My fear is less about people being “duped” by a fake video and more that fake videos will serve as feedback loops for misguided or false beliefs that people already “cherish” and “love”. Most will make little effort to research the legitimacy of a video that agrees with their current beliefs, but those beliefs will probably be strongly reinforced by fake videos.
I don't think it matters. Those people are already in an intellectually closed pocket universe. People overestimate the extent to which universal consensual reality exists or has ever existed.
The first line of defense is education. Fundamentally, we have to make the case for why we know what we know. This is why K-12 exists, although the availability of effective primary and secondary education remains a major issue.
The next line of defense is social interaction. Most people will have to leave their bubbles to have any sort of upward mobility and ability to steer society. There will always be cynical people who exploit constituencies of deceived people to gain power, but many others eventually defect.
We have little reason to believe that this is a long-term equilibrium, but it's the story of the past 500 years of history, ever since the printing press created decentralized mass media.
This is first-order thinking, and neglects deeper strategies, that tamper with how society currently functions, as compared with moving through a transition phase for how society will have to function in the future, which requires some second and third order thinking.
It's not only the flashy, obvious attention grabbing deception that matters, it's also some really mediocre day-to-day stuff that's going to matter too. Take your typical tendencies for human dysfunction, and now amplify the effects of poor communication with augmented miscommunication.
Areas involving identity theft, SWATTING, security camera evidence, security cameras as crime deterrence, post divorce child custody, blackmail, and worse.
If you don't trust MD5 hashes to protect your password, this will be the corollary in terms of video cameras as de facto evidence. Sure, an MD5 quickly masks a string in a deterministic way, that requires privilege escalation to access and limited skill to unmask, but the level of technology we've reached raises the bar, and MD5 is understood as untrustworthy, such that even a well guarded data set should still not utilize MD5 hashes.
So too with video, which requires skill to tamper with, and likely privilege escalation even to do so, but we're moving into a world where it won't be enough to assume that the data assets themselves were too complex to tamper with, too few would know how, and best practices always kept all the footage 100% secure in an impregnable, incorruptible repository under lock and key.
"Those people" indicates that the majority on this forum (including myself) is part of the general dupe-susceptible population. That seems dubious to me.
Edit: *is not! I do think Hacker News readers are dupe-susceptible.
> Most will make little effort to research the legitimacy of a video
This is already happening. People are regularly editing videos out of context to fit a narrative. It can't really get any worse when the media's integrity is already hitting rock bottom.
James O'Keefe is a notable offender. Incidentally, he is not part of the news media, although segments of it will often push his doctored videos as a source of truth.
Some people still don't think humans landed on the moon. This is not a battle over facts. It's a war.
The real problem is that people will torture a fact, like a PoW, until it'll tell any story they want it to tell. Even if that story has no basis except for delusion of the torturers.
That can be avoided by video content uploaders verifying their source content or a plugin running in your browser noticing you about detected fake videos. Sort of like firewall against deepfakes.
