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Comment by rgmerk | Hacker News Reader

Be serious for a moment.

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.

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How? Rick says I did not do this, it's an ai fake and I'm being harassed. At that point, assuming people believe Rick, then it's likely he'll receive sympathy and support rather than considerable harm.

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.

but when everyone see him, there is always the photo in their brain. this is about goat, but they fake pedo photo? Rick will lose his job first.

Then Rick ought to release the video of his boss fucking that zebra!

ok, in future, when someone reach 18 years old, government will generate video about that guy fuck everything, from stone to zebra, then publishing to internet. no one can hurt by deepfake anymore.

That's true only for the first few hundred Ricks. Then people wide up and ignore the child rape videos.

It's inevitable and frankly a hundred Ricks is a price worth paying.

You just described the “boy who cried wolf” dilemma…

so, we just need better digital competence?

I don’t think that is a good example, because the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software.

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 in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software

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.

Further to this point, there is plenty of collected evidence of the harms this kind of image-based abuse, of both real (sometimes coerced or often surreptitiously taken) and faked images:

See, for instance, this study of "sextortion" in minors:

https://respect.international/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Sex...

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