Further, we have seen harm come from some of this already, there’s a pretty big online community that uses deepfakes to put people in situations they would rather not be in, the most obvious being porn.
You couldn't, but basically any VFX shop easily could. Point is, it doesn't make anything possible that wasn't already possible, it just makes it more accessible. That's an inevitability with technology, as time goes on. The counter is not to try and suppress it, that has never worked and never will.
It's always individuals who want to harm others in this particular way; and individuals don't throw around big-VFX-project amounts of money on petty revenge. But they'd certainly spend $20.
DDoS attacks got a lot (1000x) more commonplace once there were DDoS services that let you buy an hour of attacking someone for $20. Same idea here.
DDoS services are almost always purely malicious (you can _may be_ argue that you can use them for pen-testing or load-testing). But cars are not just purely malicious; there's a lot of useful things cars can do, and that's why the dangers of car ownership is outweighed by the benefits, as judged by society - we just have some road rules, and licenses, so that people know to use them responsibly.
Why not the same with an AI model?
You can download and run this software right now: http://faceswap.dev/ and it will do a better job, and do it on video, then any AI image generator.
The technology is over 3 years old and the world hasn't ended, the harassment hasn't happened. It's so common that your phone runs it for Instagram.
There's this whole narrative here that "this harm is new" and not only is it not new, it's not even better then what we already had.
In your example, the correct parallel isn't killing people in real life, it's making an image of killing people. The ethics of making such images are debatable, but they already permeate our society without AI.
So the problem isn't the AI, it's the forum of haters. Restricting AI usage, in the hope of not having someone use it to incite hate is too roundabout a way to achieve any significant result, while everybody pays a high cost (of not being free to use such an AI as they see fit).
The idea that it's "doing harm" is simply inventing a new form of lèse-majesté. Verbally, we regularly do the same: we might take a signifier for someone and place it in a representation. "Rick likes to fuck goats every day." Have I done harm to Rick?
If I circulated a convincing-looking video of Rick fucking goats to his parents, partner and his boss at the school where he works, that could easily do considerable harm to Rick.
For AI image generation to cause harm specifically, the harm has to be consequent to the additional realism.
IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video.
You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
> IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.
See, for instance, this study of "sextortion" in minors:
https://respect.international/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Sex...
So there seems to be an implicit assumption here that the risk is faked material where people don't believe it's fake, for some reason. And the fix for that would be to ensure that the easy to use versions of generators are watermarking or otherwise recording what they made, so it's easy to find out if something was faked. That doesn't help of course if you're up against a programmer who can make awesome deepfakes locally with open source software and a great GPU but then we're back to the debate about costs because of course, if you to against well funded experts they could already do this sort of thing. In reality it doesn't happen.
It's inevitable and frankly a hundred Ricks is a price worth paying.
At your point, I think it's worth considering widespread acceptance of ridiculous ideas that currently exist (amount of people who believe articles from The Onion for example). There's no harm there but when the content is convincing video being used by nefarious actors I think you could make argument potential for harm is real, especially given the media content bubbles on both sides that people have segregated to in social media age.