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Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

> The harm here isn't AI, or if it is the harm is minimal.

> AI is going to make life pretty miserable for good looking women in the public eye.

Could you help me understand how you reconcile these two statements? Is the harm minimal, or will women in the public eye be miserable? Or is making women in the public eye miserable not something to take seriously - and if so, why?

I'd also be curious if you think the harm will stop there - could you foresee maybe, high schoolers using deepfake porn to bully each other, con artists using cloned voices to commit fraud, deepfake evidence being used to frame someone for a crime, etc? Is there a reason I shouldn't be concerned about these prospects?

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Being in the public eye is already miserable. The public eye appears to be a close relation to the Eye of Sauron. These people smile a lot, but they don't look like they're having much fun.

The existence of AI will make life a bit worse for some of them. But life being better or worse doesn't really reach my standard of 'more harm' here. I suppose what I was thinking is a bit like if someone cuts in front of me in a queue. I might be worse off, certainly could feel annoyance, but I wouldn't say I'm harmed. I just don't like it. For harm to have happened I would actually have to be ... I dunno, harmed.

Ms. Swift already has to deal with literal stalkers. The baseline of what public people are expected to put up with is already high. I'm not sure this thing is really moving the bar.

> I'd also be curious if you think...

2 thirds of that (bullying, miscarriage of justice) are already major problems. The legal system is already a crapshoot; they do there best but it makes a lot of mistakes. I could see the net effect of AI being helpful in both cases; I'm more excited about neutral, AI judges than I am worried about evidence quality dropping off.

Con artists, we'll see what happens. The major protection I've relied on to date has been rollbacks and balances rather than preventing fraud up front. Social engineering is hard to stop.

You can feel concerned about whatever you like, of course.

To be frank this is nonsense. People in the public eye are miserable so it doesn't matter if they're more miserable? Making lide worse isn't harm? I don't even know what harm would mean, then.

I'm always bemused when people counter with the observation that something is already a problem. Okay? So then we should agree that more if it is also a problem, right? It's like saying the invention of the machine gun wasn't a factor in WW2, because we had already had guns and before that we had crossbows. There was a phase change with the machine gun and things were quite different.

Similarly, if people are able to produce deepfakes at an industrial scale, things will be very different.

> I don't even know what harm would mean, then.

Suffering some sort of detectable injury, for example. I'm hedging a bit because there could easily be something obvious I'm not seeing, but I don't really see how Taylor Swift of 2024 is worse off than the one of 2023 here. She hasn't suffered any physical harm. I don't think this harms her reputation. It isn't going to cause her financial prospects to drop. There is emotional harm, but that has always been a bit of a cop out taht people use when they just don't like something and I don't see why it has to cause emotional harm. There doesn't have to be any stigma around this, it looks like it is just going to be one of those things that happens.

Automated fake porn is obviously different and I can see why she might be upset. But it isn't so clear she - or anyone else - has actually been harmed in any serious way. I get upset by a bunch of things that are frankly more materially impactful on me than this is on her and it isn't appropriate to say they harm me. Tax springs to mind as a light example.

And speaking of WWII, we'll note that although war became much more horrific, it became so much more horrific that we seem to have stopped doing so much of it. So although objectively the machine gun makes fighting much worse, it actually led to less killing overall.

> There is emotional harm...

I agree. Things like this are potentially traumatic. This reduces to a form of cyber bullying. Cyber bullying has gotten people killed.

> [T]hat has always been a bit of a cop out taht people use when they just don't like something...

I disagree. Furthermore I would describe saying that there wasn't harm, and then admitting that there was but that it doesn't count, as a copout or equivocation.

> Tax springs to mind as a light example.

I shouldn't need to point out why harassment and taxation is an apples to oranges comparison.

> [A]lthough war became much more horrific, it became so much more horrific that we seem to have stopped doing so much of it...

We do a huge amount of war. I'll wager you're not aware of all the conflicts categorized as a "war"/"major war" in the list below (I wasn't when I came across it a few days ago).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_confli...

I'm not even sure how to respond to the idea that war getting more horrific is a boon except to say that you should think on that again.

Bullying is targeted though. I doubt that this instance is someone trying to annoy Swift. She could theoretically not have noticed the episode at all and the faker would still be happy. I don't see why this has to make her feel like she is under some sort of attack. She isn't; most of the people looking at this stuff think she is a very respectable human being. Some fanatically think she is one of the best.

> I shouldn't need to point out why harassment and taxation is an apples to oranges comparison.

Sure. But you can see how (1) me being worse off and (2) me being upset about it are not sufficient for people to be persuaded that harm is being done to me. I mean, technically there is a point there but most people don't consider it appropriate to describe taxes as "harmful".

* War and Peace

There is a lot of war in the world, but if you look at the overall trends we're actually in a period of remarkable peace [0]. Absolute number of wars is way down, and death rates due to war will be way down (note that population growth is exponential so absolute numbers being a little higher actually means rates are dropping).

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/conflict-measures-how-do-research...

> ...deepfake evidence being used to frame someone for a crime, etc? Is there a reason I shouldn't be concerned about these prospects?

This is already happening, I'm reasonably certain, and until something of substance is done about it on a systemic, legal level, "deepfake" proliferation will lead to further systemic 'othering' of already-marginalized people at the expense of our own humanity.

Eventually, some of us (humans) won't be able to worry so much about engineering heaven-on-demand, as it were, when suddenly we find ourselves limited in ways we never could've imagined or ever hope to escape from.

People will continue to point and laugh by way of social media, but for how long and at what, or more importantly, whose expense? These are serious questions, which the general public has been plainly ignoring until recently- and that's being entirely overly-favorable.

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