Evidence

I recently came across this video from the streamer Ludwig’s news channel Mogul Mail, speaking his thoughts on the whole leaked deepfake problem. Basically, deepfakes can generate videos of someone’s face over-layed onto another body, or just changing the face altogether. You can probably see where this is going. A ton of female streamers spoke out on the issue, with contempt. Although the streamer community is a rather small portion of the overall population, it poses a larger issue at hand that affects the general populace as a whole.

Photoshop has actually done this already with images. We hear the term “Instagram Reality” often, where people would intentionally alter images of themselves to paint them in a better light. It works the opposite way too, producing images that could defame another person. So much so, that we’ve coined a colloquial word for it, “shopped”, as in “Photoshopped”. This mentality of images did not exist 30 years ago. An image of something is a real image. Now, not so much. By the same token, I think this whole deepfake thing is the progression (or regression) is now going from photos, to videos. Most deepfakes can be recognized as such, but as technology improves, the margin between real and fake videos will be so thin that you won’t be able to tell. The solution is simple. People will start treating videos like they do images.

This presents a slightly larger problem for the society and law. Without the trust in video evidence anymore, what other ways can we use to incarcerate people for violent crimes? Since the beginning of human history, it was simply witness testimony, but as we know, every time we read into our HDD’s we call a brain, the data gets slightly corrupted each time. Human memory is not reliable unless there is a collection of witnesses who saw the same thing. [Aside: My SJ(W) teacher from high school once said the same thing about Jesus Christ. We have no proof that he existed, but enough people saw the same thing that the probability of it being false is rather low. Make of that as you will.]

We are living in an era with unprecedented changes to the way we produce and consume media. Yeah, it’s fucked that people are essentially auto-rotoscoping porn of people. Human courtesy/decency is out the window on the internet, so we have to rely on laws on cybercrime to deal with this kind of stuff. But on the other hand, it’s the internet. R34 is a thing, it’s been happening since images were even possible on the WWW. The medium is different, but the idea is still the same. Can we ban deepfakes? Probably not. Should we ban it if we could? Probably not. Every new tool has a double-edged sword. It’s up to the discretion of the user, the platform they have, and personal moral code to use it for a purpose they deem correct. This era of deepfakes, AI-generated art, ChatGPT writing articles, should further cement the idea in the general populaces’ heads that the internet is severely detached from the “analog” world. I hope it awakens more skepticism across the board, a reminder to never blindly trust what you read on the internet.

The internet and reality were once closely knit, so-called “golden age” of the internet, from around 00-12 I’d say, where almost everyone who had an online presence were a “landlord” of their own, having their own personal space on the internet. This website and blog pay homage to that time period, where things were simpler, less corporate controlled, less censored. The information age is gaining more XP, with a bunch of new unlocks to further confuse us, humanity. We should take responsibility of how we consume, not how others should produce.

Play your hand. Not someone else’s.

-ekd