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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

This kind of advancements is one of the reasons I don't post photos of myself online. In a few years we will be capable of making videos with anybody's face replaced with anybody else's. It will be trivial to produce a fake video that can cause all kinds of legal troubles.

And yes, I realize it's even possible now, but with all the new algos and software coming out it will be easy enough for somebody to just mess with people's lives for fun.

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doesn't matter if you post photos of yourself online, very likely it will be others that do so. And your image is being digitally captured constantly, if you travel on public transport or go through an airport, or do anything in a public place your photo has been captured many times. Figuring that it's you is also pretty straightforward. All it takes is a DMV hack or Facebook (where one of your coworkers tagged you in a photo, or instagram where your niece tagged you by the bbq on july 4th etc etc etc...

Stroll through a few blocks of midtown Manhattan and you'll end up on hundreds of security cameras and in the backgrounds of a handful of tourists photos. Add a few more years and your image and gait will be continuously recorded by a swarm of 3D camera phones, self driving vehicles, and police drones. Authentication of a crime may require not one but a diverse set of recordings from multiple entities. Validating that the person you are talking to on Skype is indeed your mom may require a cryptographic key exchange (and a damn good reason it won't be Skype but a tool that can be verified by third parties.)

For those of us who grew up reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and other cyberpunk yarns: that is today, we are living in that world at this moment.

And how much of that footage do YOU have access to to mess with my life? Zero.

In the future, we are all in porn.

While I think this is a derangement of society, I can imagine a porn app that let's you drop in a facebook id to superimpose your crush's likeness upon a porn actor.

If it's trivial, it will probably undermine the utility of video in legal circumstances more than it impacts the people depicted in the videos.

You assume legal framework will keep up to pace with technology with no lag.

I trust that, due to jurisprudence model, the legal framework will always have some lag[1] after game-changing technology becomes mainstream... sometimes this can be significant.

[1] disclaimer: active legislation efforts can move faster than tech - especially due to lobbying.

In theory it doesn't have to - there are already legal procedures for qualifying and admitting expert testimony at trial that work quite well (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard). So if you were in jeopardy primarily due to video evidence which you knew to be faked then you could bring a machine vision or CG expert into court to demonstrate the unreliability of the video evidence.

But this is not to say that our system for handling forensic evidence works great - it doesn't sadly, and part of the problem is that juries are often reduced to trying to weigh the credibility of competing expert testators without rigorous standards of measurement or terminology. You'll probably be interested in this: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?Rec...

"In a few years we will be capable of making videos with anybody's face replaced with anybody else's."

The plus side of this is that people will be able to correct casting mistakes that ruin what would be otherwise great films

Can you give an example of a casting mistake like that?

Keanu Reeves in Dracula

Keanu Reeves in Speed

Keanu Reeves in Sweet November

Keanu Reeves in The Lake House

Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate

Keanu Reeves in everything except Bill & Ted

Do you wear a mask in public spaces?

Stalking someone and secretly taking good photos of their face is orders of magnitude harder than googling them and downloading such photos.

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