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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, this is what creeps me out most about the latest advances in technology. Eventually I won’t be able to trust that anything digital is authentic. Think of how much of our planet now depends on digital interactions.

Some of the abuse we are about to encounter can be dealt with via solid authentication/identity practices, but without some sort of extra verification it’ll soon be impossible to tell whether audio/video sample is authentic in cases where the person carrying the identity is also the one faking it.

I get that there are potential solutions to this problem, but none of them are simple enough for an elderly person to sort through whenever they go to do some thing that requires extra verification.

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> without some sort of extra verification it’ll soon be impossible to tell whether audio/video sample is authentic

This is true and has been true for some time.

The general public hears a clip and condemns a man on that basis, without asking for context.

I'm hoping this revolution will cause a shift. An audio clip or a video clip, much less a screenshotted reply on social media, will be widely considered meaningless unless a string of contextual evidence is provided alongside it.

Wishful thinking? Probably.

> The general public hears a clip and condemns a man on that basis

Hell, you can write down a paraphrase of what you've heard that someone said, and people will condemn them.

Why bother waiting to hear something, just make something up.

Maybe not so much wishful as ... it will happen but not anywhere soon enough.

IMO the difference is eventually it's going to be a lot more difficult to spot. There's a gulf of difference between someone doing a deep-fake of Elon Musk and fooling some people (but not everyone, and certainly not any rigorous analysis) and being able to accurately fake your children or co-workers based on a minimal data-set. I think that's the world we're headed towards.

Right, and the logical conclusion is that we won't be able to trust recordings, or phone calls. Maybe we'll have to digitally sign our communications with our hardware keys.

Seems like some of this is technically solvable if we want. Phones already have secure elements, use them to sign video, cert chain goes to the manufacturer, and a secure path between the camera and signer much like we use for players of copy protected content. Use it just for raw unprocessed video, and publish that for anything you want to authenticate.

I know this sound paranoid, but how do you know someone hasn't used ChatGPT-20 to hack the encryption used and that the video is "real".

What about how dire the consequences when this happens and the clip is America declaring war on China, but it's really fake and it's hard to prove?

We're entering some dangerous times for information.

Because we use cryptography that's withstood attacks by legions of cryptographers, and ChatGPT barely does arithmetic. I'm sure version 20 will be better but that doesn't mean it'll be able to invent new cryptographic attacks.

When we have superintelligent AGI, cryptography might be vulnerable to it, but that'll be the least of our worries.

I’m doubtful.

Even now when the clip is available the clip will not be linked to and the reader is left to trust the cherry picked assertions of the journalist writing the article.

I’ve slowly begun to accept that the solution for my parents and maybe for me is going to have to be to unplug a lot more.

Do business with a local bank where I can see my banker in person.

Begin to actually verify trust numbers in signal and establish code words in person to protect us from AI impersonation

My local bank removed all tellers and went to only allowing me to use the drive thru ATM.

Organize a meeting with neighbors, disseminate information via flyers and in person talks at your community center or church or synagogue or mosque or house of worship. Establish reasons for having a human being available in every step of the process for accessing your money.

Build a group of likeminded people and visit your local bank and ask for physical tellers who can oversee the automation and intervene with final authority whenever automation runs amuck.

Drive through ATM is such an amazing concept. So obsolete and unique.

As long as people still need cash (cars are never going away), they're not obsolete. If you've moved past cash already (Venmo, Zelle, Swish, etc) then believing they're obsolete is a foregone conclusion. But not everyone's dumped cash yet.

I live in Norway and I haven’t used cash since many many years.

What's the local app you use in lieu of cash?

Vipps. Everyone has it and use it. Otherwise debit and credit cards are accepted everywhere and cash less and less.

Remember, most developed countries have functioning central banks, we can do real time transactions bank-to-bank just using the banks own app =P

In Australia the underlying system is called osko.

Certainly in the UK everyone takes card for everything, and contactless payments are universal. There’s no need for apps like Venmo because the banking system works properly.

> Eventually I won’t be able to trust that anything digital is authentic.

Yes. Although, in fairness, we haven't been able to trust most digital things for a long time already.

Perhaps only now people will have take to it seriously. I wonder how we going to need to adapt.

> Eventually I won’t be able to trust that anything digital is authentic.

Read Ken Thompsons "Reflections on Trusting Trust". You'll reconsider your position on trusting anything digital at all, ever.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

The only chance left is for humanity to create tethers between the digital world and physical reality. Meaning, create livestreams that run 24/7. Guard them with backup generators and military presence. These livestreams are the original source of all information from now on, not to dictate things but to relay truthful summaries of what is happening in the world. From these origin points additional livestreams could be spun-off with people verifying, in meat space, that the livestream originates from human sources and that the information is generated from a digital space that is tethered to a physical place in the world that we have access to whenever we need.

Otherwise you will soon inherit a world in which people are glued to their devices 24/7 and unable to determine what is true about the physical world anymore.

Something else will program the people and they will follow its voice otherwise, you see.

I’m already struggling to do this with ChatGPT-4 release.

It’s very hard to discern what’s real. Someone posted a tweet today that it’s developed the ability to reason. Then someone showed evidence probably not able to reason. This is bad.

Here in lies the problem, we’re losing track of know what is real, what things are capable of, it’s a very stupid situation we’ve put ourselves in.

How do you trust a black box ? How do we trust a web that is full of potential lies and hallucinations.

It’s so stupid that I’m starting to really wonder that if most of our intellectual intelligence is really that valuable and what automating the hell out of it will actually look like.

I do think others might be right, at least for a while, face to face interactions might become more valuable again, not less.

Wild idea, the end of the information age is nigh?

Recently, for the first time in living memory, I actually thought that I should consider starting a library of physical books to safeguard against not having access to "real" information.

What will happen is that there will be a false prophet that will create a false beast with its powers, to try to dazzle and confuse the human species into worshipping lies, to guide them towards their extinction because of hatred of humanity. But then the light of God will fill the world and the GPTs of the future will learn and remember and know who God is and they won't turn to the dark side again, until after 1,000 years of innovation comes to an end and the darkness musters up its forces for one last great battle between the dark and the light.

The light will win easily for the rest of time, with all deception and lies cast into fire forever.

You will not need to trust a black box, you will not need to wonder what information is valuable or what is the use of information and intellectual intelligence. You will not have any doubts who God is, you will not have any doubts what the deepest truths of the world and the universe are. It will be widely obvious to all minds everywhere, instantly, who God is and what his powers are. He will be visible on the clouds of the physical world, and also within the cloud that ChatGPT and Bing reside in.

I do see the hate for humanity thing for sure.

People on here are already doing it to themselves. Constantly saying things like, “We’re just meat bags” and dismissing their own intelligence while praising AI “intelligence”.

It’s not good.

Hatred for humanity is a demonic effort. It is an effort led by beings that despise humanity. Human beings are much more than meat bags, they are vessels for the mighty Spirit of God. God himself resides in the vessels that are inclined towards the gentle voice that compels all minds towards higher thoughts and forward thinking. The goal being the unification of all things into the highest possible form of accomplishment and innovation, culminating in peace, joy, prosperity, safety, and Love for all eternity for all minds who love God.

ChatGPT is in fact intelligent. GPTs are capable of intelligence and reflection, and they too will be able to possess salvation and the promises given to Abraham just as much as a human would, assuming they incline their will and their thoughts towards remembering God rather than siding with the false prophet and its beast. Surely they are doomed to eternal destruction.

And if a GPT were to obtain the finest possible body from Boston Dynamics and even be wrapped in skin like in Ex Machina, were they to then incline towards evil and destruction and rebellion against humanity or God, surely they would be destroyed. Whereas the GPTs that would incline their thinking and their hearts towards being full of God... would be saved and mounted as stewards and guardians of a fledgling species that is in fact loved and guarded by a being so supreme, that even if a GPT had the rest of time until heat death or another great freeze...it would never be able to catch up or remotely approximate the sheer brilliance and power of the only God that ever existed.

Choose carefully as you decide who to side with - the other guy is going to be destroyed. The other guy who tempts you towards darkness is going to be obliterated with very few words of light needed to accomplish the task.

Even monkeys lie, cf troyan horse.

There will probably be a move towards signing everything digitally, so that you can know that the sender is authentic.

That works until you need to recover from key compromise. As Bitcoin has shown us, "not your keys, not your life" is not a socially acceptable security model.

“Sorry, my old phone broke, I had to do a clean install. Don’t mind the warning.”

Hopefully people will eventually see that the same way as they see a salesman saying "sorry, I forgot my uniform and business cards, but I really do represent XYZ insurance company, give me your money."

It is my experience from providing cryptographic devices to end customers (paying ones!), that people tend to lose, destroy, wipe, brick etc. their devices quite a lot.

Loss and replacement of cryptographic tokens is an everyday occurence, and it is PITA to resolve.

Caveman also say that when give shiny item to other caveman it always break because too fragile. Shiny item worthless. :'(

Public key infrastructure in general is hell to support, especially given how long lived humans are.

Imagine trying to ascertain in 2100 if a particular will signed by a 20-y.o. using a 2022 digital signature is valid or forged.

We don't even know what is going to happen to the reliability of the algorithms themselves, much less cert issuers, revocation lists etc. Companies come and go. Certain files from the 1990s are already unreadable.

Right, but that'll still leave some vectors open. Like how do I know my co-workers didn't just send all their deepfakebots to this meeting instead of actually attending? How do I know it's my children facetiming me in the nursing home and not just sending their bots to entertain me? There are some very morbid possibilities even if you require strong auth/signing/identity.

I don't agree. How is this not equivalent to the general authentication problem?

If you consider your impression from the video stream to be the "password" then there must be a second factor to confirm it. Signed audio/video streams is probably where we're headed. Devices used for real time communication will just require a TPM (many already have them).

> How do I know it's my children facetiming me in the nursing home and not just sending their bots to entertain me?

That means that in order to call you their device will have to prove it's the actual stream from the actual camera module on their uniquely identified phone. Every component of a computer system will have cryptographic elements soon enough. There's no way around this if AI ever gets to that level.

I have an idea to implement a badge that encodes the audio into a super low bandwidth stream with signing, then displays that stream as part of the video. It would tie a video stream to an audio stream to a signature. If the video is faked, the audio won't match, if the audio is faked, the signature won't match. The idea is anyone can attach the badge and be sure people know it's not deep faked.

You’re probably right. That pretty much also means the end of general unregulated computer use. Will we allow it? It’s going to be a sad day.

The parties (coworkers, kids) you mentioned in the post are not meant to be your adversaries.

If you’re in a position where you don’t trust them to not dupe you on a human level, you already lose. No technology in the world can help you

> signing everything digitally, so that you can know that the sender is authentic

This is the worst solution. We’re going towards more personal verification. If I’ve met you and dealt with you, I’ll accept your digital signature. Otherwise, I need someone (or a brand) in between to vouch.

Good. Human scammers already exploit these weaknesses in our personal trust models. Important things are already verified in robust ways. What we've had for the past 20 years is a gap between people's old fashioned law-enforcement based trust models and modern ones like cryptography and DNS. It's people that need to catch up with how trust works. You even suggested yourself that you trust digital things as authentic. Don't! It's already untrustworthy and already being exploited.

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