alt Hacker Newsexactly! while there may be some neutral to slightly positive use of this tech (haha funny video) I can only really see the evil uses of it: scams, misinformation, propaganda, easily available to create by anyone at massive scale.
I really don't see the argument for this tech to be any kind of good, unless you think moving into an era where you cannot trust any image or video is somehow a neutral outcome, AND are happy about the people who are in control of this tech. which I guess captures a larger part of the HN crowd than I'd hoped
My perspective is different: we never could trust videos and images in the past. Our hopes, back then, were that the costs of faking said media (despite us being in the age of information and media) would remain permanently high and would deter people from choosing so. But this was always wishful thinking.
GenAI has presented tangible proof of such risks and is forcing society to reevaluate the way we trust evidence. In my eyes, it serves as an opportunity to improve our foundations of trust to something that relies less on the good will of random authorities onto something more objective.
Also, I haven't really seem anyone celebrating the large corporations who control AI tech. Could be simply the people I'm involved with, but most AI enthusiasts I've seem are more about, at least, open-weights AI models.