> it totally removes the ability of a random citizen witness to capture evidence
The police/etc have the same problem.
> putting the power of deepfakes in the hands of ordinary people is going to make everybody a less credible witness, no?
"Ordinary people" have a major advantage: parallelism and redundancy. Making one fake and disseminating it to many people is efficient and cheap. Faking many videos in a way that avoids easily discovered contradictions is very hard. Evidence always needs to be corroborated.
Re:High-tech deception of ‘deepfake’ videos
by mbowcutt on Monday July 02, 2018 @02:46PM
(#17444351)
This aspect is what scares me the most. Nowadays evidence can be easily fabricated and everybody has reason to be a skeptic.
The whole Cambridge Analytica debacle started blowing up after deepfakes gained notoriety and started getting banned on most sites. The whole time I was watching the undercover documentary Channel 4 released I kept thinking, "this 'found footage' could easily be a hoax"
Deepfakes' destruction of the credibility of videos is still worse because it totally removes the ability of a random citizen witness to capture evidence. This has been useful in the past, e.g. for documenting police brutality or just-developing events like shootings.
In a way this is a very undemocratic development -- putting the power of deepfakes in the hands of ordinary people is going to make everybody a less credible witness, no?