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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: What if we just accepted that any video might be fake, just like any photograph might be fake?

And that we accept that the only thing that's assured to be real is face-to-face, and live with that reality?

It's already the legal standard in many places that a court doesn't just accept evidence like a photo or a video. Typically the photographer testifies under penalty of perjury that they were there and can be questioned about the circumstances in which they took the picture/video and any post-processing that might distort what we see.

So we can say that either it's real or we can identify the specific people who might be lying.

Unfortunately, in media and the public discourse / memosphere, that's a standard notoriously difficult to establish or enforce.

People, and crowds, will respond to first impressions.

What if we put out enough deepfakes that they get desensitized to it and just stop believing stuff on screens altogether?

Past experience suggests that that likely won't be too effective. "Big lie" propaganda is profoundly effective, even amongst those who are painfully aware of its existence and methods as individuals, and at the population level, there seem to be virtually no defences.

Rather, there'll need to be the emergence of credible and trustworthy channels which verify messaging and content before it's widely disseminated.

That largely means re-implementing the sort of media gatekeepers we've seen in the past. Though the challenge of bad-faith actors emerging in such roles at considerable scale points to further challenges, even with that model.

Under a regime in which free speech is considered a fundamental right, any sort of preemptive management by government mandate becomes intensely difficult.

>"Big lie" propaganda is profoundly effective,

I mean, people still believe we put men on the moon, and people still believe the Earth is round! /s

Some even subscribe to the belief that water is wet.

For now. It might become more important.

Don't think of a white elephant.

Don't breathe consciously.

Don't lose the game.

But if you lack technology to detect fakes how can you ever prove perjury? Photographer would then risk nothing by lying.

If the person is a professional, lying is a huge risk, as in the end of a career even if not convicted.

Earlier this year, a man who was repeatedly caught lying as a journalist was forced to resign.

Unfortunately, he was the British Prime Minister by that point.

Corroborating evidence

My startup was founded on technology to authenticate and provide provenance for digital media content.

The overwhelming response from the market, investors, etc was “We like what you’re doing and this is all well and good but the ship has sailed”.

I think the real hot take here (and they danced around this one) is essentially the partisanship. For almost everywhere this really matters a good chunk of people are more likely to believe as real whatever aligns with their pre-conceived notions, political leanings, whatever.

Essentially, real is whatever my tribe says is real.

Your startup is probably to early. As in, at some point it might be a necessity. And it’s been studied that we believe something first, and then apply reasoning to it. We skew towards our preferred bias by belief.

Thanks, I appreciate that but the experience was eye opening. Speaking of which…

Get on Facebook and watch people swap around things that are so blatantly and obviously fake. In the words of one potential investor: “no one cares”. Or, to repeat a phrase you may have heard “fake news”.

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” - Jonathan Swift, 1710

Investors are dumb. See the list of people who have ftx truckloads of money. Sometimes what’s needed is a couple good sentences with create the appropriate spark in their imagination. If you can sell truth as a service, you have potentially a total addressable market of half the planet’s population.

On things like facebook usually our “guard” is down. We just assume at some point that if someone feeds it to us, it’s vetted already.

Usually a lot of context is missing with for instance a scary headline. In that sense context tools could also be great to have. Something that exposes connections between information.

I don’t believe no one cares tbh, but there are those who are resistant to change in bias.

or, conversely, to judge ideas based on their merit and not based on who says them, maybe in some deep wonderfull future ...

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