[hsribei]

One point that is often lost on the discussions of fake video/"deepfake" is that this development won't only make it easier to fool people into believing something that's made up, but it might also make people more distrustful of things which are actually true.

When it's been spread out enough that anything can be doctored to an indistinguishable extent, everything becomes deniable by those being caught, and the skepticism explosion is going to raise the bar for investigative journalism / actual evidence to standards high enough that few will have the resources to produce them.

[amarant]

The optimist in me wants to say that this in turn might lead to people actually researching stuff and forming their own opinion instead of just going along with whatever headline they see first, but the pessimist in me says that's probably a pipe dream

[baq]

This is arguably what Putin's trolls are really after. If western societies stop trusting themselves, both internally and externally, it's an easy target for his men to pick up what's left of them.

Note that non-democratic government's are much more resilient to this type of attack on trust, because there's much less of it to begin with.