The real danger of deep fakery

[Dark Jaguar]

The very first thought I had when I heard about deep fake was this: "Oh great, now every single time a politician says or does something horrible on camera, everyone is going to cry out "deep fake, it's all just CG!".  As evidence, flat earthers literally believe every single photo and video of the earth from space is CG, especially the ones before CG was ever detailed enough to make an image like that.

I'm apparently not alone in that fear.  This is a tech we are not ready for, but even if the tech was erased right now, the knowledge that it's possible at all has already done all the damage.

[Sacred Jellybean]

I heard about this on an episode of Radiolab. Very unnerving stuff. It's bad enough to have to discern what's true and false in what you read. Now you'll have to question what you see and hear. We'll have to rely on common sense (when has that ever worked?) and "gut feelings", imperfect tools for perceiving reality, and skewed by personal (and group) bias. People are already highly selective in what they choose to believe, and these fakes will be able to drive us further into a post-modern experience.

I feel sick every time I think of this technology.

[Dark Jaguar]

I mean, we have evidence. There's whole chains of where claims came from, and they can be followed. I believe that's how people used to confirm facts before smellovision.

[etoven]

The very first thought I had when I heard about deep fake was this: "Oh great, now every single time a politician says or does something horrible on camera, everyone is going to cry out "deep fake, it's all just CG!".  As evidence, flat earthers literally believe every single photo and video of the earth from space is CG, especially the ones before CG was ever detailed enough to make an image like that.

I'm apparently not alone in that fear.  This is a tech we are not ready for, but even if the tech was erased right now, the knowledge that it's possible at all has already done all the damage.

I am having to wave off those very questions now since I work in IT.

And now flat earthers think we had sophisticated machine learning before we even had modern computers.
It takes our most powerful chipsets today hours to complete deep fakes.

Some fun trivia, the Apollo computer had RAM registers so large you could see them with the naked eye.
Today couldn't even fit a single email inside the thing, to say nothing for a machine learning model (or neural net).

That's just banna shit crazy.

Apollo guidance RAM chip.
   

[Sacred Jellybean]

I mean, we have evidence.  There's whole chains of where claims came from, and they can be followed.  I believe that's how people used to confirm facts before smellovision.

That's true for journalists (the few we have left), whose job it is to investigate these claims. Some you can trust, others not-so-much. But as an end-user, consumer of information and current events, and someone who feels like he has to dig deeper to cut through the noise, any new form of false information is frustrating. I started writing my last post about lamenting how ignorant people will spread and believe whatever deep fake propaganda that they consume, then realized that I shouldn't be so haughty as to assume I wouldn't be susceptible to it as well.

The internet has opened up all sorts of new channels for disinformation. This will only add to it. It's hard enough to convince someone they're misinformed in what they read. My guess is we'll see a growing trend of smear videos that get spammed by the same trolls who regularly spam memes.

People have become accustomed to sticking with whatever news outlets, bloggers, and echo chambers that confirm their beliefs. Social media has been especially pernicious in fostering this mental poison. The internet has made us dumber and more narrow-minded, when it should have been the opposite. I guess this rant is going beyond the scope of the topic, but still. Something about fake video propaganda seems like some next-level shit that makes my stomach lurch. This isn't just editing footage to spin a narrative, this is whole-sale inventing new footage that's indistinguishable from reality.

Hopefully websites like Snopes will be able to shed light on which videos we can trust, which we can't, and which are indeterminable. What ratio will we see of the three?