing out that what you said would have applied to the computer graphics industry about 30 years ago. The interesting thing about computers is they tend to get faster over time.

If Disney can't make Luke Skywalker, one of their most iconic characters, look good in a show with a budget the size of the Mandalorian, I can't say I'm too worried for this technology yet.

Everyday misinformation techniques are far more pernicious - out-of-context sound bites, selective coverage, framing in an uncharitable way, interviewing non-experts, etc etc.

I see you haven’t watched The Book of Boba Fett. I can assure you the deepfake technology is now… fully operational.

Everyday misinformation techniques were already really bad, but things could stand to get a lot worse.

Yeah the improvement in young Luke in The Book of Boba Fett was pretty impressive.

Agreed! That was the first one I've seen where I felt it was basically "passing". Like if I didn't know, I wouldn't know.

Yeah, it doesn’t seem like people believe misinformation because the evidence for it is just so convincing. I see people link to sources (if they even bother doing that), with completely false descriptions of what it shows. It doesn’t matter; as long as the description is the kind of thing that outrages people they’ll amplify it. Corrections will get one tenth of the attention.

>If Disney can't make Luke Skywalker, one of their most iconic characters, look good in a show with a budget the size of the Mandalorian

and yet are willing to put it out there that means actually they see this technology as important, it's the future for them, and what do you do when you think a technology is the future, that's right you invest time and money in using it so that you can improve it. It's not that they have the budget of the Mandalorian to do this scene, it's that they have the budge of Disney to improve the technology.

I would say in 10 years Disney in a show with a budget the size of the Mandalorian (adjusted for inflation natch) will probably have something really worrisome.

ILM support came after.

A6000 is only $50/day rental.

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