> 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.

i've thought about this off and on and how to implement it. Not easily, was my general takeaway.

or rather, it's easily to implement but you're in a adversarial relationship with bad actors and easy implementations may be easily broken

e.g. your certs gotta come from somewhere and stay protected, and how do you update and control them. key management for every single camera on every phone, etc.

Verification needs to work the other way around, some kind of verifiable chain of trust for photos and videos from real cameras. Watermarking all generated media is impossible.

How do you prove the signature isn't fake?

Ultimately ID requires either a government ID service, a third party corporate ID service, or some kind of open hybrid - which doesn't exist.

All of those have their issues.

There are people hosting agents online to talk to other agents etc. on their behalf. How difficult is it to just instruct such an agent to do the tasks you mentioned? You're assuming it's done by "bad actors" while it's most likely just going to be done by "everyone" that knows how to do it.

As with any problem, scale changes its nature.

With cash, you can only steal so much (or have transactions of up to certain size) until you run into geographical and physical constraints. With cryptocurrency, it’s possible to lose any amount.

With humans writing scam emails, you can only have so many of them until one blows the whistle. With LLMs, a single person can distribute an arbitrary amount.

At some point, quantity becomes a new quality, and drawing a parallel becomes disingenuous because the new quality has no precedent in human history.

Spam emails in the 90’s don’t come remotely close to the operations people can set up by themselves with AI now. It doesn’t even compare.

I mean emails were and still are a huge security risk. Sometimes I'm more scared of employees opening and engaging with emails than I am than anything else.

All these are true, but just as it happened before the internet, it's accelerating even further. There are clear costs that cannot just be hand waved away.

Either way, the lack of trust is the damage.

I don't know of a solution. I don't think even identity verification will meaningfully solve this. People will get hacked, or provide their SEO-spamming agent with their own identity, or purposefully post fake videos under their own identity. As it becomes more normal to scan your ID to access random websites, it will also become easier to steal people's identities and the value of identity verification will go down.

Touching grass. Valuing in-person connections. Focusing on the community, meatspaces and actual people around you.

Getting off of the Internet and off of our devices. It's not just a solution to AI/LLMs modifying our reality but also a solution to [gestures wildly at the cultural, societal and global communication impacts of the past ~16 years].

This sentiment is unpopular, but it's true. Prioritize true connections and experiences.

I’m seeing a huge increase in companies requiring in person interviews now. Seems there is a real possibility the internet as we know it will be destroyed.

That's just shifting the problem not solving it.

In general barriers to trust/trade are bad for tbr economy.

Your wife or mother calls you or video calls you and says to meet her somewhere, or to send money, or to pick up groceries or whatever. Does it not matter that it wasn't her? Could it be someone trying to manipulate you into going somewhere, to be robbed or whatever? At any rate, you'll need to verify that information came from the source you trust before you act on it, and that verification has a cost.

The damage is to the trust we have in our communication media. The conclusion here is that every person is trivial to impersonate; that's the damage.

Because what you are actually doing is exchanging symbols, tokens, if you will, that may be redeemed in a future meatspace rendezvous for a good or service (e.g. a job, a parcel). These tokens are handshakes, contracts, video calls, etc. to be exchanged for the actual things merely represented therein.

Instead what we have now with AI is people exchanging merely the tokens and being contented with the symbol in-and-of itself, as something valuable in its own right, with no need for an actual candidate or physical product underlying the symbol.

There is a clip by McLuhan I can't be assed to find right now where he says eventually people will stop deriving pleasure from the products themselves and instead derive the feelings of (projected) accomplishment and pleasure from viewing advertisements about the product. The product itself becomes obsolete, for all you actually need to evoke the desired response is the advertisement, or the symbol.

A hiring manager interviewing an AI and offering it a job is like buying the advertisement you just watched, and.... that's it. No more, the transaction is complete.

> What damage are you talking about?

Not GP, but there's a lot of damage that can be done with impersonation.

The grandparent post has the belief that human interaction is intrinsically better. Not sure i agree, but i can understand the POV.

However, the increase in fake videos that are difficult to tell from real is indeed a potential issue. But the fact that misinformation today is already so prevalent is evidence that better video doesn't make it any worse than it already is imho.

Imagine how this plays out in courtrooms the world over for evidence.

We're in deep shit.