Deepfakes Are Coming. We Can No Longer Believe What We See.

… We ordinarily tend to think that perception — the evidence of your eyes and ears — provides pretty strong justification. If you see something with your own eyes, you should probably believe it. By comparison, the claims that other people make — which philosophers call “testimony” — provide some justification, but usually not quite as much as perception. Sometimes, of course, your senses can deceive you, but that’s less likely than other people deceiving you.

Until recently, video evidence functioned more or less like perception. Most of the time, you could trust that a camera captured roughly what you would have seen with your own eyes. …

Now, with the emergence of deepfake technology, the ability to produce convincing fake video will be almost as widespread as the ability to lie. And once that happens, we ought to think of images as more like testimony than perception. In other words, you should only trust a recording if you would trust the word of the person producing it. CONT.

Regina Rini (York U.), New York Times