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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

The best we can hope for is that one personally avoids this for the first 5 years or so, and then it gets so widespread and easy that everyone will start doubting any videos they watch.

The same way it took social media like reddit a few years of "finding the culprit" / "name and shame" till mods figured out that many times the online mob gets it wrong and so now that is usually not allowed.

But many people will suffer this until laws get passed or it enters into common consciousness that a video is more likely to be fake than it is to be real. Might be more than 5 years though. And unfortunately laws usually only get passed after there's proven damage to some people from it.

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> everyone will start doubting any videos they watch.

This kills the medium.

Just as ubiquitous scam calls have moved people away from phones, this moves people away from using media which cannot be trusted. Done enough this destroys reporting and therefore democracy. I wonder when the first nonexistent candidate will be elected.

It is inevitable at this point that video as 'proof' will be killed. That we cannot do reporting and it destroying democracy is a little too much 'sky is falling'. Democracy existed before video.

We've had Photoshop for decades, and I still see pictures everywhere.

Again this tired argument. Photoshop requires skill and time. AI generation takes a few seconds of typing some words. The scale is not comparable.

And let’s not pretend image generation AI isn’t already in a state where it can pump out convincing slop. Facebook is full of it.

This sounds like saying Text, as a medium, is already destroyed. But as we can see, despite thousands of years of fraud potential, we still use text a medium. We're back to needing witnesses and corroborating evidence.

I'm not sure I can take seriously arguments of "killing democracy", that undermines whatever point you're making in the same way people that worry about crime and shout "think of the children" or immediately go to "stopping terrorism". Just make your point without hyperbole.

The market for content that reassures people their preexisting views are right and valid is huge, evergreen, and held to the lowest possible standard.

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