[owenmarshall]

I can't speak for OP, but consider: the very strong scientific consensus is that the earth is warming and that warming is caused by human activity; the best-case study I've seen showed 75% consensus among Americans and that's sharply up over previous years.

The gap between scientific consensus and common belief has been driven by "regular" misinformation campaigns: promotions of conspiracy theories, manufactured doubt, cherry-picking of claims.

Why worry about the novel when the basics are still working?

[mudsnail]

What would you think about a deep fake depicting secret video footage (from a cell phone) of real climate scientists at at a real conference discussing how they are manipulating the data to convince the public and the lawmakers that climate change is a real phenomena. This deep fake would contain real people who really are climate scientists who really did attend a conference together. Its just that this discussion never took place. It was created by deep fake technology.

This type of scenario seems like a very real concern to me. You can extend this example into practically any hot button issue.

[pessimizer]

I wouldn't think it would matter at all. Nobody would know who the scientists were, so you wouldn't even need to use real ones for the same effect. I don't even think most warming deniers would really care, and it wouldn't even spend a week in the news cycle, if aired at all. Do a video of them sacrificing a child to Beelzebub, and maybe you'd get some attention.

Just telling everybody that you were told that this meeting happened through secret messages from a secret high-level traitor from the Soros Foundation would work just as well. It would work on hundreds of people even if you said that you were receiving these messages psychically or encoded through subtle changes in reruns of Law & Order.

[olyjohn]

What's to stop somebody from doing that now? If you have seen any movies in the last few years, you would know how good special effects and CGI are. We can already create fake people, and generate fake voices, or find people who sound close enough to pass. Ever since the invention of video, the potential for fakes has existed.

[owenmarshall]

We already have people willing to believe a conspiracy theory based on willfully misinterpreting emails, cough cough, so it seems like it probably won't make a difference.

In a highly polarized world people don't actually care about evaluating evidence. We pay attention to the voices that reinforce our beliefs and – at best – ignore those that don't.

[thu2111]

It'd have no effect at all.

We know this because that's exactly what ClimateGate was. A huge pile of hacked emails leaked, and they included climate scientists saying things like:

- The world had stopped warming and they couldn't explain that

- They were mixing and matching data to ensure graphs showed temperature's going up

- They were working to prevent papers that disagreed with them from being published

- They were deleting emails and other material to avoid having to release them

etc

Guess what - they denied everything, the emails were roundly denounced by a friendly media, and nothing happened to any of the people involved.

Really, you don't need deepfakes to create climatology skepticism. Climatologists are very good at creating it all by themselves.

[chrisco255]

Science isn't consensus based. If you've got proof, show the proof. Stop turning science into a popularity contest.

[quantified]

Have you ever heard the saying “science advances one funeral at a time?” It absolutely is consensus-driven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle Especially important in academia where you need to go along to get along with thesis chairs, department heads, and grant funders.

[chrisco255]

I separate academia from science. They are orthogonal constructs.

[throwanem]

"Deepfakes aren't a problem because climate change is a conspiracy theory" is a pretty wild swerve.

[owenmarshall]

Also a pretty wild misreading ;)

Try: "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because regular misinformation campaigns are still wildly successful."

I might go as far as to say: "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because we live in a post-factual society, so evidence doesn't really matter."

[ardy42]

> "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because regular misinformation campaigns are still wildly successful."

> I might go as far as to say: "Deepfakes aren't a huge concern because we live in a post-factual society, so evidence doesn't really matter."

Deepfakes are concerning because they point to a future where disinformation is so effective that it's impossible to pierce a disinformation bubble and unreasonably difficult for a sensible person to avoid getting pulled into one.

Take the idea that the moon landings are a hoax. It relies on accepting the idea of a rather unbelievable and expensive (for the 60s) amount of fakery. Sure, people believe it anyway, but they have to try pretty hard. They wouldn't have to try so hard if someone had faked a convincing body of evidence that the landings were faked. Or they'd have to throw up their hands and give up if they understood how easily things could be faked with modern technology.

[belorn]

That would be true of people made individual assessments based on evidence. That doesn't however seem to be what people do, even if they themselves believe that they do it.

I would guess that people who believe in government conspiracies has low or even very low trust of the government. Give them an story that display that the government can't be trusted and people will attach themselves to the narritive in order to confirm how they feelt. They don't need to try hard to actually rationalize it, because the actually details are unimportant. The only thing that matters is the feeling of confirmation.

It is really hard to convince people out of a feeling by using facts and proofs, and a common statement during online discussion is that it is impossible.

[ardy42]

> It is really hard to convince people out of a feeling by using facts and proofs

I agree with this. I think the problem with deepfakes is that they could make it impossible rather than "really hard" to "convince people out of a feeling by using facts and proofs." Not only will those people have "a feeling" to back up their false beliefs, but they'll also have convincing fake "facts and proofs."

Those fake "facts and proofs" will also make it easier to convince others of the false beliefs. With deepfakes, it could be possible to convince someone with moderate to high "trust of government" of false government conspiracies (e.g. a convincing high-resolution deepfake showing Hillary Clinton knowingly engaging in child sex trafficking or talking about adrenochrome).

[andrewflnr]

I think GP meant to say that the number being only 75% and used to be lower is caused by disinformation. I did have to do a double take.

[throwanem]

Ah, yeah, that's fair.

Is it too late to claim I wasn't sure whether the original comment came from a human or a GPT-3 instance? ;)

[owenmarshall]

gpt-3 is a clearer author than I ;-)

[owenmarshall]

Edited to hopefully clarify. Thanks :)