Ask HN: How should we handle AI-generated videos that look 100% real? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should we handle AI-generated videos that look 100% real?

1 pointcloudking4 comments

I just watched a clip supposedly generated by Google’s Veo, and I honestly couldn’t tell it was fake until a friend mentioned it. With OpenAI’s Sora and others pushing the limits, it’s going to get even harder to know what’s real. How do we as hackers and builders help society deal with this?

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We have all grown up with fake images and videos, in movies and on TV, and then on social media. “AI” generated video makes the tools cheap and available, but doesn’t represent a novel way to deceive. I expect more of it. The fake images will push the good ones out, we will suspect everything as “fake news.” People who commit fraud and benefit from lying will take advantage.

  > The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
  > Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

The above quote has been true for the whole internet, ab ovo. But people are starting to realize this only now.

> What’s the best way forward before trust in video hits rock bottom?

Isn't trust in video already at rock bottom? Since when could you show people a video apropos of nothing and convince them what they saw was real?

Humans are usually what matters, and the hardest thing to fake.

CGI has been good for a while, but up until recently, if you showed me a video of a person speaking, it'd generally be pretty easy to tell if it was really them or was fake. Now, it's not so sure, and it doesn't take a hundred million dollar Hollywood budget to fake a person speaking, it just takes a 600$ GPU.

Look at Tarkin in Rogue One. Incredibly expensive and detailed animation, months of professional animator time, multiple passes and reviews and changes, huge budget... and you can still tell it's CG. And that wasn't even that long ago.

Now I can make a convincing video of Elon Musk telling you to buy some shitcoin in 5 minutes in my basement.

The more people and resources it takes to fake something, the harder it is to keep a secret. Also - when editing photos became easy, we could always step it up to video for 'proof' - if deepfakes and video generation become easy, what do we step it up to? What's beyond video?

I'm not saying the sky will fall in - digital photo editing didn't end the world - but it is definitely a different situation than before and deserves consideration.

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