Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/24/i-can-tell-by-the-voxels.html
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I’ve been thinking about the ability of our social ecosystem to coexist with deepfakes and I’m stuck with the impression that we are basically returning to a late 19th century news landscape, but without the social immune system we had then. In the late 19th century news moved quickly due to the telegraph, but we didn’t have the same ability to verify stories with picture and video. The market conditions also led to a flourishing of different outlets with frequently hyper-partisan output. Even a mid sized city generally had a bunch of papers. The party press system supported amazingly niche content, but undermined reliability. We had a brief period of relatively trustworthy news media in the mid to late twentieth century. Photos and videos gave a veneer of authenticity and market conditions tended to favor a small number of large reasonably honest players in the news market. Sure the gatekeepers were garbage, but picture Breitbart with the same market share as the peak of the big three television and you’ll see we could have had it much worse. So now we’re heading into a time where photos and video are just as easy to falsify as an old woodcut. If we just relearn a certain skepticism we should only fall back to a previously stable state.
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If you saw Jordan Peele’s deepfake on Obama, you know this story is, technologically, a little dated. Politically, let’s pray it’s impossible.
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Pray all you want. All that matters is making sure that the detection technology stays at least one step ahead of the fakes. Because the flipping instant that the entrenched… Racist, bigoted, xenophobic elites whose deepest nightmare is simply to be srripped of their wealth and privilege… Are able to dictate perception of reality to this degree, humanity will be doomed.
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