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Comment by tarr11 | Hacker News Reader

Banning or regulating AI wouldn’t impact scammers at all.

I think it would. There’s a degree of expertise required to create a good deepfake. Banning it will reduce the pool of professional deepfake artists which 1) drives up the price of deepfakes and 2) makes it harder to secure good ones. And since the effectiveness of a deepfake scam depends on the quality of the deepfake, fewer people will be scammed.

Drugs are expensive for the same reasons. Most of the people who want to do them still do, just at a higher price.

Regulation is fine, but prohibition rarely works.

> There’s a degree of expertise required to create a good deepfake.

Here's the thing, you're almost most likely to be successful as a scammer with a poor deepfake with a good deepfake.

This is why so many scams are so unbelievable in their premise (Nigerian princes , UN Lottery, etc...). Falling for the premise is a good indicator that the leads they get will turn a profit because they indicate vulnerability.

This is partly why I don't think regulation would stop much of the scamming.

Well, in this case the deepfake is being used to amplify the authority of the product itself. It could work for Nigerian prince scams and dubious supplements. Imagine a deepfake Nigerian prince in the email! In fact the Tinder Swindler used something similar in his scams.

So I think it does matter how authentic the deepfake appears. I’m ambivalent on whether banning the technology is a good idea or even how feasible it could be, but to the extent that deepfakes are limited I do think it would be bad for scammers.

People are up in arms about nation states restricting the application of cryptography which is essentially an application of mathematics. AI is also just another form of an application of mathematics with a different outcome. Seems unreasonable to ban one flavor of maths and not another.

Or hostile nation-states, for that matter.

And yet I can’t just Google “how to build a Bomb at home” and click on the first result and get detailed instructions for how to be a little terrorist.

Probably can't Google it, no.

But there's a thousand other ways to get that exact info, even/especially online.

I don't know the state of that and I'm not about to put it in my google history, so I'll take your word for it. But even if google gave you good info, it's a lot harder to level a building in the US these days because the AN part of ANFO bombs are a lot more regulated in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

> And yet I can’t just Google “how to build a Bomb at home” and click on the first result and get detailed instructions for how to be a little terrorist.

But you can Google "the anarchist cookbook" and get that information just fine (for better or for worse[1])

[1] https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/books-as-contraband-the-st...

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