alt Hacker NewsAI companies love to hype up how AI will provide a great benefit to the economy and transform intellectual labor, but I hardly see any discussion about how much damage it will cause to the economy when you can no longer trust that you're on a video call with an actual person. Maybe the person you're interviewing is actually an AI impersonating someone, or maybe they never existed in the first place. Information found online will also no longer be trustable, footage of some incident somewhere may have been entirely fabricated by AI, and we already experience misleading articles today.
Money will have to be wasted on unnecessary flights to see stuff or meet people in-person instead of video, and the availability of actual information will become more and more limited as the sea of online information gets polluted with crap. It may never be possible to calculate the full extent of the damage in monetary value.
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Partially agree. However, this problem has existed with scam e-mails since the 90s.
For me the solution is in signed e-mails and signed documents. If the person invites me to a online meeting with a signed e-mail, I trust that person that it's really them.
Same for footage of wars, etc. The journalist taking it basically signs the videos and verifies it's authenticity. It is AI generated, then we would loose trust in that person and wouldn't use their material anymore.
> Information found online will also no longer be trustable
Most information you can access publicly, including Wikipedia, is a result of astroturfing fight. Most information online had not been trustable for double digit number of years now.
> we already experience misleading articles today
Again, had been happening for decades.
> footage of some incident somewhere may have been entirely fabricated by AI
Not like we did not already have doctored footage plaguing the public.
> Money will have to be wasted on unnecessary flights to see stuff or meet people in-person instead of video
Necessity to inspect the supply chain for snake oil has been a thing since at least EA (the Nasir one).
We may be dealing with the problem of spam, but the problems have already been there.
"Is this a deepfake video call" is a major plot point in a pretty big movie currently in theaters, so I think this is getting into the broader zeitgeist.
We are still in the early stage of AI and already I struggle to tell what is real or fake on my Twitter feed. It will only get better in its deception with time.
You know those incriminating Epstein photos with his associates? A few years from now a common defense from people like that would be that the photos were AI generated, and it would be difficult to prove them wrong beyond reasonable doubt.
People in previous cases already attempted to dismiss incriminating pics of themselves as being the work of clever Photoshop artists.
> footage of some incident somewhere may have been entirely fabricated by AI,
Or the opposite, where people attempt to get out of trouble by calling real evidence into question by calling it “AI”
What's the solution apart from an identity providing service?
If anything deepfakes will be good for the economy because if you can’t do business with people who are far away it becomes harder to outsource.
It is already a problem. Try interviewing people from LinkedIn and you'll face an onslaught of imposters. https://www.darkreading.com/remote-workforce/north-korean-op...
> damage it will cause to the economy when you can no longer trust that you're on a video call with an actual person
What damage are you talking about?
I'm not sure I understand why it matters that there is no real person there if you can't actually tell the difference. You're just demonstrating that you don't actually need a human for whatever it is you're doing.
Laws will be passed to make it "safer". Just like it is happening with the id verification systems. Every image or video gen will require a watermark. Something visible which cannot be removed easily or hidden which can be detected and blocked. Access to models which do not comply will be made harder through id verification checks or something.
There will be some regulatory capture in between.
World will kick into gear only when something really bad happens. Maybe a influential person - rich or politician - fooled into doing something catastrophic due to a deepfake video/image. Until then normal people being affected isn't going to move the needle.