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Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't this already happened? Remember the Project Veritas videos of ACORN employees giving advice to a pimp on how to run his child prostitution ring that were all over the news in 2009? Multiple investigations found the videos where so heavily edited as to be fake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_c...

The original videos were everywhere, ACORN was driven to bankruptcy, and the investigations revealing the videos were faked got hardly any news coverage. The art project described in this post is very quaint in comparison to this very real life event.

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To expand on this point further, the phenomenon of synthesizing accounts of a person saying something has already existed for thousands of years.

If I tell you that "Trump said that low income families will receive unconditional, federally sponsored medical coverage," you will not immediately take my word on it. You will critically analyze my statement by scritinizing who I am to make this claim, and the claims congruency with what you already know to be reality. I am not a reputable publication, so you are not likely to believe me, because the claim is contrary to what is already known.

The same will become true of video. A video of what looks like somebody saying something will become as useful as hearsay testimony. We will, through necessity, begin critically scrutinizing the source of footage, not just taking it's content at face value.

In many ways this already exists in the photography world. Convincing photo manipulation is old technology at this point, and I think we've adequately adapted to it.

In many ways this already exists in the photography world. Convincing photo manipulation is old technology at this point, and I think we've adequately adapted to it.

Have we? I'm pretty sure there's still a pretty serious problem with young girls developing their self-image based on heavily manipulated photos of models in the magazines they read. That's a benign example, as far as the purpose of the manipulation, which can be argued to be 'artistic'. An intentionally-damaging example of photo manipulation is much of the falsified propaganda that was distributed last year during the presidential campaign, which I'm sure included a lot of manipulated photos. That stuff definitely influenced the election, and our whole political climate. I don't think people, in general, have adapted to the idea that what they see isn't necessarily real.

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