[piyh]

I'm worried about the social ramifications and moving us one step closer to "post-truth". Not much we can to do stop it at some point, but if a certain pee tape came out in the next year, there'd always be a reasonable doubt to its veracity.

[SeanAppleby]

Yeah, I don't think people are lending enough weight to how big of a deal that is.

We're heading into a world where it would not be very hard to bombard the public with a large number of long form videos of highly convincing videos of anyone in the world ranting on any topic and acting out anything they want, and we would have borderline no idea if it was legitimate.

Combining that with our media climate and already runaway problem with monetary and political incentives for fabricated stories seems really dangerous.

You could make a video of Neil Armstrong and Nasa execs talking about how they faked the moonlanding, or even much more nefarious fake content confirming conspiracy theories for political ends.

What will we use as a scalable filter to know what is actually going on, and how will we keep that content from manipulating public discussion?

[swaggyBoatswain]

We've had digital and video manipulation for years, it leaves behind pixelated artifacts though and can be spotted (E.g. see captain disillusion on youtube).

But yes there's going to be a big market for tracking fake data sources in the future. We're already seeing tools to track fake twitter accounts, fake instagram followers, fake amazon purchase reviews, this is an ongoing trend.

[earenndil]

I disagree that it is a big deal. There'll be brief period when many people don't know about it, or don't know how mainstream it is, but when it will be done. Then people will realise and there will be a cultural shift where video evidence is significantly less trusted.