Photos went through the same thing: they used to labor-intensive to fake and generally accepted at face value, now that everyone can easily manipulate them with photoshop people are much more suspicious. That's how we got to people using video as proof instead of simple images. Now faces in videos will lose this trust, and people will find more trustworthy signals.

Agreed.

> people will find more trustworthy signals.

I would really like to believe this but the world is clearly experiencing a massive crisis of trust because we have failed to find reliable trustworthy signals now that broadcast Internet communication makes it so easy to create and spread nonsense.

Hmm.

I think you could tell a couple of stories:

- "It used to be that media was used to broadcast journalism to the public, but now the internet allows lies to be spread faster than they can be caught".

- "It used to be that what the public found out was gatekeeped by a particular set of people, but now the internet allows the public unfiltered access to the truth".

The public used to have a limited set of narratives they had access to because creating and broadcasting them was expensive. That naturally limited the set of narratives available to those who had some level of power and wealth. The upside, if you feel that any level of power or wealth is ever earned, is that those broadcasting have presumably done at least something of value to society to partially earn the right to broadcast. The downside is that much of it may be unearned, or the value they provided may have only been to the elite few at the expense of the many.

Today, narratives are so cheap to produce and broadcast that the public can choose whichever one suits their whim or preconceived notions.

It's not entirely clear to me which of these scenarios is better. They both clearly have deep structural flaws.

A low-trust society is a significantly less productive and safe place to be. We don't want to go back there.

I am old enough to remember the times when "photoshopped" became a verb, and yet I don't remember a "Photoshop epidemic" where people blackmailed other people with production-quality fake pictures. I mean sure, it happened, but not at a major scale.

If the past is any indication we will indeed have deepfakes of personal connections, but their quality will rank from "bad" to "okay", and that will be it.

I remember at the time this was a pretty common thing, in high schools, so perhaps you just managed to avoid it.

All the consternation about deepfakes ignores this higher-order effect.

Throughout human history we have used effort and cost of communicating in a given medium as an indicator of the legitimacy being contained therein. At various points the bar to entry for disseminating information using said mediums has dropped precipitously causing relative chaos as we acclimated to the new reality. Often times institutions or groups that had power and were using the difficulty of disseminating information to maintain that power were left with less when the dust settled.

Right now we're in the middle of one of those precipitous drops. From realistic special effects and green screens to celebrity porn modern computer tech is enabling high production value content with incredibly minimal expenditure compared to what would have been required in the past. That's gonna shake things up. Maybe it'll be a nothing-burger like photography. Maybe we'll have a century of religious wars like the printing press.

Society will be fine in the long term.

First of all, and most relevant to the discussion, that website handles single pictures. They don't do videos, which means I can pedantically classify the result as a "photoshop" instead of a "deepfake".

As for the results themselves: I uploaded a couple pictures of me. I can't see the full result because I am not a paying user, but even in the blurry preview I can see that it's a fake. One of them even fused my clothes and my skins, which I guess could be a turn-on for those who are into Lovecraftian horrors.

I won't deny that it's technically interesting, but I wouldn't start a moral panic over its results.

Whatever happened to mystery, and desire, and letting your imagination run wild trying to fill in the blanks?

It's like the computer is being used to narrow our horizons, not broaden them.

Alternatively, once the quality becomes good enough, "it was a deepfake" will be an entirely reasonable defense. Not just in actual courts (which is what I fear we will be heading towards, that even horrible crimes such as raping children will go unpunished or underpunished in countries where possession even of drawn/animated material is a crime), but also in the "court of public opinion".