alt Hacker News> For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do, combined with social media, and have a feeling that governments are completely unprepared to deal with this, as this will arrive fast (it’s already here somewhat).
I'm not convinced that deepfakes are any worse than photoshop was. It doesn't take much to manipulate/misinform someone. while you can use an AI generated video do to it, but simple text can be just as effective. The public needs to learn that they can't trust that every video they see on the internet is real, just as they've had to learn that they can't trust every photo they see online. The threat with AI is how much faster it can push out the lies making what little moderation we have more difficult.
The best defense is making sure that people have a good education that teaches critical thinking skills and media literacy. We should also be holding social media platforms more accountable for the content they promote. It'd be nice if we held politicians and public servants accountable for spreading lies and misinformation too.
> The public needs to learn that they can't trust that every video they see on the internet is real, just as they've had to learn that they can't trust every photo they see online.
This very thing, is the end of an informational common good that we shared, and allowed for the average person to coordinate and gain benefits faster than elites.
The analogy I would put forward, is that we are moving into a dark forest online, where distrust is the ideal first move, and signaling your position is to make yourself open to attack.
The idea of an open internet dies in this environment, and so does the reduced cost of coordination.
Another tragedy is that corrupt, clannish, controlling and secretive organizations are more effective than open, distributive and collaborative societies in this scenario.
> The best defense is making sure that people have a good education that teaches critical thinking skills and media literacy
While true, any solution that depends on education is effectively depending on society having its shit together in the first place.
This very idea was proposed at a conference to a room full of fact checking orgs and media orgs, and one of the responses was that the more likely solution is global warming. That is how bleak things were is in the user safety world in 24.