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Comment by mythrwy | Hacker News Reader

People already produce all kinds of fake news and doctored photos and false flags and all kinds of things. This has been going on since we developed language and photography I suspect.

People already have trouble telling propaganda from fact. That has been going on since forever.

At the end of the day I don't see this being a game changer. If anything, now video and photos are less evidence for/against something as the potential falseness becomes well known. Congressman X: "no, that wasn't me you saw leaving the hotel with the prostitute, my slimy opponent obviously is deep faking stuff".

And people will continue to believe what they want to believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, just like they do right now.

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There seems to me a huge difference between a few organizations being able to produce & distribute a total of X amount of self-serving bullshit with some limited reach, and anyone with a bit of money being able to produce 100,000 • X amount of self-serving bullshit and deliver it to exactly the people most likely to respond to it the way they want, anywhere in the world (save, notably, China and North Korea and such) while making it very hard to tell who it's coming from.

An environment in which 90% of the information is adversarial is really bad. It's a severe problem and very challenging to navigate. An environment where 99.9999% of it's adversarial and it's even harder than before to sort truth from fiction, functionally no longer has any flow of real information whatsoever.

Another thought:

Maybe liberal democracy is not the final outcome of human civilization. You like it and I like it (presumably we were both raised to believe this way) but perhaps it's not really true.

Just to question a base assumption here.

It seems to me, if all the things that are claimed to threaten liberal democracy actually do, liberal democracy might be much less robust and long lived then previously believed.

Oh, absolutely. I've even come around to thinking that's likely. But one can hope.

[EDIT] One thing I no longer think has any realistic future is the open, semi-anonymous Internet. We're either losing it because despots take over and definitely won't permit that threat to remain unfettered, or we're losing it (in perhaps a gentler-touch way) because we have to to prevent authoritarian take-over and vast civil strife. I don't think we're getting to keep that no matter what happens.

Yep I think you might be right. It's ultimately too much of a risk to all sorts of powers to have open unfettered real time communication and mass dissemination.

Even the "good guys" will call emergency that will never end.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. An intellectual Cambrian explosion. And all that porn!

> And all that porn!

On that note: I can't wait for the resulting proliferation of photorealistic tentacle hentai. Imagine the possibilities!

Take it a step further: Can you be arrested for having porn that would be illegal in your country if it was real, but instead it's a thousand generated images/videos? How blurred will those lines get?

I guess my first question would be how the creators of such porn put together the training set.

Eh you're asking the wrong question - training sets are not made of gold, it might be hard to make good ones, but faking a training set with a program like this, resource intensive but possible.

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