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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

The volume alone might be a problem. It takes some Photoshop skills to pull off an acceptable fake. If there's a turnkey website that can spit them out en masse, that's something different than having to actually hire a human to do it by hand.

Previously it took at least one CGI artist to convincingly fake video, probably several. This inherently limits how much of a problem it can be, because it doesn't scale. AI scales.

I mean- either deep learning AI automation is going to be important and useful, or it isn't. If replacing all drivers with robots is important, then automated turnkey fakery has the potential for disrupting something, isn't it?

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I agree, but I think my original point covers this - if video proves to be very easy to fake at scale (e.g. using your example of a turnkey website) then that should result in equally large-scale scepticism about video as evidence. The internet may drown in annoying deepfake-based memes but as long as everyone knows its all fake, there seems little potential for the kind of serious harm people are worried about (reputational damage, election meddling etc.)

> ...as long as everyone knows its all fake,

There's a shockingly large number of people who aren't even convinced that election meddling took place in 2016, or that propaganda was disseminated to many people on social media, despite unanimity from US intelligence.

If we as a society can't all agree that these things even happened, how can we hope to properly educate people on the existence/prevalence of fake video? It seems like common sense to many people, but we can't assume that everyone will accept these truths based on the political rhetoric we've seen in the last few years.

US intelligence doesn't enjoy a reputation for trustworthiness, to put it mildly. But if people can just go online, upload a video and get back a "hilarious" deepfake, that's an irrefutable demonstration that video-meddling is easy and widely-available, isn't it? They can literally see for themselves how accessible the faking tech is.

Text can be convincingly faked at scale. Most meme images are widely reused photos. We do have Snopes and other fact-checkers, but it's only a partial solution.

And yet, fake news does seem to be a problem. Checking provenance of facts and statistics is often skipped, even by journalists, let alone on Twitter.

This suggests that people will have lots of fun resharing deep fakes and won't care much that they're fake, as long as they express some emotion that they agree with.

Give people a fake that they want to believe in, and it's going to be very hard to talk them out of it.

I would think that the same tech you can use to graft a face onto a person in a video could be used to do it on a still.

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