Comment by SmitheryB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SmitheryB | Hacker News Reader

I feel as though I'm the only one who doesn't care about this.

Curious to know if 20-30 years ago, as graphic design tools got better, were people freaking out about being able to superimpose another person's face on a the body of p*rnstar?

Superimposing people's faces on to porn star's bodies happened/s, but does anyone care really even notice or care about it now days? For the most part, of course not.

So why should we care about porn videos? What makes them so different? The whole concern smells like typical media hype (i.e. yay - we get to write about AI + Porn - instant clickbait) that nobody will be able to stop and nobody will even care about in 1-2 years: e.g. "oh, yah, another deepfake of <(politician|actress|colleague^)> in a porn film - how incredibly creative".

^ Incidentally, this was made light of in the British version of The Office where a modified image of the boss, David Brent, was sent around the office. If it's joked about harmlessly on mainstream TV, it's probably not a huge concern.

It's more problematic than photoshopping a person's face was decades ago because we didn't have pervasive online social media decades ago. Computers weren't in your pocket, and an offending image couldn't be beamed to everyone you know instantly.

> If it's joked about harmlessly on mainstream TV, it's probably not a huge concern.

There are plenty of mainstream TV jokes about horrendous things. Our ability to joke about something is a poor way to gauge how concerned we should be.

> an offending image couldn't be beamed to everyone you know instantly

Is your concern that recipients would think it's real? Or is it that people will get an email/chat message containing NSFW material? (because the latter happens now, and is nothing more than background noise at most). What is your actual, specific concern? (genuinely, I have no idea, but want to try to understand - to me it feels like panic about a problem that isn't actually a real problem).

I'm not sure what my personal concerns are specifically, so I don't have a good answer to that question.

But I think there's a difference between a crud photoshop picture that a person has on their PC, and a (more or less) convincing deepfake video of a person being broadcast.

I think you're likely right that there is an element of panic. I don't know a lot about Korean culture, but I imagine the concern is that deepfakes can have real-life negative impact on people's lives, either because people think it's real or because it creates a hyper-sexualised social environment that endangers women. Both are worthy of concern in my view.

Photoshop has for decades been able to produce fake images indistinguishable from real life.

There's still no case for why fake video is apparently so much worse than fake images. Both achieve the same effects when sent maliciously to a relative or contacts list.

I'll (try to) steelman the case for why video's worse: because people don't realise how easy fake videos are to make. But in 1-2 years... meh... most of society will have it figured out.

But who gives a fuck about people who's lives are ruined in the interim 1-2 years, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com