[rcarr]

I wouldn't say they're being silly no. Think of what is going to happen when anyone on planet earth can make any kind of photo realistic propaganda materials they want. Imagine somewhere else on the planet with tensions between two communities like Israel-Hamas. Now imagine you're someone with an agenda. You can now create videos and news reports in the blink of an eye showing one faction murdering some kids from the other. Target some unstable "pizzagate" individuals with the videos and then wait for one of them to go on a vengeance rampage with the hope that it actually sparks a real riot or war.

Or imagine there's a presidential election and one candidate wants to take down the other. So they buy your psychological profile from some data broker, then create a deep fake video of the candidate reading a speech tailored to make you dislike them.

You don't even have to go so large scale. Imagine you're a teenager and you're mad because someone else is making moves on the person you fancy. So you decide to create a video of this love rival kicking a dog outside the school and upload it to Youtube under a fake account and then spread it round the school.

It will get to the point where you cannot trust anything you see on the internet anymore. Laws are absolutely going to have to be created and rewritten to take into account this new reality. I strongly suspect all social media accounts will need to be tied to ID numbers like passports or social security at some point within the next 20 years.

[swatcoder]

Your first two examples are the only ones that are consequential and you don’t need AI for either. You could do all that a century ago and you can be 100% sure that intelligence agencies have.

[rcarr]

> Your first two examples are the only ones that are consequential

Er no. That poor kid might end up getting socially shunned at best and lynch mobbed and killed at worst. I'd say that's pretty fucking consequential. And that's just one example of an infinite amount of scenarios. Every "big" event is just an aggregation of many individual stories.

> and you don’t need AI for either.

You are massively underestimating the scale of change. In the past you would have needed an entire team working many hours to create one short video of high enough quality to fool people. Now anyone, anywhere, will be able to create them in an instant. Not only that, they will be able to create videos tailored to an individual and delivered to them for maximum effect. That is 100% only enabled by AI.

> You could do all that a century ago

Television wasn't even invented a century ago. You could make up some fake story and put it in the newspaper, but people trust their eyes more than words, and they're also moved to action by them more as well.

And no, a government absolutely could not run any kind of deception campaign in 1923 anywhere close to what they will be able to when this is perfected. A motivated sole individual with a bit of capital to spare, let alone a government, will be able to run a deception campaign thousands of times more effective than any 1920s trickster's wildest dreams.