“Tool is expensive” is a real, effective deterrent to frivolous use of a tool. There’s a reason we pool resources into governments, which is explicitly so we (via a government) have capabilities that we (as individuals) don’t have.
That may not be a fair comparison. Nuclear weapons are difficult to make, and using them will not go undetected - the damage would be enormous. Deep fakes are a real threat today, and anyone willing to pay for the expertise (which isn't that hard to find) can have them made. By putting this out there, deepfakes are now something almost anyone can make which means the threat is imminent and needs to be addressed. I understand the argument, but still not sure about it. Just wanted to say it's different than nuclear weapons.
Now that the public knows broadly that digital manipulation is easy and they have seen it with their own eyes a ton things like that are believed less. Notice I do say less though, we still definitely have problems with misinformation being propagated with shitty-looking video/audio/photos that people should not believe in because they look/sound so inauthentic.
All that to say, these tools clearly exist. I think the public is better served by them being pervasive and well-known rather than having them be locked up in Hollywood studios, research labs, and government agencies.
It may be worthwhile to have someone create a bunch of deepfakes of politicians saying "This video has been faked" to drive awareness of this as a threat model.
E: Forgot the key bit, it would need to be spammed all over Facebook/Instagram/Mainstream social media.
In a perfect world, what should have happened was a separate team inventing a reasonably accurate deepfake detector to the world before the deepfake producer gained prominence (differential technological development), but interest, productivity and excitement on the researchers' part to release their work first seems to have foiled that.
It's honestly an interesting moral question.
We as a species have only survived ~75 years since we became aware of nuclear weapons, which is only a small portion of our overall history.
This has taught me to be mindful of the state of being unaware, because once you are aware of something it is impossible to reverse unless you're an amnesiac. Collectively forgetting something as a society then becomes infeasible without the technology and the willingness to revert our knowledge to a safer state, and a single outlier can ruin the entire system. When Jobs held up the first smartphone and we all started cheering and fantasizing, did any of us think it would lead to this?
(I also think that a pill to forget the experience of [addictive thing] would be revolutionary, but sadly our ingrained curiosity might undo the effect shortly afterward. A lot of tech takes advantage of our curiosity.)
This makes me wonder: what compels us to keep researching AI despite us also being able to hypothesize all these game-over scenarios? Why does it feel like we have no choice but to be crushed by unbounded progress?
Perhaps 50 years from we may find that nothing short of halting all research in the name of curiosity was the only option that could have preserved our culture/existence/values for another few decades.
Jobs didn’t hold up the first smartphone and smartphone proliferation has little to do with the AI research that led to deepfakes.
Do we aim for security through obscurity or work out how to deal with that increasingly terrifying reality? I think at some point we will be forced to do latter.
Maybe an interesting norm to try to generate in this community would be, “if you plan on publishing attack X, you should publish immediately alongside it your best guess as to the effective counter to X.”
In the case of nuclear weapons, one of those consequences is that poor countries are denied the ability to defend themselves.
This led to the bullying and invasion of countries without nuclear weapons by countries with nuclear weapons (most recently Russia invading Ukraine, but China and the US are equally guilty).
I'm reminded of a line from the TV show The West Wing, something like: "India must and will be a nuclear power. That way, we'll never be dictated to again."
I'm sure there are some very worthy technical efforts to improve mankind that are being hampered by the lack of easily accessible U-235 so why are we restricting this material from Chemists that want to Chem and Physicists that want to Fizz?
The OP specifically said tools "like this"
While it’s convenient to dismiss any discussion about A and something slightly similar to A as “slippery slope,” an inconvenient fact is that the slope often is slippery. It’s increasingly evident to anyone paying attention that information warfare can yield disastrous effects in a variety of ways: disrupting peaceful transition of power; disrupting critical infrastructure; disrupting command and control of ”traditional” WMD systems, even.
So that’s sort of the spirit of my question: how far does this argument go? What is the definition of “like this?”