[justworkout]

I think a lot of these issues could be "solved" by lowering the resolution, using a low quality compression algorithm, and trimming clips down to under 10 seconds.

And by solved, I mean they'll create convincing clips that'll be hard for people to dismiss unless they're really looking closely. I think it's only a matter of time until fake video clips lead to real life outrage and violence. This tech is going to be militarized before we know it.

[HlessClaudesman]

Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.

I showed these demos to my partner yesterday and she was upset about how real AI has become, how little we will be able to trust what we see in the future. Authoritative sources will be more valuable, but they themselves may struggle to publish only the facts and none of the fiction.

Here's one possible military / political use:

The commander of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, Viktor Sokolov, is widely believed to have been killed by a missile strike on 22 September 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Sokolov_(naval_officer)

Russian authorities refute his death and have released proof of life footage, which may be doctored or taken before his death. Authoritative source Wikipedia is not much help in establishing truth here, because without proof of death they must default to toeing the official line.

I predict that in the coming months Sokolov (who just yesterday was removed from his post) will re-emerge in the video realm, and go on to have a glorious career. Resurrecting dead heroes is a perfect use of this tech, for states where feeding people lies is preferable to arming them with the truth.

Sokolov may even go on to be the next Russian President.

[antris]

> Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.

I think this way of thinking is distracted. No type of media has ever been a source of truth in itself. Videos have been edited convincingly for a long time, and people can lie about their context or cut them in a way that flips their meaning.

Text is the easiest media to lie on, you can freely just make stuff up as you go, yet we don't say "we cannot trust written text anymore".

Well yeah duh, you can trust no type of media just because it is formatted in a certain way. We arrive at the truth by using multiple sources and judging the sources' track records of the past. AI is not going to change how sourcing works. It might be easier to fool people who have no media literacy, but those people have always been a problem for society.

[subtra3t]

Text was never looked at a source of truth like video was. If you messaged someone something, they wouldn't necessarily believe it. But if you sent them a video of that something, they would feel that they would have no choice but to believe that something.

> Well yeah duh, you can trust no type of media just because it is formatted in a certain way

Maybe you wouldn't, but the layperson probably would.

> We arrive at the truth by using multiple sources and judging the sources' track records of the past

Again, this is something that the ideal person would, not the average layperson. Almost nobody would go through all that to decide if they want to believe something or not. Presenting them a video of this sometjing would've been a surefire way to force them to believe it though, at least before Sora.

> people have always been a problem for society

Unrelated, but I think this attitude is by far the bigger "problem for society". It encourages us to look down on some people even when we do not know their circumstances or reasons, all for an extremely trivial matter. It encourages gatekeeping and hostility, and I think that kind of attitude is at least as detrimental to society as people with no media literacy.

[krab]

During a significant part of history, text was definitely considered a source of truth, at least to the extent a lot of people see video now. A fancy recommendation letter from a noble would get you far. It makes sense because if you forge it, that means you had to invest significant amount of effort and therefore you had to plan the deception. It's a different kind of behavior than just lying on a whim.

But even then, as nowadays, people didn't trust the medium absolutely. The possibility of forgery was real, as it has been with the video, even before generative AI.

[quartesixte]

To back up this claim, when fictional novels first became a literary format in the Western world, there was immense consternation about the fact that un-true things were being said in text. It actually took a while for authors to start writing in anything besides formats that mimicked non-fictional writing (letters, diary entries, etc.).

[xanderlewis]

> No type of media has ever been a source of truth in itself.

'pics or it didn't happen' has been a thing (possibly) until very recently for good reason.

[throwup238]

And they've been doctored almost as long as photography has been around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

[xanderlewis]

As has been pointed ad nauseam by now, no one's suggesting that AI unlocks the ability to doctor images; they're suggesting that it makes it trivially easy for anyone, no matter how unskilled, to do so.

I really find this constant back and forth exhausting. It's always the same conversation: '(gen)AI makes it easy to create lots of fake news and disinformation etc.' --> 'but we've always been able to do that. have you not guys not heard of photoshop?' --> 'yes, but not on this scale this quickly. can you not see the difference?'

Anyway, my original point was simply to say that a lot of people have (rightly or wrongly) indeed taken photographic evidence seriously, even in the age of photographic manipulation (which as you point out, pretty much coincides with the age of photography itself).

[victor106]

> Videos have been edited convincingly for a long time,

You are right but the thing with this is the speed and ease with which you can generate something completely fake.

[rightbyte]

> Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.

Why have you been trusting videos? The only difference is that the cost will decrease.

Haven't you seen Holywood movies? CGI has been convincing enough for a decade. Just add some compression and shaky mobile cam and it would be impossible to tell the difference on anything.

[taylorius]

Of course, any video could be a fake, it's a question of the cost, and corresponding likelihood of that being the case.

[snowram]

Hell, some people have been doubting moon landing videos for even longer now. Video wasn't a reliable source since its inception.

[scotty79]

The truth is to be found in sources not the content itself.

Every piece of information should have "how do you know?" question attached.

[cruffle_duffle]

> Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.

We've been living in a post-truth society for a while now. Thanks to "the algorithm" interacting with basic human behavior, you can find something somewhere that will tell you anything is true. You'll even find a community of people who'll be more than happy to feed your personal echo chamber -- downvoting & blocking any objections and upvoting and encouraging anything that feeds the beast.

And this doesn't just apply to "dumb people" or "the others", it applies to the very people reading this forum right now. You and me and everybody here lives in their safe, sound truth bubble. Don't like what people tell you? Just find somebody or something that will assure you that whatever it is you think, you are thinking the truth. No, everybody is the asshole who is wrong. Fuck those pond scum spreaders of "misinformation".

It could be a blog, it could be some AI generated video, it could even be "esteemed" newspapers like the New York Times or NPR. Everybody thinks their truth is the correct one and thanks to the selective power of the internet, we can all believe whatever truth we want. And honestly, at this point, I am suspecting there might not be any kind of ground truth. It's bullshit all the way down.

[fragmede]

so where do we go from here? the moon landing was faked, we're ruled by lizard people, and there are microchips in the vaccine. at some level, you can believe what you want to believe, and if the checkout clerk thinks the moon is made of cheese, it makes no difference to me, I still get my groceries. but for things like nuclear fusion, are we actually making progress on it or is it also a delusion. where the rubber meets the road is how money gets spent on building big projects. is JWST bullshit? is the LHC? ITER? GPS?

we need ground truths for these things to actually function. how else can things work together?

[geysersam]

I've always found that take quite ridiculous. Fake videos have existed for a long time. This technology reduces the effort required but if we're talking about state actors that was never an issue to begin with.

People already know that video cannot be taken at face value. Lord of the rings didn't make anyone belive orcs really exist.

[latexr]

> This technology reduces the effort required

Which is a huge deal. It’s absurd to brush that off.

> People already know that video cannot be taken at face value.

No, no they do not. People don’t even know to not take photos at face value, let alone video.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/03/26/that-viral...

[justworkout]

Lord of the Rings had a budget in the high millions and took years to make with a massive advertising campaign.

Riots happen due to out of context video clips. Violence happens due to people seeing grainy phone videos and acting on it immediately. We're reaching a point where these videos can be automatically generated instantly by anyone. If you can't see the difference between anyone with a grudge generating a video that looks realistic enough, and something that requires hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of employees to attain similar quality, then you're simply lying.

[_kb]

A key difference in the current trajectory is its becoming feasible to generate highly targeted content down to an individual level. This can also be achieved without state actor level resources or the time delays needed to traditionally implement, regardless of budget. The fact it could also be automated is mildly terrifying.

[roenxi]

Coordinated campaigns of hate through the mass media - like kicking up war fever before any major war you care to name - is far more concerning and has already been with us for about a century. Look at WWII and what Hitler was doing with it for a clearest example; propaganda was the name of the game. The techniques haven't gone anywhere.

If anything, making it cheap enough that people have to dismiss video footage might soften the impact. It is interesting how the internet is making it much harder for the mass media to peddle unchallenged lies or slanted perspectives. This tech might counter-intuitively make it harder again.

[_kb]

I have no doubt trust levels will adjust, eventually. The challenge is that takes a non-trivial amount of time.

It's still an issue with traditional mass media. See basically any political environment where the Murdoch media empire is active. The long tail of (I hate myself for this terminology, but hey, it's HN) 'legacy humans' still vote and have a very real affect on society.

[yurishimo]

It's funny you mention LotR, because the vast vast vast majority of the character effects were practical (at least in the original trilogy). They were in fact, entirely real, even if they were not true to life.

[ksangeelee]

You can still be enraged by things you know are not real. You can reason about your emotional response, but it's much harder to prevent an emotional response from happening in the first place.

[tomaskafka]

... and learning to prevent emotional response means unlearning to be human, like burnt out people.

The only winning move is to not watch.

[geysersam]

You can have an emotional response and still act rationally.

[galdauts]

The issue is not even so much generating fake videos as creating plausible deniability. Now everything can be questioned for the pure reason of seeming AI-generated.