Looking forward, the trajectory for next year is clear: Deepfakes are moving toward real-time synthesis that can produce videos that closely resemble the nuances of a human’s appearance, making it easier for them to evade detection systems. The frontier is shifting from static visual realism to temporal and behavioral coherence: models that generate live or near-live content rather than pre-rendered clips.
Watching this evolve over the last year has been crazy. I’ve said to family & friends: people can take completely banal photos and turn them into porno scenes. This was true in the past, but the speed, quality, and volume is tuned waaaay up compared to past uses of similar tech.
Once teenage boys understand this tech more broadly, we are going to have serious issues. We’ve had stories over the last few years, but I think this will become a societal issue. The consequences of making & distrusting porn of minors are bad (as they should be), but I bet a lot of dumb young boys will recreate their peers without fully comprehending the seriousness.
Likewise, I have 3 young girls. Watching this tech develop: it’s deeply troubling & disheartening. Again, all of this could have been done before, but it feels like a Pandora’s box.
People lost their minds at the first moving picture show of a train coming at the audience. They called the rolling film camera Pandora’s Box. Hell, the printing press was Pandora’s Box, too. Ordinary people could spread thousands of copies of heretical materials!
In 2002, worth1000 started up as a photomanipulation website that ran challenges, open to anyone, with prizes for seamless manipulations. I won a few as a kid, so I always knew how easy it was to fake any image. Digital rendering was already a thing, it was just a matter of skill and how big a render farm you could build.
As a teen girl I digitally aged myself so I could talk to older men on the Internet. Yes, obviously, I was an idiot. I was hormonal, had a dismal sex and relationship education (ie. “Don’t,”) and I loved the attention. Teenagers are going to fuck up regardless of gender. Teen girls are just as sexually active as boys, and just as evil.
Instead of calling a new technology Pandora’s Box we ought to keep educating ourselves and speaking up. We’re over 8 billion invidiuals who can all take an active role in guiding this tech.