Deepfakes Paranoia Considered Pointless
3rd November 2019
The concern is that AI has gotten so good that we’ll be able to create videos of important people saying all sorts of nutty things, which will lead to a total breakdown in our ability to trust important institutions. The problem here is that world leaders already say incredibly nutty things. Making a fake video of Donald Trump saying something outrageous is superfluous, like photoshopping a picture of Jeff Bezos so he’s holding a twenty dollar bill.
The other problem is that the media suffer from an intellectual autoimmune disorder, and relentlessly hype up minor misstatements into full-blown hysteria. If you’re at all partisan, you can think of examples of The Other Guys doing this. Every educated person knows that “cling to guns and religion” was a sympathetic remark from a churchgoer, except of course for the educated people who know that Mitt Romney’s “47%” line was a rhetorical flourish about people who pay no Federal income taxes.