Deepfake stuff is not a threat, it's a vaccine. There finally is a chance people will realize they can believe nothing and nobody, news lie and mislead and they absolutely have to triple-check everything before they take that in consideration.
This destroys democracy. Because you can't check everything yourself, or even a tiny amount of things, so you have no meaningful basis on which to tick that box on the ballot.
Is it that much worse than the effect that photoshop had? We have been able to fake pictures/images for a long time now. What changed is that people no longer blindly trust pictures. I assume something similar will happen with video.
Trust in media with a reputation. Trust in journalism to unearth attempts of deceit. Quality journalism and reputation will become more important and powerful than ever
The "can't check everything yourself, or even a tiny amount of things" argument applies to everything. It's even more work to verify - for example - a small segment of a real hour-long Trump rally, carefully chopped off in the middle of a sentence to push a bullshit interpretation of what's being said, like I caught Snopes doing a while back.
Hell, even text suffers from this problem. Back when the UK (briefly) hit their target of 100,000 Covid-19 tests a day, the BBC News website pushed a bullshit claim that Germany was already averaging that many a month earlier. This played well into all the existing narratives about British exceptionalism, Brexit, inferiority to Europe, and the incompetence of our Covid response. It was also trivially verifiable as untrue - the German testing numbers were up on the RKI testing website, in English, and not only were they nowhere near that a month earlier, they were still well below it when the BBC published that claim. Someone at the BBC had mistaken the number of tests German labs had the capacity to process a day for the actual number of tests, which was particularly bad since literally every other part of Germany's testing process was more of a bottleneck than lab capacity. The BBC then kept this claim up and prominently linked to the article it was in on their front page for a month after they knew it was untrue. A large proportion of the UK population probably saw it. How many people do you think spotted the error? (They've since decided that because they've memory-holed it, they don't have to append a correction.)
