Hacker News Reader

Comment by willsoon | Hacker News Reader

Well, yes. I saw Biden recite a copipasta from beginning to end. I still marvel at how well it's done. The skill of the AI or whatever, or the person who did it, approaches art. I still don't believe for a second that it's real, because it's a copypasta, you know? And especially because I am a human being with normal intelligence.

View on HN

Just like the first time I saw the old lady on the surf table standing up in the sky to welcome me to the Internet and offer herself as my guide, I knew it couldn't be real and suspected that there was some irony in the whole wonderful scene.

Ok that's wonderful but a bit of a red herring. I'm not worried about the AI presidents gaming channels that are out there with Trump Obama and Biden playing Minecraft together, I'm worried about "new leaked audio from our undercover reporter of Biden telling the head of the FBI to sink Trump's campaign" or "Video leak of Trump calling for the intimidation of voters in blue states" exploding on the internet with no real way to confirm or deny it. You may say you're a human being with normal intelligence, but I don't have a ton of faith that people would be able to tell one way or the other - especially younger people who seem much more likely to believe things on the internet. We already have cybercriminals using AI voicechangers to impersonate people's coworkers to game helpdesks for breaking into systems.[1] This is a tool that can be used for fun but it's as game changing as the printing press, possible more.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/hacker-deepfakes-employees-voice-...

You are right not to rely on people's intelligence, but we are obliged to do so because we are not monarchists and we believe in democracy, or at least we try to.

How sure are you of that? I would bet there's more than one Mencius Moldbug fan on hacker news....

I don't know for sure. And certainly we are not what you call "leftists" in HN. But let me say this on a personal level. I know that people sometimes, all the time, often, certainly, behave stupidly. But I want to believe, ergo I believe, that people can make good decisions, that there is such a thing as "common sense". Looking at the facts sometimes made me sad. Maybe people can't think for themselves, and then they can't choose. But I prefer not to think in terms of peasants and elites, even if history tells me so and Ortega y Gasset tells me how it works. I want to believe that we are capable of governing our lives. I want to believe. Forgive me for expressing not a fact, but the way I think about democracy.

At the same time, you have to consider that if the same crooked reporter reported these leaks without providing any audio at all, or said they were emails, or texts, a large number of people would believe them anyway. You have to check what the delta is of people who would not have believed a plain text lie but would believe a video lie, and as deepfakes become more and more sophisticated in plain sight, that delta is bound to shrink.

I feel that ultimately the delta will become negligible, because the cognitive flaws that would push us to believe deepfakes at an era when anyone can create a deepfake of themselves in 30 seconds on a website (not now, but not long after they would be used for propaganda) are the same that currently push us to believe clear textual propaganda. If you don't fall for one, you won't fall for the other.

Doesn't even need a crooked reporter, just a troll/extremist/propoganda creator and a news organisation without much interest in fact checking/research.

In fact, forget deepfakes and disinformation campaigns. What should truly terrify people is how low the standards are for sourcing information in many media publications now. Oh sure, you could use AI to fake a video of Biden or Trump saying something controversial and send that in... or you could print out a document titled 'Trump's Super Secret Plan for World Domination!', take a photo of it on a mobile phone and send that into many outlets for much the same effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com