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Comment by sendfoods | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I am increasingly nervous about some point in the future where you cannot trust any digital medium because of deep fakes, NERFs, voice cloning...

The only possible solution I have seen being talked about is digitally signing any and all "real" content, similar to GPG/SSH.

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Photoshop and minor video manipulation is enough to trick people into believing fake news, this will make it harder. I see political parties doing simple edits to make people believe anything, this will push it multiple notches higher.

> Photoshop and minor video manipulation is enough to trick people into believing fake news

If the news confirms what they think is the truth, it doesn't need manipulation, just a fake heading

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/climate-protest-ukraine-bo...

for example (and in that case it even had the true caption on the video, just not in English)

That they can do so without consequences is almost as scary as that they can do so in the first place.

Fraud, slander etc are already illegal. There are consequences for crossing these lines.

AFAIK nothing ever happened to the political parties that use these tactics. But I'll be happy to be corrected.

Not in politics they aren't. There was an incredibly high bar to clear for the Alex Jones libel lawsuit to succeed.

You really have low exceptions for humanity. Most people are not complete idiots you know. I think your opinion is pretty elitist. Or do you think you yourself will fall for this as well?

Bunch of people just stormed the Brazilian government buildings yesterday over a fake "election theft" narrative. This stuff will be constantly tuned until enough people do fall for it, like advertising.

There's also the unravelling biography of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos#Scandals (you know someone's doing well when their "scandals" section has ten subheadings! And that's all old-fashioned manual fraud)

(I'm now wondering how far you could get with an elected official who's entirely deepfaked and only appears in recordings. Probably all the way to being sworn in, at which point someone has to appear in person. People have occasionally been elected despite being dead, so it's not impossible)

> Probably all the way to being sworn in, at which point someone has to appear in person. People have occasionally been elected despite being dead, so it's not impossible)

Unless the people doing the swearing in are also fake.

Or millions of people passively accepted the results of a stolen election. That would be an equally viable scenario with this technology. You just won't know the truth anymore.

It's not equally viable; there are centuries worth of checks and balances designed to prevent voting fraud and errors vs. the ease of speaking a lie on video.

If electoral boards around the country or at the national level were all sounding the alarm for irregularity in voting returns or procedures then an election might have been stolen. As it stands, the election results match the earlier polls which is a strong indicator that, at best, the election became a tossup at the time it was held, and the military also didn't find any reason to suspect fraud or error.

Not the person you’re responding to, but I don’t think it’s egotist at all. I’m sure I’ll fall for some news manipulation. I’m sure I already have.

I don’t think it’s elitist to think many people will be duped. I think it’s arrogant to think you won’t.

Agent K: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. --Men in Black

Less elitist(might really sound like one), more realist who knows that masses devolve to the lowest common denominator of sorts based on the information they are provided

Perhaps most people aren't, evidence is pending, but enough of them have been proven to be that this is a real concern.

>enough of them have been proven to be that this is a real concern

This matters a loooot more than the smart enough people realize too, because it's so difficult to imagine what it's like being south of that threshold, the potential consequences are difficult to imagine.

It is easy to see through bullshit... ex-post. But not so easy in real-time.

> Or do you think you yourself will fall for this as well?

Yes.

I don't believe anything digital anymore for quite a while. Heck, pictures have been staged and faked since the beginning of photography. Modern tech just makes it easier.

Maybe, just maybe, human society will move back to personal interaction, since apparently you cannot trust call, voice and video, anymore in the future.

> human society will move back to personal interaction

Which implies a much narrower, less diverse, more elitist system of both politics and economy, as it gets harder to trust people from outside your existing circle.

Hard to get more elitist than our politics and economy are now at the height of digital interconnection. The liberal democratic revolutions and popular democratic swell of the US labor movement under FDR all happened without the internet. A return of social connection to the community would be very much to our political benefit.

True. Sometimes it seems some people read every CyberPunk story and considered it an instruction instead of something between a parody and a warning.

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