Kevin Simler

I confess I don’t get the existential concern around deepfakes. Can anyone explain it to me? I imagine we’ll have a few incidents where deepfakes are taken too seriously, as we get used to them. But we’ll learn and adapt pretty quickly, as we did with Photoshop. Yes/no/maybe?

The part i dont get is there is a very simple technological fix. You can use cryptography to e-sign both photos and videos (as long as camera manufacturers support it). We could use that to verify authenticity.

I’ve heard that solution proposed, but never quite understood how it would work. Do you understand? I know the basics of public key cryptography. So, like, camera manufacturers would put their private keys on cameras and sign the bits as they come off the sensors...?

Yes, the manufacturer would put the private key on the camera. The camera would sign every picture/frame/n bytes. Then everyone with the public could verify the images/videos. Of course if the key gets stolen from the cam this approach breaks down.