[gambler]

Can you give me a single example of deepfakes being used to stage a real news event?

Meanwhile, most of the population isn't even trained to recognize when videos are trimmed to start and stop at a conspicuously convenient moments, which is the most commonly used technique for creating fake narratives.

Actual media literacy is at near zero, especially among the people who arrogantly consider themselves "informed".

[jimmySixDOF]

> Can you give me a single example...

This suggests you may not have done the research to support your viewpoint with such self assurance.

The increasing sophistication of Deepfakes as a technology concept applied over time is what people are rightly afraid of today.

But even now : (based on some search notes I have from 6 months ago)

[1] Video of Gabon’s long-unseen president Ali Bongo, who was believed in poor health or already dead, was decried as a deepfake by his political opponents and cited as the trigger, a week later, for an unsuccessful coup by the Gabonese military.

[2] Malaysia: Is the political aide viral sex video confession real or a Deepfake?

[3] ISIS 'preparing clip of al-Baghdadi ALIVE' using deepfake propaganda. "An important goal may be to try and rally the ISIS supporters and 'show' that the US is lying"

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/12/top-ai-... [2] https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2019/06/12/is-the-po...

[3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/al-baghdadi-stil...

[quantified]

The concern is over what will happen in the first few instances, assuming it hasn’t happened yet. We don’t need deepfakes when Colin Powell can just say that something untrue is true and we go to a long and expensive war. A deepfake video in a tweet at the 11th hour could tilt an election. At an earlier time, could be a more convincing swift-boating. A spear-phished deepfake could be really valuable in the ransom industry. Deepfake police vest-camera recordings could be very pernicious. Suppose there was plausibly a camera on in Jeffery Epstein’s cell?

I’d say it’s something to be highly concerned about, but like an earthquake you don’t know where and when to actually be concerned about it.

[nsnow70]

Just to clarify, I'm not really picking a side but just was curious on your thoughts being explained further. Only thing I have to add is just because it's not a problem right this instant doesn't necessarily mean it can't be a problem in the future, right?

[vkou]

This argument is going in circles, though. Plain-old-media has been used, to great success, to manufacture news.

Consider, nearly a decade ago, the BBC (And that's an outfit that many believe to have journalistic integrity) airing video footage of a protest in India, with people waving Indian flags, and claiming it to be video footage of anti-Ghadaffi protests in Libya, in the run-up to the Libya bombing campaigns. Millions of people have seen it, a few of them noticed that they are being fed a line of horseshit, and then they shrug their shoulders and go on with their day, because Gell-Mann amnesia is probably a real effect, and they didn't actually care too deeply about this.

Worrying about deepfakes is a lot like worrying, around the invention of scissors that they could be used to stab people. Yes, they can be, but knives have been around for a lot longer, are easier to make, and work just as well.

Going through the trouble of deepfakes, to convince the subset of people that will not be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies, but will be convinced by deepfake-multimedia-lies seems like a poor ROI maneuver - especially given that we live in a world where the number of people that can be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies is sufficient to achieve whatever end you seek.