People don't underestimate it, they just don't know what to do about it. That's arguably more of a technological problem than a policy problem, the technical and philosophical problem of how to detect fakes.
People do underestimate it, especially people who see themselves as critical thinkers. Your conscious mind might know that a photo or video is fake, but your unconscious mind still gives it some credibility. Our ability to remember and process facts is much worse than we think and we're highly prone to creating false memories. No-one is immune to these shortcomings.
Fake images on social media are much more than just a nuisance - they represent a fundamental threat to liberal democracy. Our brains simply aren't evolved to cope with convincing but fake images and we don't have any effective countermeasures.
I don't think it's a matter of brain being trained to see fake images, or people being emotionally readied. I haven't heard yet heard of the essential difference between fake evidence and the real thing.
Technological solutions will help, but software to spot fake videos will lead to an arms race between video creation and video classification.
The more promising angle is imho the society angle. Most people view their memory as the best source of truth, when in reality it's well established in psychology that our memory is incredibly unreliable. Previously this was mostly a problem for the justice system, now we risk entire nations being gaslighted. What we should be doing is trusting our written word, not our memory. Basically writing diaries and keeping newsletter articles, and checking both from time to time to keep wrong memories from manifesting
I don't think people see enough with regards to the situations they are called to judge, so I see local politics of a small town barely scaling okay that way. People do trust their memories, but I don't think journalling is going to improve civic judgment that much.
Most of the issues discussed in the presidential elections are way beyond personal observation. Are we to throw our votes to the wind since it falls outside our experience?
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't the technology to detect fake video in fact part of the process of generating it? I was under the impression that these deep fakes used an adversarial network, thus, the better the detection of fakes, the better quality of the generated fakes.
Yes, but in order to be useful for training, the fake detection algorithm has to be reasonably performant. Performance is less of an issue if you just want to test if one video is fake.
Unless of course the attacker has vastly more computational power than the person trying to detect the fake
Throw billions of dollars at data science prizes to create open sourced ways of detecting deep fakes. Have western intelligence agencies keep some methods private too, so we can detect it when someone has a way of getting through the open sourced scanners. Figure out how then did it, then open source a third way of detecting what they did while keeping the private scanners private.
This is so obviously a problem to everything that we simply cannot allow this threat to be tolerated. Truth itself cannot be under attack. We simply must be able to trust video.
Billions of dollars might not be enough... I don't really see ways of detecting sufficiently realistic fake videos. The best we could do might be to find the original unaltered video, given that we have access to such video (which is unlikely if the fake video is meant to be an attack). Even then, it's not sufficient evidence to say the new one is fake (one can argue that the original is fake).
