There is a deep change coming upon us: the ability to manipulate videos is now so advanced that it is easy to do and videos can’t be taken any more as proofs. This issue is discussed at length in The Atlantic paper ‘The Era of Fake Video Begins‘.
I believe the impact of this technological change is quite underestimated, in particular because it will be democratized in the next months. Until now it was easy to fake or manipulate a sound track, but much harder to do so with video; in addition videos are intrinsically more believable because “we see it with our own eyes”. New technology allows easily to replace a face in a video, or else manipulate them in an undetectable manner. And this will be a huge problem because we have come to rely on video as a means of proof (for example, equipping police forces with video cameras). As the paper says, “We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.”
Some call these manipulated videos ‘deepfakes’ and it is quite a good image. We won”t be able to believe any more what we see. Video certification programs will have to be developed to give us trust. Regulation will have to kick-in. A new world is coming.
