Originally Posted by Wolf359
Originally Posted by JeffKeryk
Originally Posted by PandaBear
Deep fake has always been around since the dawn of humanity. It is a competition between civilians' education level and the spreaders' skill.
Exactly. The only difference is now we have better tools.
There have always been liars, cheats, thieves. And a lot of these people get rich by getting over on others.
Take the law: it is not how guilty you are it is how much justice can you buy. Deep fake baby!
We are sold a bill of goods every day.
The topic you wanted to avoid is a prime example.
Education is the primary key. Inspection is key. Honesty and integrity are key.
Yeah, historically it's been there. Yellow journals was partly the reason the US got into the Spanish American war. Anybody remember the Maine?
Stalin was well known to edit people he didn't like out of pictures. They said the same thing when Photoshop came out.
I disagree with the assertion that "Deep fake has always been around since the down of humanity."
In this case, in this conversation, Deep Fake refers to the specific technologies that can clone a person's visual and audio personality so accurately that it is indistinguishable to the common person. Unless you've come from some other planet, this is a unique situation that our world faces today. DF and AI are not a continuation of a problem; they are reasonably new technologies that are advancing so fast that they have the real potential to cause irreversible effects detrimental to life as we know it.
I would agree that human stupidity and gullibility, thieves and liars, etc have been around since the "dawn of humanity"; that's the human condition. But that's not what the topic is about. This is about a newly developed capability to fool even the most ardent and skeptical person; we will soon be unable to distinguish fiction from fact. Education, inspection, honesty and integrity mean nothing when the technology exists to override them.
Think of DF and AI as methods, not motive. Motive speaks to the human condition. Method speaks to the vehicle which carries motive. These new methods have never existed before. These new methods will be so freakishly accurate and indiscernible that calamity can ensue, degradation can proceed, crime can be perpetrated with impunity.
Imagine, if you will, how this could play out in a corporate sense. One company hires a devious source to create a DF regarding the CEO and board members of another company; to damage their reputations, they are seen/heard in a "clandestine" (DF) video doing unspeakable things and mocking employees and their customer base. They are DFd saying unsavory things about minorities. Etc ... This causes a backlash publicly, and sales volume falls. That causes layoffs, and stock losses. (Like it or not, stocks are embedded in our lives; if you have a mutual fund, this can affect even the most ardent investor). The motive here is corporate sabotage, but the method is DF. Regardless if calmer heads wait, the vast majority of our public today is all about over-reaction and PC nature to a point where no tolerance exists for waiting for the "truth". And the reality is that the "truth" is so deeply riddled with the cancer of DF that it's impossible to get a pure sense of reality.
Imagine, if you will, how this could play out in a local or regional emergency. Someone who enjoys chaos and finds pleasure in disruption creates a video that DFs a local mayor secretly discussing "facts" about the water source has been contaminated with known carcinogens, in a closed door meeting. Suddenly, the local news agencies pick up on this. And now there's a call for the mayor to be hanged from the nearest tree. Panic ensues and there's local runs on bottled water. Etc. Or worse yet, what if the local water IS tainted, and there's a DF series of conversations that play out as an "announcement" that the water is fine for consumption. And now the mayors office sets out a counter-statement. Which one do you believe? Again - DF is so "real" that you cannot tell it from other true sources.
Imagine, if you will, your home being put into foreclosure, because you borrowed on a HELOC and didn't pay it back. The truth is that you didn't do it; you never took out a loan. But some unscrupulous person did it as a means of fraud, and there's a note on file at the Recorder's office that the lien was placed on your property. Suddenly an anonymous DF source provides recorded conversations of you attempting to defraud your bank; there are fake conversations of you and a co-conspirator discussing how to take the money and run. The goal of the criminal here is to divert attention away from himself by making you the "obvious" thief.
Imagine your son being kicked off the HS b-ball team, because a video surfaces online of him bullying a person via internet social media. He's DFd talking trash about a mentally challenged person in his homeroom class; making fun of the disability, etc. Why was this DF created? Who knows ... maybe the parents of a fellow teammate were jealous of all the playing time your son gets on the court where their son is a bench-warmer. Maybe it's a girlfriend that you son spurned recently. Maybe it's a prank from his other teammates as a joke. Does it matter the motive? The result is damage to your son's reputation that, at best, will take weeks if not months to repair, all while he's denied a chance to play ball, and maybe even loses his opportunity at a college scholarship due to both the lack of playing time, and the damage to his credibility.
Imagine if you and several other people have a disdain for a neighbor who's just a bad person. It gets ugly to a point where physical fights have ensued and arrests have been made. Suddenly, the bad neighbor is found dead in a ravine not far away. And a cell phone conversation arrives from out of the blue, and your wife is framed for murder; she's DFd into guilt by a conversation which centers around hiding the body.
Or, conversely, what if someone does a truly bad thing, and they DF themselves into seemingly benign purity? What if a person says and does terrible things to another, but creates a DF video of himself which removes all doubt of his innocence?
In all these examples, the age-old motives of greed, lust, hate, etc are not new. What's "new" is the DF tech methods that makes it so incredibly hard to understand the difference between reality and made-up stuff. You can no longer discern right from wrong, because you cannot tell truth from fiction.
Here's the failure in the assumptions some of you have; you presume that some amount of effort and purity will prevail due to technology overriding technology. While that might happen, it's unlikely to be able to overcome the nature of our society today to blame everyone, accept no fault personally, demand immediate heads rolling and public hangings, and our insatiable appetite for human suffering to play out before our very eyes. Between DF and AI, we are at a very dangerous crossroads in which no path can be undone. These are methods which have never been present before now. And the very motives which have perpetrated crime and illicit events over eons of human life now have a vehicle which is uncannily "real". The very problem lays in the very definition of the issue; it's "deep fake". So deeply entrenched that we will not be able to tell what is real or not. You are left with the indecisive feeling of "maybe, maybe not" forever. And that will affect nearly every decision in your life.
Combine DF with AI, and we're in for a terrible ride in the not to distant future. Global warming? Nah - that's nothing contrasted against what DF/AI can do.
My original post was asking for ways we might combat this very real risk. What can we do as a civilization to stop DF from turning our world upside down? The answer put forth by some of you is "Well - I'm just a skeptic". Yeah, well that means you'll never believe anything, even if it IS true, and there are times when belief in truth would be patently necessary to survival and well being. Denial and ignoring the problem isn't really a plan; that's also been done since the dawn of man, and often has terrible consequences.
