Deepfakes have the potential to turn the word upside down and cause utter chaos in the world. I don’t know how we are going to deal with it as a society, I think we are not equipped for it. In fact I fully expected trump to use it for the October surprise, but I guess he didn’t go there for whatever reason.
In the early days, you could spot one by the lack of blinking because the model was trained on open-eyed images. Not sure if that's still the case, I'd be surprised if it was.
Any time I see a "this is peak technology" comment, I'm always reminded of the PC gaming magazine cover showing the first Unreal game's graphics ("Yes, that's an actual PC screenshot!").
It looks awful now, but in the nineties, it blew us all away.
People didn't think it looked like reality. Back in that time, marketing used a lot of illustration to promote the game that had little connection to the in-game visualizations. So that cover is more saying, "This wasn't drawn by an artist".
These do blink so it's no longer an issue. It's still not perfect because other than blinking the eyes have no expression to them, they're mostly still which is very unnerving once you start paying attention to that (it's also how you can tell a fake from a genuine smile). But we're at the point where unless you're looking for it, it's easy to believe.
If an obvious lie can consistently fool 80% of the players in among us (details below) then I can imagine deepfakes will fool just as many people despite how obvious it is. By obvious I mean almost 100% of the time it's a lie and people fall for it
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I played maybe a hundred games of among us (they can be very short). The game is about one or more imposters trying to murder the rest of the crew but you'll have to be discreet and get/find people alone so you don't get voted off. When a body is found a meeting happens and you can lie (text chat)
One problem is you don't want to accuse someone when you're an imposter because you immediately become suspicious. Most games will tell you if you voted off an imposter or not so they'll know you're lieing right away once game tells them they voted a non imposter. Most of the time you want to accuse noone, play dumb and act like you're everyeone else and saw nothing.
I lost count when a guy doesn't accuse anyone for 20+seconds, get accused then claims the guy who found the body is an imposter and all these things he did that are suspicious. (why didn't you say it right away?!). Like 90+% of the time the guy being accused is the imposter who waited so he can feel the situation out. It's extremely obvious but maybe 70% of the time literally every player but me and the guy reporting the body is fooled. Which is far too many players at a far too high fool rate. It's so painful because it's so obvious. 90+% of the time in that scenario the reporting guy is telling the truth.
Create short deepfakes that can go viral and be so ridiculous that they're both entertaining and obviously fake. Obama advocating for a border wall. Al Gore lobbying for the oil industry. Steve Jobs advising against staring at a screen all day.
The problem has always been accountability. If we can devise a system that includes accountability in the authority we could be on to something.
Democracy has accountability by virtue of everyone having a vote. It’s a small power that everyone can use to hold their leaders to account. But it still allows people to hold arbitrary power over each other. If you can convince enough people, you can apply your morals and beliefs on others. For instance, lots of discrimination is a function of democracy and codifying oppression of certain people.
We sit here furiously debating who can use a bathroom, who gets preferential treatment, who you have to interact with and a million other things. “Both sides” are bent on forcing people to behave a certain way and they use the power of the vote everyone has to accumulate power and make things “how they ought to be”.
I think this could be done democratically but everyone has different interests. How do we find a common, singular interest and then optimize around that?
Or maybe democracy is the “best bad system” and we just have to make do. I do believe with the hyper connected world we have today, cryptography, and resource abundance that we could transcend the modern system and discover liberation from each other to be ourselves and pursue truly enriching lives at a mass scale within local communities. And this means a different thing to different people. But just about everything in our modern system would need to be disposed of and recast.
That view makes sense if the only alternatives are democracy, extreme localism, and benign anarchy. A brief historical survey should suffice to demonstrate that there are, in fact, other less pleasant alternatives.
True, but maybe deepfakes can help challenge or prevent the "alternatives"? They are fairly cheap to make. They seem like they could be a great tool for challenging authoritarianism.
