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Comment by ocharles | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me that you don't think deepfakes are only ever going to be distasteful. Once this becomes more commonplace, you're going to see it being applied to more personal connections - e.g., deepfaking pornography about friends. While already dark, it doesn't take long for this be essentially inventing blackmail material. Once the quality is high enough, there's a ton of potential for deepfakes to be extremely damaging for ones life. If you don't have the social status to prove to a community that it's a fake, ones can be significantly impacted.

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I would expect the opposite, that once deepfakes become commonplace the ability to blackmail anyone with pornographic material of them vanishes. After all they can claim it's a deepfake, and everyone will find that plausible.

Photos went through the same thing: they used to labor-intensive to fake and generally accepted at face value, now that everyone can easily manipulate them with photoshop people are much more suspicious. That's how we got to people using video as proof instead of simple images. Now faces in videos will lose this trust, and people will find more trustworthy signals.

This is not how humans work. We can see from 2020's politics that people believe all kinds of crazy stuff simply because a youtuber said so, to the point of committing acts of terrorism. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689...

A low-trust society is a significantly less productive and safe place to be. We don't want to go back there.

> Now faces in videos will lose this trust

Agreed.

> people will find more trustworthy signals.

I would really like to believe this but the world is clearly experiencing a massive crisis of trust because we have failed to find reliable trustworthy signals now that broadcast Internet communication makes it so easy to create and spread nonsense.

> the world is clearly experiencing a massive crisis of trust because we have failed to find reliable trustworthy signals now that broadcast Internet communication makes it so easy to create and spread nonsense.

Hmm.

I think you could tell a couple of stories:

- "It used to be that media was used to broadcast journalism to the public, but now the internet allows lies to be spread faster than they can be caught".

- "It used to be that what the public found out was gatekeeped by a particular set of people, but now the internet allows the public unfiltered access to the truth".

I think it's closer to:

The public used to have a limited set of narratives they had access to because creating and broadcasting them was expensive. That naturally limited the set of narratives available to those who had some level of power and wealth. The upside, if you feel that any level of power or wealth is ever earned, is that those broadcasting have presumably done at least something of value to society to partially earn the right to broadcast. The downside is that much of it may be unearned, or the value they provided may have only been to the elite few at the expense of the many.

Today, narratives are so cheap to produce and broadcast that the public can choose whichever one suits their whim or preconceived notions.

It's not entirely clear to me which of these scenarios is better. They both clearly have deep structural flaws.

The trouble is, I think it's painfully clear that the incentives from advertising / social media has led online journalism to a place where speed takes priority over quality.

Trust doesn't really work like that in practice though, photos are still typically assumed to be genuine to say nothing of the context in which they're presented. The war in UA has a host of examples, genuine videos and images presented with various (made up) contexts to show anything the poster wants them to show. Add in modification (cropping, video cuts, as well as photoshop) and it gets even more complicated. Unless deepfaked porn is trivial to make by anyone, easily shared, wildly popular, and almost always perfect, I really don't think that "it's a deepfake" will work as an excuse. And that assumes that you'd be able to reach people to tell them that.

People believe what mass media tells them about Ukraine. That is, it's not that they're believing random pictures, it's that they're believing things that CNN (or if they're predisposed more sympathetic to Russia, Russia-sympathetic media outlets) tells them are true, even if CNN has no good reason to think that.

If we wait until society, by default, assumes that photos are fake, then it is way too late. Being able to trust what you see is fundamental to many basic functions of society.

I'll be the optimistic one (famous last words) and say that this apocalyptic scenario won't happen.

I am old enough to remember the times when "photoshopped" became a verb, and yet I don't remember a "Photoshop epidemic" where people blackmailed other people with production-quality fake pictures. I mean sure, it happened, but not at a major scale.

If the past is any indication we will indeed have deepfakes of personal connections, but their quality will rank from "bad" to "okay", and that will be it.

I had to deal with 2 separate fake facebook accounts that used photoshopped images of me during HS (>10 years ago). The fake accounts both had way way more friends than me, posted more frequently, were utterly humiliating and embarrassing. Throughout high school I had a bad reputation that proceeded me, it made making friends extremely difficult, and on top of a few other confounding factors made my HS experience so bad I basically gave up. I never found out who was behind the accounts.

I remember at the time this was a pretty common thing, in high schools, so perhaps you just managed to avoid it.

Eh, as the technology becomes better and more widespread, the likely result is that people take compromising pictures less seriously, because everyone knows they're more likely to be deepfakes than real. It will be ubiquitous. People will be deepfaking each other constantly for any number of reasons—jokes, porn, pranks, etc.

All the consternation about deepfakes ignores this higher-order effect.

Your opinion is ignorant in the most literal sense of the word.

Throughout human history we have used effort and cost of communicating in a given medium as an indicator of the legitimacy being contained therein. At various points the bar to entry for disseminating information using said mediums has dropped precipitously causing relative chaos as we acclimated to the new reality. Often times institutions or groups that had power and were using the difficulty of disseminating information to maintain that power were left with less when the dust settled.

Right now we're in the middle of one of those precipitous drops. From realistic special effects and green screens to celebrity porn modern computer tech is enabling high production value content with incredibly minimal expenditure compared to what would have been required in the past. That's gonna shake things up. Maybe it'll be a nothing-burger like photography. Maybe we'll have a century of religious wars like the printing press.

Society will be fine in the long term.

http://deepnude.cc we are already there.

Not really.

First of all, and most relevant to the discussion, that website handles single pictures. They don't do videos, which means I can pedantically classify the result as a "photoshop" instead of a "deepfake".

As for the results themselves: I uploaded a couple pictures of me. I can't see the full result because I am not a paying user, but even in the blurry preview I can see that it's a fake. One of them even fused my clothes and my skins, which I guess could be a turn-on for those who are into Lovecraftian horrors.

I won't deny that it's technically interesting, but I wouldn't start a moral panic over its results.

Yeah, but you are also not a horny 12 year old. It's bad enough.

you people... just suck the romance out of everything.

Whatever happened to mystery, and desire, and letting your imagination run wild trying to fill in the blanks?

It's like the computer is being used to narrow our horizons, not broaden them.

> Once the quality is high enough, there's a ton of potential for deepfakes to be extremely damaging for ones life.

Alternatively, once the quality becomes good enough, "it was a deepfake" will be an entirely reasonable defense. Not just in actual courts (which is what I fear we will be heading towards, that even horrible crimes such as raping children will go unpunished or underpunished in countries where possession even of drawn/animated material is a crime), but also in the "court of public opinion".

Today you could do this with a copy of Photoshop, but in practice this isn't really a concern for most people. What makes you think it'll be different with deepfakes?

Because you’ll need even less skills than it takes to do a passable photoshop?

People will believe the fakes, or not, based on what they want to believe. Once the quality is good enough you can argue that any is true and the other side can say deep fake.

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