A.I. Video Generators Are Now So Good You Can No Longer Trust Your Eyes

To no longer be able to trust video evidence is a big deal. Sure the sky isn't falling, but this is a massive step beyond what Photoshop enabled, and a major powerup for disinformation, which was already winning.

What you end up stuck doing is deciding to trust particular sources. This makes it a lot harder to establish a shared reality

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is "video" as in "moving images". Photoshop isn't a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it'd be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up --- not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise --- to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don't think that this is the "end of truth". There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we'd have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera --- as on a cell phone --- that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn't stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

The real danger is the failing trust in traditional news sources and the attack on the truth from the right.

People have been believing what they want regardless of if they see it for a long time and AI will fuel that but is not the root of the problem.

And that's perfect, that's the world that made all the due process and similar things evolve.

There's never been such a thing as independent evidence. The medium has always mattered. And when people started believing this is no more true, we've almost gotten ourselves a new planetary fascist empire, I hope we're still in time to stop that.

Videos are now basically have the same weights as words...

We live in a post-truth world now.

It's interesting that you start with a bold statement that is IMHO correct, namely that namely what was once taken as unquestionable truth now isn't, but also it's not new, just yet another media, but still conclude that it's different.

Arguably we were already in a post-truth World, always have been, it only extends to a medium we considered too costly to fake until now. The principle is still the same.

I'm just thinking, people thought Americans were faking the moon landing, we've always had conspiracy theorists. AI just spins them faster and sloppier, let's go back to humans lying to humans than a computer taught to lie and advertise by humans to do the same thing

A hacker may have replaced the authentic video in the phone. The edit must be unnoticeable to the eyewitness who shot it.

Absolutely.

Cryptographic signatures are something we should have been normalizing for awhile now.

I remember during the LTT Linux challenge, at one point they were assigned the task "sign a PDF." Linus interpreted this as PGP sign the document, which apparently Okular can do but he didn't have any credentials set up. Luke used some online tool to photoshop an image of his handwriting into the document.

agreed. having a cryptography mark on the file and relying on chain of trust is the way.

The NFTs tried to solve this problem already and it didn't work. You can change the hash/sig of a video file by just changing one pixel on one frame, meaning you just tricked the computer, not the people who use it.

That’s not really feasible without phones doing this automatically.

Even then didn’t the first Trump admin already argue iPhone video can’t be trusted because it’s modified with AI filters?

But what if your eyes were secretly replaced by an AI-eye that replace everything you see with real-time generated imagery? 🤔

It's the accessibility and scale that's scary now. Anyone will be able to make convincing fakes of anything from their couch during an ad break on TV. The internet will be essentially useless for getting any useful information because the garbage will outnumber everything else by a million to one.

You see the same panic about 3D printed guns. It's not that difficult to make a gun at home, but 3D printers makes it slightly more trivial.

To be fair, if anyone was going to kill Onlyfans, it was Onlyfans. They haven't yet managed it.