50 years of verity

Only during the roughly 50 year span of 1970 to 2020 was instant, long distance communication trustworthy, and it will likely be a few hundred years before it happens again.

Now, in all fairness, that statement doesn't perfectly match reality. It moreso exists as a sort of thought experiment; a lens for viewing the future which likely distorts as much as it sharpens. That being said, an "almost true" statement can show you some interesting things, so let me paint you a picture:

Before the printing press, books were insanely hard to make. It took both unique skill and unique dedication, so if you had one you could reasonably assume that someone in the process had a great deal of skill and knowledge. Could they be lying to you or trying to deceive you? Of course, but that barrier to the creation of books meant that faking books from specific sources and scribes was rather difficult, so by and large you could trust books from reliable sources. Regardless of the content, the medium itself was trustworthy.

Then, out of nowhere, the printing press bursts onto the scene. Suddenly, both the time and skill needed to make books went down to such a drastic degree that they flooded the market. This was a huge leap forward for mankind that did immeasurable good, but it also had consequences, one of which being the explosion of forgery. Forgery went from a uniquely difficult and highly expensive targeted attack to being rather easy in a relatively short period of time. The books that used to carry with them a sense of trust just by their very nature no longer had that guarantee, and we've been caught in a game of cat and mouse ever since.

My big theory is that we're at the same place, but now for digital communication.

In 1970, the first ever video conference call was held. From then on, we had a form of digital communication which was insanely difficult and expensive (oftentimes even impossible) to fake, and therefor a trustworthy form of long-distance communication. In the same way someone in the early 14th century could trust the context built in to a book, we can trust the context built into video calls. If you call your grandma from halfway across the world, she can be sure it's you and you can be sure it's her. Of course, using that call you could lie to each other¹, but the medium itself is trustworthy.

...Or was, which is my point.

In 2021 there was an explosion of AI tools which were capable of generating video from text². This was our printing press moment, and things have only accelerated since then. Putting the ethics of training generative AI from scraped web content to the side for a moment³, the "price" of video just plummeted. Quality might still be a concern, but yet here we are with Nvidia's MFG, a technology which generates three frames of video for every one "real" frame rendered. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

AI generated audio and video is getting increasingly good at replicating people, and it's a nightmare for digital communication. Before, if I wasn't sure if it was actually my grandma texting me, I could video call her and know immediately with a very high degree of confidence that she was on the other end. Not anymore, as the computational cost of real time voice replacement and deepfakes has gotten so cheap that it can easily be run on regular consumer hardware. We already have cases of people being tricked by these tools⁴, and it's only going to get worse.

So there's my pitch. Only during the brief 50 year period of 1970 to 2020 were we able to trust long distance digital communication, and I don't see that trust coming back any time soon. We can and will play the cat and mouse game with cryptographic keys and whatnot, but that's effectively the same thing as watermarks: just another thing to fake in time. We're well past the point of no return, and we've got to be ready for the mindset shift these changes will require.

Thank you so much for reading! I'm not near good enough at HTML to have a comment section working quite yet, so if you have something to say please feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected]. Until we meet again!

you sick, sick man. Lying to your own grandma!^
such as Nvidia's GauGAN 2 or Microrosof's NUWA, althought I am compressing time quite a bit here and there were absolutely video models that existed before this time^
it's a very complicated and important issue, just not relevant to the point I'm making^
this poor Hong Kong finance worker comes to mind^