It’s unclear to me whether deepfakes is going to be that big of an issue in the first place. Written text can already be “faked”—that is, anyone can claim to have witnessed anything and write a report saying so. Photographs can likewise already be altered, staged, or edited in a misleading way.
Society solves the problem by trusting different claims depending on how reliable the source is considered to be. If an established newspaper publishes an investigative report citing anonymous sources, then they are generally trusted because they have staked their reputation on it, even though the whole report could have been made up. But if your crazy neighbor makes the same claim, they are much less likely to be widely believed.
It seems to me that at worst, deepfakes will only take us to a point where photos are about as trustworthy as the written word. But we seem to mostly already operate fine in a world where the written word is trivial to “fake”. I’m sure that photography and video being harder to fake makes some contribution to it being easier to trust claims, but my intuition is that most trustworthiness still comes from the sources themselves being considered trustworthy.
On a fundamental level, I agree. However, there is some aspects of this technology that makes me wonder if things might not be a tad bit different and past experiences may not accurately predict the future. Artificial intelligence is a different beast from what we are used to, that is to say “mechanical effort”.
When it comes to multimedia deepfakes, the threat is less “people believe everything they see” and more “people no longer trust anything they see”. The reason why we trust written text and photographs is because most of us have never dealt with faked letters and most altered photos are very obviously altered. What’s more, there are consequences for doing so. When I was a child, I sometimes had my senile grandmother write letters detailing why I was “sick” and couldn’t come to school or had her sign homework under my father’s name. Eventually, the teachers found out and stopped trusting any letter I brought in, even if they were legitimately from my father.
It’s unclear to me whether deepfakes is going to be that big of an issue in the first place. Written text can already be “faked”—that is, anyone can claim to have witnessed anything and write a report saying so. Photographs can likewise already be altered, staged, or edited in a misleading way.
Society solves the problem by trusting different claims depending on how reliable the source is considered to be. If an established newspaper publishes an investigative report citing anonymous sources, then they are generally trusted because they have staked their reputation on it, even though the whole report could have been made up. But if your crazy neighbor makes the same claim, they are much less likely to be widely believed.
It seems to me that at worst, deepfakes will only take us to a point where photos are about as trustworthy as the written word. But we seem to mostly already operate fine in a world where the written word is trivial to “fake”. I’m sure that photography and video being harder to fake makes some contribution to it being easier to trust claims, but my intuition is that most trustworthiness still comes from the sources themselves being considered trustworthy.
On a fundamental level, I agree. However, there is some aspects of this technology that makes me wonder if things might not be a tad bit different and past experiences may not accurately predict the future. Artificial intelligence is a different beast from what we are used to, that is to say “mechanical effort”.
When it comes to multimedia deepfakes, the threat is less “people believe everything they see” and more “people no longer trust anything they see”. The reason why we trust written text and photographs is because most of us have never dealt with faked letters and most altered photos are very obviously altered. What’s more, there are consequences for doing so. When I was a child, I sometimes had my senile grandmother write letters detailing why I was “sick” and couldn’t come to school or had her sign homework under my father’s name. Eventually, the teachers found out and stopped trusting any letter I brought in, even if they were legitimately from my father.