Democratizing access to things -- including bad things -- has a preventative effect:
1) I can guard against things I know about
2) People take me seriously if something has been democratized
The worst-case scenario is if my stalker got her hands on something like deep fake technology before the police / prosecutor / jury didn't knew it existed. I'd probably be in jail by now if something like that ever happened. She's tried to frame me twice before. Fortunately, they were transparent. She'll try again.
Best case scenario is that no one has access to this stuff.
Worst case scenario is only a select group have access, and most people don't know about it.
Universal access is somewhere in between.
And when you ask for help, people think you are the insane one because they simply can't believe your story about the insanity of someone else.
I hope you find relief sometime from your stalker. I found it (not a stalker exactly) from letting the person burn themselves with their behavior so many times without me doing or saying anything in return to them (my strategy of non-direct conflict, and it worked for me), that eventually they ran out of people to manipulate and fool.
Obviously, it's hard to imagine many situations like that, but you can imagine a process that required a 8-figure quantum supercomputer.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/spies-who-spilled-ato...
For better or worse, I did not have the requisite $2B-or-so to do so at the time. My allowance was $2/week. I don't think most terrorist groups have $2B either. Even if I did have the requisite $2B, I don't think I could have done so discreetly enough to not get caught; someone would have noticed a high school student buying up things like uranium or building appropriate facilities.
I'm more concerned about biological warfare. While I don't have the knowledge to engineer a super-virus, we're at the level where a few years intense study is all it takes to have that knowledge, and a few high school students do. The cost structure there is increasingly moving into the budget of high school students too. Things like DNA sequencing and synthesis have a Moore's Law-style curve, with falling prices.
(If this sounds unrealistic, I was in high school back in the days when nerds intensely learned physics; physics is much less interesting to nerds in 2022. Hot topics for nerds change over time, and we're out of the cold war and the space age. Today's high school nerds have moved on to today's hot topics like machine learning and microbiology)
not to be too pedantic, but this is not "democratizing access", as that would involve print-outs/usb sticks/discs of the code distributed to people that can't access the internet, accessibility issues, bias considerations etc etc. as such, this is just "access".
Likewise, slavery < serfdom < caste / Jim Crow / etc. class system < equality under the law with discrimination < equality
Access, inclusion, and democracy aren't binary concepts, and progress is gradual.
That being said, bringing it to light also has benefits like you said. If the tool is out in the open and state of the art techniques are used, technology to detect its use will also benefit.
It only buys time, but that can provide the time needed to create countermeasures and ideally make those very accessible—somewhat similar to responsible vulnerability disclosure.
This piece goes into more detail: https://aviv.medium.com/the-path-to-deepfake-harm-da4effb541... (excerpt from a working paper, part of which was presented at NeurIPs).
Also, the notion that "raising awareness" is going to prevent deep fakes from being used in practice shows complete and utter disconnect from reality. Most people who are skeptical are already aware how imminently fakeable all the media really is. Most people who still are unaware will remain so, no matter how many GitHub repositories some dipshits will publish.
I suspect this perfect deep fake technology might be a real boon to society.
Continued development towards a tech dystopia might be the only way. But I’m worried it will require the dystopia part before people will wake up and accept that moving back to the physical world might be required.
The next few decades will certainly be interesting, at the very least.
Making such tools accessible is reprehensible. It will lead to more bad actors, to less trust in media and in any objective reality, and more erosion of our institutions and society.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this. It's unethical and frankly downright evil.
You’re being absurd.
The technology exists, and it’ll get better. Pretending that it doesn’t exist or banning it won’t make it go away — it’ll just be used by the least scrupulous and most powerful.
Disruptive efforts like this are most upsetting to anxiety-ridden people who think that if they could just control things firmly enough, everyone and everything will be safe.
That kind of thinking doesn’t actually work, though, and it produces a stiflingly rigid, oppressive society that deserves to be upset occasionally.
But: are those really the only options? Paranoid stop-the-world wishful thinking or all-new-trends-are-inevitable?
I realise I'm almost certainly wildly misrepresenting your point of view with the latter label! I don't really mean to ascribe it to you. But I think the conversation often ends up tacitly as a debate between those two positions, both of which are mistakes. But one other option -- as an example -- is to find more complicated ways to stop doing <bad use of tech>.
A striking historical example to me because it's so old it can hardly be said to have been an invention that needed to be responded to -- rather just an apparent invitable fact of life: For the longest time, it seems everyday brutal violence on a level we find hard to imagine was common. At the time, that would have been obviously inevitable. Nothing else had ever happened. Then it basically stopped -- turns out it never was inevitable. Why? We didn't for example ban knives as a technology, but we did a lot of things over the centuries that, to a good numerical approximation, stopped us using them for violence (banning them in certain situations is only one, I suspect not the most important and maybe not even necessary).
In ages past, impersonating another person was not nearly as difficult as it is today. Advances in identity verification and such have eliminated a certain class of problems. The emergence of deepfakes doesn’t necessarily introduce “new” problems, it just resets the progress on some very old ones.
Assuming this is solved not by banning the tech but by making progress elsewhere, some pretty worrisome implications come with that. One antidote to deepfakes would be even more progress on identity verification and tracking the source of digital media for purposes of authentication / validity.
It’s not hard to imagine the negatives in such improvements at a time where we’re already tracked far too much.
I think a more ideal development would be a return to pre-tech habits. Meeting people in person. Less reliance on virtual communication, etc. But one need only look at the backlash against returning to the office to see that such a move would require something truly existential.
I suspect you are right in the long run, but I’m curious what other factors or forces might nullify the threat introduced by this tech in the short term, or if things really have to run off the rails before people decide that fundamental changes in how we interface with tech are required.
I don't disagree that it can have that effect.
Just to note: this use of "turn back the clock" is quite distinct from "turn back the clock on technology".
> Assuming this is solved not by banning the tech but by making progress elsewhere, some pretty worrisome implications come with that.
My point was not that we can make progress elsewhere to solve resulting problems (we can) but that we can also not use the technology in the "inevitable" bad way. It happens!
> One antidote to deepfakes would be even more progress on identity verification and tracking the source of digital media for purposes of authentication / validity.
One other antidote (of many I'm sure) would be to do less identity verification in the first place.
Institutions that are corrupt and serve themselves (not the public, despite their lipservice) need to go.
Trust in media is already very low, and in fact should go lower. Deepfake tech exists, and the fact that it does, and is broadly available to bad actors, should be widely known.
Obviously the best case by far is that such weapons (in this case disinformation weapons) do not exist, but the worst case is them existing but hidden — THAT is the recipe for fooling people in the greatest numbers.
These tools existing, with widespread knowledge of their existence is sort of the least-worst case for the real world in which we live.
Yes this does have the potential to kill pretty much anything related to video and photography (everything from art to news to documentation), but that was the same when spam was a literal threat to existence of email. Unless we manage it, video and photography will be trusted for nothing but boring amusement; but better than than mass deception.