Yeah... The problem is try explaining deepfakes to your significant other when they are randomly sent what looks like a video of you cheating on them. Sure it’s possible but not likely.

It's all a matter of cultural awareness. Everyone now thinks when seeing an unlikely photo -- "Photoshop?"

This stuff even has the catchy name "deep fake".

Maybe but only after extensive proliferation.

Initially, every Tom, Dick & Harry script kiddie will try to blackmail people whilst the public and justice system is not really aware of the technology possible.

When eventually enough of the public is made aware to not trust photos and videos anymore then these types of blackmail attempts would be less effective. But there will still be less informed gullible targets.

Surely lawyers will know about the tech soon enough to simply show the same video evidence with the judge in place of the defendant -- reasonable doubt right there.

The blackmail angle I expect will work for a while. People falsely accused of sexual crimes can have their lives ruined by the accusation.

The justice system will hopefully catch up quickly.

But as you say the media (real and social), political propaganda, etc will exploit the uninformed masses for all it is worth, so blackmail will still work. For a while.

Someone's gonna come up with a simple way to sign pics and videos with public key encryption, after which signed media will be the only stuff that is trusted. Of course people will still make sex tapes and sign them when they are drunk because the signing software will be automatically integrated into the camera app, so blackmail is still a possibility.

But.. if the camera app automatically signs pics/vids, that would mean that a private key is available to the app without any passphrase (or one embedded in the app :O).. So why not just extract they key and sign your fake vid?

Well, for something like this the user's signing key itself would probably be managed by the OS, so not extractable. When the app is done editing, it asks the user via the OS to approve the result and the OS performs the signature. You could even embed a downsample of the original that came signed from the camera hardware.

If the key is managed by the OS but is inaccessible to the user, the concept would seem to be incompatible with free software operating systems. Also, if the camera app can have anything it "makes" approved, the app itself could take a deepfake video (from the web or device storage) and have the OS sign it.

The only way I see it working is if the key is "burnt-in" to in the camera hardware and any applications cannot MitM it.

Why would you assume it would be inaccessible to the user? I'd expect a key management interface at least. I guess I did say "not extractable", but I meant more that random apps don't have access to it directly, but they call an api to do the signing.

> the app itself could take a deepfake video and have the OS sign it

Note how I said "it asks the user via the OS to approve the result". I would expect a modal OS dialog to let the user review and approve the content before being signed and passed back to the app.

Thinking about it, there's actually nothing stopping this from happening on today's hardware using just application sandboxing. Substitute "OS" above with "Signing App" that does the same thing (accepts media signature requests from other apps, and opens dialog to request approval from user with a preview).

That's equally horrifying in a different way.

Also, map images pulled from facebook to the bodies of pornstars. The creepiness and invasion of ... personal image(?) this enables is horrifying.

That's already happened. Search for deep fakes. We already have face substitution in videos which is working surprisingly well sometimes.

There's been r/deepfakes where around 30% of the content was porn with swapped faces. It was banned though.

It was pretty limited though. For split seconds videos seemed real but the seams soon enough showed.

Fake celebrity porn has been on the internet since 1996 at the very least. It's always been crummy; but porn in general requires a thick suspension of disbelief and an intense focus in a partial object of desire (what Lacan calls the objet petit a) that blurs everything else.

DRM will be pushed hard, starting from video/audio acquisition, perhaps assisted by blockchain to keep footage verified at all processing steps.

Don't you think that a blockchain that works for anything other than a rather useless currency should be created before suggesting one for such a use? I see comments all the time about how we should use blockchain for this and that, and yet far simpler uses for blockchain haven't yet worked out.

A blockchain is actually a reasonable part of the solution here (just not nessesarily creating a new one). What a blockchain really does is decentralized timestamping. Usually you use it to combine it with a bit of cryptography to process flows of money, but in the same blockchain you can just write "I know hash XXXX", and if later you produce a work with that hash you can prove that it already existed at the point your message was written in the blockchain.

That's not all you would need for verification, but it is a big help.

The sentiment and idea is there, just need the implementation.