OTOH now that we know the technology is possible, would you prefer that only some actors had perhaps the ability to do that. or perhaps not and having the lingering doubt that anything you see could be deep fake but there could always be plausible deniability that it would be too hard to actually carry it out.
If the technology is actually made widely available that just reveals that the Pandora box was actually already open
I think this is an oversimplification that undermines your goals.
If you're unwilling to recognize the benefits of something, it becomes easier to dismiss your argument. Instead, the truth is balancing trade-offs and benefits. Certainly there is a clear and harmful downside to this tech. But there are benefits. It does save a lot of money for the entertainment industry when you need to edit or do retakes. The most famous example might be superman[0].
The issue is that when the downsides get easy to dismiss, it becomes easy to get lost in the upsides. It'll get worse because few people consider themselves unethical. We're all engineers and we all have fallen for this trap in some way or another. But we also need to remember that the road to hell isn't paved with malicious intent...
> I think the downside is 10 orders of magnitude larger than this benefit.
I actually agree that the downsides outweigh the upsides.
The intent of my comment is not to defend this work, it is actually more about how to better construct arguments against it. That is why I do not begin with "you're [tdeck] wrong" but specify that the argument undermines the goals.
The point is who your speech is targeted at. If your audience is people who already agree that the downsides outweigh the benefits, the argument is fine. But it also isn't that fruitful, is it. But if your argument is intended to persuade people to agree with you, who already do not, then I think the argument will only amplify such disagreement.
If we recognize that most people aren't intentionally malicious, then if we are to persuade them to be in agreement we must also understand what persuaded them to be in disagreement. It is easy to brush this off as "money" or "stupidity" but doing so won't help you construct an effective argument.
I also need to stress my point in that this construction is harmful to yourself! If we are quick to simplify and see how obvious something is through hindsight, it will make us ill equipped to prevent such mistakes beforehand. Because what's obvious post hoc is not a priori. So don't dig your own grave. Especially because the grave is dug slowly. It's far more effective to be able to recognize it when the grave is shallow and you can still climb out.
In this case, the road to hell seems to be paved with intent to... make it easier to goof around and make silly prank videos, I guess? A lot of deepfake projects seem to be aimed in that direction and while there's nothing wrong with that in itself, it's hardly a compelling use case that outweighs the obvious harms that everyone has been talking about for years now. That's why I say that if someone cared about those harms they wouldn't be making this. Of course there are always things we tell ourselves: "if I didn't make this someone else would", "by making this easier (faking videos of real people) I'm training the public to be more skeptical", etc... etc... At what point is it obvious that these are excuses and the person really doesn't give a damn?
So the truth here is that the reason they're doing this is because they aren't yet good enough to sell to Hollywood. Not to say that Hollywood isn't using deep learning[0], but there's typically a combination of classical tools and deep learning tools. But these companies all seem to have an aversion to traditional tools and appear to want to be deep learning all the way down. This is a weird tactic and the fact that people are funding such companies is baffling. I can't even imagine a future where you don't want traditional tools, even if ML could do 99%. Hell, even 100%. Language is pretty lossy and experts are still going to want to make fine grain edits.
If the technology is actually made widely available that just reveals that the Pandora box was actually already open