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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

> The technology hasn't changing anything.

I don't agree with this. Sure, things like VFX have existed to augment the experience of movies and other types of content over the years, but these were large-scale commercial projects that only a few could afford.

We're now reaching the point where anyone can create video content that humans aren't able to discern is real or not, and that is unprecedented. Video is an extremely powerful medium that has driven entire movements. For example, BLM wouldn't have happened without the world watching a video of a cop publicly murdering George Floyd.

There's something about seeing video evidence of heinous things happening that drives people to act more than simply reading op-eds or listening to interviews, largely because it's more viscerally stimulating.

We can't know until generative AI has proliferated and fully integrated into society to know whether or not it's changing how we think or behave.

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>We're now reaching the point where anyone can create video content that humans aren't able to discern is real or not

>We're now reaching the point where anyone can photoshop an image with intent to deceive

>We're now reaching the point where anyone can film a scene with intent to deceive

>We're now reaching the point where anyone can stage a photograph with intent to deceive

>We're now reaching the point where anyone can mass-produce pamphlets with intent to deceive

>We're now reaching the point where anyone can cheaply replicate a signet ring to pose as a member of our House

>We're now reaching the point where anyone can write a letter impersonating the King

>We're now reaching the point where...

It's funny how little humans change. Think about how, for every single one of the above technologies, many people reacted with the same sense of doom and gloom, induced by a novel technology, yet the general was no different, only the particular. Something else interesting, is many of us relish in this doom-mongering. Again, this is not something new either, as reactionary doomsayers and the cults they've spawned have been coming and going for thousands of years.

I find it useful to remind myself that technologies and socio-philosophical trends come and go, yet man remains fundamentally the same. In times of uncertainty, it's comforting, and informs me how to act.

Yep, and stable diffusion can imitate hand written signatures of everyone, no matter how difficult it's to draw it.

I used ChatGPT to write a story of a person who warns about a new knife technology, which produces sharper knives than any other knife technology in history.

https://i.postimg.cc/9X4Vjyjk/knife-technology.png

The hand signature could also be taken from a picture and then drawn by a cnc/engraver, without ai.

This doesn't really help you though, because for important things you need witness a for your signature.

It has always been trivially easy for people to lie to each other.

The fact that it used to be hard to lie via one specific medium, like video, and now is easy (well, soon perhaps -- the cited examples show there's still some ways to go there) is more of a return to the normal course.

No it is not. People used to be able to trust what they saw with their own two eyes. Hollywood could come up with some fake magic, but your average joe couldn’t. Have a look at the new unreal engine demo. Pretty soon, anyone will be able to take a person’s social media photos and videos and place them into any scene they want.

Did you see the news article of the pope in a white coat? Heads up, it was an AI photo and it tricked millions. What do you think might happen if someone decides to flood the internet with a thousand fake George Floyd videos to incite riots because “the ends justify the means”.

This is the world we are entering.

You can still trust what you can see with your own two eyes. You can't trust videos or photos of things. Computer image/video editors (e.g. Photoshop, AfterEffects) have made photos & videos untrustworthy for years if a skilled editor made the modifications, and before that some darkroom tricks could do a reasonable job. The new AIs make it cheaper & easier to fake photos and videos.

Good point. You can’t trust anything you see on a screen anymore. Although even your eyes can deceive you in the real world occasionally.

Yes, optical illusions do exist. They're not particularly useful for the sorts of deceptions that edited media can produce though, so they're not much of a threat.

I wasn’t really talking optical illusions but more something along the lines of the film vantage point or just detective work in general. A lot of people can recall the same event and be telling it faithfully to what they saw and remember but the actual truth of what happened can be something entirely different to their own individual perception. I suppose something like saying you saw someone murder someone with a gun and then run off, when if you’d have seen it from another angle then you would have seen the guy was acting in self defence because he was about to get stabbed or something like that

> What do you think might happen if someone decides to flood the internet with a thousand fake George Floyd videos to incite riots because “the ends justify the means”.

People have been flooding the internet with lies all along -- and, indeed, sometimes incite riots with those lies.

I get it: there are new ways to lie now, and some will be more susceptible because they don't pay attention to the moving target of what's possible with deepfake technology. But adding one more way to lie to the existing pile of a thousand ways doesn't change the balance, especially since the effectiveness of a lie doesn't depend on its believability, but on whether it tells a story the listener wants to believe.

photoshopped images have been deceiving people for decades. it's just getting easier to scale production and harder to identify manipulated images

George Orwell in his writings about the Spanish Civil War complained bitterly about the recent loss of any sunset of shared objective truth and how cheap local newspapers would write entirely fictional battles, which, to the readers back home would be taken as true.

https://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/0yu1y3zKUe...

I think "fake news" has been going on a bit longer than maybe you might realize.

The USA started a war with Spain and conquered the Philippine islands over headlines like this in 1898.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)

If you think augmented imagery started with vfx then you would not believe what people were able to do in a darkroom. Deepfakes can be made with an xacto blade.

This guy gets it. Evil people can frame other people for things they didn’t do, creating completely photo realistic videos as evidence. It doesn’t matter if the truth comes out eventually if the pitchforks have already come out to enact revenge and get their drop of blood. And on the flip side, any evidence of their wrongdoing is just “fake AI news”.

Welcome to the new world.

I think the point of the article, and it is a very valid point these days, is that it is the ease in which we turn to the pitchforks that is the problem that truly needs to be addressed.

“We need to put our focus on transforming society to be able to deal with this.”

The solution to that is not to believe anything and just go on with your life.

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