What's your view on Deepfake tech?

[KilroywasNOTHere]

I saw this video on a deepfake of Nixon giving an alternative speech had the moon landing failed.



admidly I was too enamored by all the cool stuff the tech could be used for I kind of missed the point of said video.

 

[Rocinante]

We got by for thousands of years before we had reliable video in our society. It's been around for a REALLY short time, considering how far back our species goes.

It's nice and convenient, especially when it comes to catching criminals. However, as deep fakes progress and get better and better, we will leave this era behind, and be back to where we started. When it gets easy enough to make reliable fakes, we just go back to that previous era. We will have a harder time convicting criminals, because any video would have the potential to be fake. In effect, it'll be the same as not having video in the first place. Society will be inconvenienced, but will be fine.

 

[Marnuplee]

deepfake tech can be used for good and bad, and there will be technology that can detect it.

 

[Curved_Sw0rd]

There's gonna be a point where it's more than good enough to fool the layman, and detection tech will be far behind enough that it'll do quite a bit of damage. Though that era won't last forever, thankfully.

 

[Sir 1000]

It's good for porn though i bet plenty of people have probably already been blackmailed with human nature being what it is

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

Honestly call me imature, but I can't help but be excited about the fact that someday we can get mark hamil to voice luke in our star wars fan fics....uh, not that i'd know anything about that.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

It's pretty frightening stuff.

With the prevalence of cell phones and prolific recording technologies of sub-standard video quality (the shittier the original video, the easier to manipulate), we're facing a critical mass of intersecting reality-recording and record-doctoring technologies. This is on top of a number of special effects technologies created for purely entertainment purposes—computer generated images, for instance. Humans, simply put, will not be able to handle ambiguity on this scale once it proliferates enough that a person can use an app on their phone to ruin the life of a person they hate. Smarter people will be forced to question everything they see and read and wonder what actually happened. Even worse is that the non-questioning types will see the footage and accept it as true.

It presently isn't a big issue, simply because it hasn't been user-friendly enough to proliferate, nor has it been maliciously employed en masse. But as social trust breaks down and necessary values for society to function go down the tubes (unless we're able to reverse our slide into barbarism), we'll see our ability to responsibly handled this sort of technology plummet dramatically.

Couple this with deliberate simulation technologies, like Artificial Reality and Augmented Reality, and we're watching nerds actively destroying our ability to perceive and understand reality simply because it might score them a better endorphine hit. On an individual level, we can handle it, but if it aggregates in human society, what will happen?

Old-timey voodoo fear of having our souls stolen by the camera seems much less silly now.

 

[robertliguori]

I think we adapted fine. Some of the first things that were done with photos were fakes; consider the Cottingley Fairies hoax.

We are now, I think, collectively coming to realize that where the person behind the camera chooses to point it matters a great deal, even if they only show true events; I think that we will weather the realization that video can be shooped and needed to study to reveal its pixels just fine.

 

[Valiran]

I think they're terrifying and would rather the technology not exist at all. I know that there are ways to detect deepfakes, but they still make it easy for malicious, lying bastards to hurt people.

 

[robertliguori]

Mmm. You know, let me put this another way. In one world, we don't have DeepFakes. In that world, the ability to seamlessly fake video and audio can be done by rich, dedicated malicious actors, and everyone has faith in video and the assumption is that video can't be faked. In another world, we have DeepFakes, and we have awareness of DeepFakes. I honestly think the second is better; it's so easy to be deceptive with editing and framing anyway that I'll take the bargain that gets people to think more about what's in front of them, even if the cost is a lot of really clever hard-to-discern fake videos.

 

[King Krávoka]

Mmm. You know, let me put this another way. In one world, we don't have DeepFakes. In that world, the ability to seamlessly fake video and audio can be done by rich, dedicated malicious actors, and everyone has faith in video and the assumption is that video can't be faked. In another world, we have DeepFakes, and we have awareness of DeepFakes. I honestly think the second is better; it's so easy to be deceptive with editing and framing anyway that I'll take the bargain that gets people to think more about what's in front of them, even if the cost is a lot of really clever hard-to-discern fake videos.

Ah yes, the April Fool's effect.