[ineedasername]

The theater is in the (somewhat) illusory notion that precautions could prevent it from happening. Prosecuting a crime is absolutely not the same thing as actual security. If a modestly funded department at a university can do this, it's within reach for pretty much any state-level actor. And just like deepfakes are much easier & available for scammers today than they were 5 years ago, the same will go for adversarial images.

5 years ago it would have been pretty much unthinkable that a ransomware attack could actually take down most of the eastern US petrol pipeline infrastructure but here we are, no one prosecuted, and apparently the only thing stopping other high profile attacks is the forebearance and self-policing of the thieves themselves.

[nerdponx]

Making it very expensive to do a thing still reduces the chance of someone doing the thing. How many more murders of passion would happen if murder wasn't illegal?

Laws against murder don't prevent murder from ever happening, but they ensure that committing it is weighed against very high costs.

Perhaps there are other ways to reduce the chance of bad things happening, like reducing opportunities for the bad thing to happen in the first place (eg. not overly relying on computer vision).