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What's as worrying, judging by the comments here and in that GitHub thread, is that there is no correlation between technical ability and ethical understanding. Perhaps naively, I'd have thought someone intelligent enough to develop a technology like this would also be intelligent enough to understand the complex ethical issues it raises. It seems, unfortunately, that there is no such correlation.

In fact, anecdotally, it seems the people with the technical ability are least likely to have a nuanced understanding of the ethical impact of their work (or, more optimistically, it's only people with the conjunction of technical ability and ethical idiocy who would work on this, and we're not seeing all the capable people who choose not to).

Also, what's with all the people in this thread coming up with implausible edge cases in which deep fake tech could be used ethically to justify a technology that will very obviously be used unethically in the vast majority of cases? It's almost useless for anything except deception—it is intrinsically deceptive. All the 'yeah but cars kill people so should we ban all cars?' comments miss the obvious point that cars are extremely useful, so we accept the relatively small negatives. The ethical balance is the other way around for deep fake tech. It's almost entirely harmful, with some small use cases that might arguably be valuable to someone.

> Perhaps naively, I'd have thought someone intelligent enough to develop a technology like this would also be intelligent enough to understand the complex ethical issues it raises. It seems, unfortunately, that there is no such correlation.

Correct. There is a tendency to think that because a person is exceptionally intelligent or skilled in one area, they must also be intelligent in other areas. It's simply not the case. An expert is authoritative in the areas of their expertise, but outside of those, their opinions are no more likely to be correct than anyone else's.

This error is often leveraged in persuasion campaigns -- thinking that, for instance, a brilliant physicist's opinions on social policies are more likely to be accurate than any random person on the street.

> intelligent in other areas

I think you mean "knowledgeable". There is a correlation though, but never mind.

Yes, you are correct. Or, perhaps more accurately, "authoritative". Being an expert in one field does not mean that a person's opinions in other fields are more likely to be correct.

Guided missiles, misguided men.

I can already fire off emails and text messages claiming to be whomever I want. I can even hire impersonators and lookalikes. I don’t get the big push against these newer technologies.

You're exactly proving the point GP makes, good job.

No they're not and this flippant dismissal is so intellectually lazy.

The ability to scam people exists and isn't going away. People went town to town in covered wagons selling bullshit. People scammed others out of money centuries before that.

The answer isn't pearl-clutching nonsense about how this technology is so different and so morally reprehensible compared to everything else. The answer is education. If someone shows up at your door and sells you a bottle of water that will cure all your ills for $100 then skips town, most people would see it as your fault for being so gullible. Someday there will be some technological or social way to easily differentiate deep fakes from real video the same way you can with photoshopped images today.

We're steadily breaking down all mechanisms that ordinary people can use to trust information they're getting, such as getting a video call from a member of their family and recognising the face and voice.

All previous scams relied on con artists using various means to pretend to either be trustworthy in their own right despite being strangers or as representing some trustworthy institution. But having people being able to act as your family members is a whole other issue. You can't claim that this is no different from other scams.

In Argentina they’ve been scamming people by pretending to be a relative for years now! No AI required. Somebody calls you in the middle of night, distraught, and crying says “mom?” or “dad?”. Then someone interrupts, claims your son or daughter has been abducted (by now you probably have given them their name when responding to the initial plea) and requests money to be dropped at some location where a motorcycle picks it up. They make you stay on the line so you can’t call the cops nor the allegedly abducted person.

These calls usually are made from prison, with an outside accomplice. They are rarely caught.

People are sleepy, and concerned, and swear the voice they heard was the one of their child.

Another no-ai popular scam is done by stealing a WhatsApp account (e.g. by cloning the sim), and then contacting a friend or relative asking for a quick cash transfer for something urgent, to be returned the next day.

Deepfakes might make these scams more believable, but the core causes of the issue and the solutions have not changed.

That sort of scam has been possible, sure, but it depends on both the person being phoned being startled and half asleep, and unable to reach the person or someone else near them in subsequent calls. You're right that I shouldn't have been so absolutist in saying 'all' previous scams, but this is an edge case that doesn't equate to what's becoming possible with real time deep fakes.

What this sort of tech is enabling is scamming where even someone who is fully awake and is probably quite aware and not normally prone to scamming can nonetheless be tricked by a video call.

It's taking us to a point where the only safe way to trust that the person you're speaking to is definitely who they say they are, in all circumstances, is to do it in person. Something not possible for people living far from their other family members.

Do you not see how fundamentally this breaks the trust models we have built over the past few decades?

Scamming an individual is already a ton of work. The amount of effort this shaves off the process is small.

>>The ability to scam people exists and isn't going away.

True, but giving the scammers orders-of-magnitude better tools can have serious consequences. If you already have a plague of robbers in your town, handing out free automatic handguns and ammo to anyone is beyond stupid. Yet this is pretty much what these AI tools give to scammers.

Arguing that people will eventually figure it out is no justification for allowing it. It ignores all the casualties in the meantime. This is especially bad because the result of this scale of weaponized technology may well be a complete destruction of trust in society, or in technology in general. These are catastrophic for everyone in society and the economy.

>The answer is education.

This is the stock answer used for deflection in way too many scenarios. We've seen how it doesn't work.

The complete lack of an enforced ethics code in our field is the biggest blight on our combined contribution to society.

I can already walk to work. I don't see how a car would make any difference.

And you do and its just as effective??? wow you are a pretty aweful person.

"I'll die at some point so why don't you stab me now"

Agree, I've come to believe that social ethics is something that needs to be indoctrinated from an early age, otherwise it can't naturally be developed in many people.

A lot of nasty ideologues that caused massive suffering also believed that

Sure, because it's such a powerful technique for shaping society. Are you saying we should stop using it because it can be abused for evil? :)

If you need to indoctrinate somebody with a certain belief from an early age, then your belief must be so poor that it cannot be used to convince adults, so how can such an action be justified?

Do you assume most adults are rational in their decision-making process and are convinced by arguments? I'm mostly seeing the opposite in practice, and that indoctrination seems merely necessary to balance things out.

I assume that anybody who needs to indoctrinate people into their believes has believes that they cannot justify rationally.

Pretty much yes: my points was that there are plenty of ideas that a rational individual would be convinced of, but that are basically unarguable logically to large parts of the population.

The flat-earthers are an extreme example, but not unique in any way.

They are also 0.01 percent of the population.

But you also seem to assume that different people would come to the same conclusion rationally, without taking into account different experinces, knowledge, ideas and priorities.

And of course, you assume the ideas that YOU came up with are what that rational person would come up with.

Which is the part that scares me. You have a perfect excuse that cannot be disproven: your ideas aren't bad, it is just that not enough people are rational enough to understand them.

Another group that had similar ideas? Lenin and the gang. The total death toll is far too great to risk going down that route again.

You say 0.01 percent, while I think that the majority of the population needs to have some basic values instilled from an early age, if only to achieve the minimum homogeneity of a stable society.

And simply because an evil group uses a tool doesn't mean that tool is broken in itself, it just implies further consideration. For all their atrocities, Nazi Germany did some great engineering and also ran one of the most successful anti-smoking campaigns ever.

I think we have too many differences of opinion to reconcile over internet comments, but thank you for the rebuttals.

At one point we tried to teach "good citizenship" at schools (and in most of Europe, we still do). Then the unethical people started claiming that schools were brainwashing their children, and here we are.

> ...astonished that people without ethics exist

"Moral intelligence" (or "MQ") and "moral cripples".

...are my provisional terms for talking about this.

I don't understand why you're astonished? Psychopaths are all around us, from corporate "leadership" to government lobbyists to fake reviewers on Amazon and the App Store. Confidence men (and women!) have existed since the dawn of time. From selling "snake oil," to 419 scams, to "Microsoft" computer support, technology has only ever aided the process of helping psychopaths find victims. Talent and technical ability are orthogonal to empathy. Always has been; always will be.

This deepfake stuff is a difference in degree, not kind, and once these people figure out how to use AI to help them, everyone is going to have to level up their defenses all over again. You ain't seen nothing yet.

These people are successful.