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Comment by verisimi | Hacker News Reader

As a thought experiment, imagine if this functionality already existed but only for a small subset. Perhaps for secretive 3-letter agencies?

What would someone with that ability be able to do? How convincing could their imagery, films, etc be? Could they even shift perceptions of the world, get people to do things because of the imagery? How powerful would that ability be - is it an ability that the military etc would have looked into, and investigated possible weaponisation?

Is it possible that this has been the case for years?

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It's doubtful.

The asymmetry between theory and scale has been shrinking on most fronts when it comes to the government. The government certainly has brilliant scientists on its payroll and in the past has been able to shove resources at problems that no other entity has, but these are no longer the days of the Manhattan Project and this isn't the atom bomb. You can't throw money at this problem beyond buying computing power (which the private sector now holds more of than the government does), and it requires incremental advancements in dozens of fields internationally over the course of years, along with huge collaboratively captioned datasets that simply can't be produced by the government without tipping their hand.

Being able to create fake films doesn't really buy you anything, when people aren't believing them. And for believability, you need connections with reality and trust, that you don't get from fake films alone. People can just look at other sources and see that none of this happened at the given time and place. And random videos that pop up on the Internet are very low in terms of trust anyway.

If you want to influence public opinion, there are already far more powerful tools. Just be Google or Twitter and create some strategically placed filter bubbles. Everything people will see, actually happened and can be verified. Nothing is hidden and will show up with a specific enough search query. But every less specific search query will nudge people into whatever direction you want them to move.

To counter that, imagine police bodycams with embedded AI touching up live-recording so that the police was always right, suspect always did something wrong. If you build the source device with this touch-up capability, if you are the certificate authority about these, if you are also defining how these recordings would be used in court, then a perfect fake is useful. (None of us see the actual sensor output from our mobile phones)

TL;DR In order for a fake to be useful, you have to fake AND be the only reputable source. If other recorders cannot get close enough, then your touched-up "real" video is the only material available.

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