The thing is that you know it's a fake and are looking for clues that it's a fake. But for many purposes, it doesn't matter if you can fool careful study or expert analysis, it matters whether you can fool a quick glance from someone already predisposed to believe the contents who will retweet or share on facebook and move on.
I think it’s already clear that a fake video isn’t necessary for people to believe something they already want to believe. You could just distribute a badly-compressed screenshot of an unrelated video with a caption explaining the fake story behind the video. I think that would be more than enough, and I doubt a full faked video would provide much marginal utility.
Well said. Imagine a similar deepfake with a Nixon "confession" about having to stage the moon landing to make America look superior. You now suddenly have the next viral facebook or whatsapp forward for conspiracy theorists who are fully convinced of their beliefs.
Accessibility and scalability, get a few trained models and you not only can produce the original deepfake but also a lot of convincing identities and accounts to spread it around.
This is the same issue as RC va Drones, you could’ve strapped a pound of C4 to an RC flyer for decades but it was never as easy to do as with drones today, the skills, availability and reliability of consumer drones even the cheapest ones from Aliexpress allowed non-state actors to weaponize them with ease.
The term "simulation" comes to mind as a description of the emerging art and science of ultra-realistic bullshit generation.
From Baudrillard (https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism...): "Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real."
> Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.
> Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Yeah pretty much. The lords are worried that the peasants can afford repeating firearms now and the well to do peasants are worried that the status quo might be upset.
I agree. To add to this, I would suggest that this is good feedback to the people creating these and they will just see it as a challenge and / or enhancement request. Perhaps in time, even the best forensics won't be able to distinguish the difference. Maybe.
The thing is that five years ago this stuff did not exist full stop. Five years from now it's going to be massively better. And societal institutions just don't respond to external shocks in five years, modern governance institutions are just not wired for it (e.g. the US Senate has six-year terms, Supreme Court terms are 30-40 years). So it's basically a complete inevitability that society will not be able to handle this, and in four years we'll probably see an election where a deepfaked video massively swings public sentiment (e.g. one of the candidates saying the n-word or something), and eight years from now, an authentic video of a candidate actively conspiring to commit a crime will be dismissed as a "deepfake" because of the experiences of four years earlier.
How is a society governed when Western Englightenment ideals of logic and reason have failed due to the inability to have any axiomatic truths? The way that societies were governed before the Englightenment -- religious fundamentalism and "might makes right."
Not bad but the audio doesn’t sound quite right.