Society/Culture Deepfakes - Threat to democracy?

Nov 28, 2011
19,312
33,376
Melbourne
AFL Club
Adelaide
Other Teams
LIVFC
So I came across this video yesterday - It's pretty funny and obviously fake, so we can have a laugh about it




but what I took from it in bigger picture terms is kinda scary - I can't imagine the technology is that far away from the mouths moving perfectly and I'm sure artificial voice matching is around too - It's already bad enough with photoshop images getting hard to pick, what happens when entire videos/monologues can be entirely doctored?

How are we to trust anything we see or hear moving into the future?
 

Caesar

Ex-Huckleberry
Mar 3, 2005
29,398
15,658
Tombstone, AZ
AFL Club
Western Bulldogs
I don't think it's as big a deal as it's made out to be. We went through a similar change with the rise of digital photos - what was once hard to fake became easy. In the short term a lot of people were fooled by one shoop or another, but in the longer run it didn't result in a crisis of reality - for the most part, it just made people a lot more careful about accepting photos at face value.

Similar will happen with video. It will require a fairly big mindset shift - we have all grown up taking the accuracy of video footage for granted - but as long as people are abreast of how the media landscape is changing then their skepticism will adjust appropriately.

That is probably not a bad thing. I often think we trust video footage more than we should, just because it 'feels real'.
 
Back