• 40 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2023

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  • You’re right, cameras can be tricked. As Descartes pointed out there’s very little we can truly be sure of, besides that we ourselves exist. And I think deepfakes are going to be a pretty challenging development in being confident about lots of things.

    I could imagine something like photographers with a news agency using cameras that generate cryptographically signed photos, to ward off claims that newsworthy events are fake. It would place a higher burden on naysayers, and it would also become a story in itself if it could be shown that a signed photo had been faked. It would become a cause for further investigation, it would threaten a news agency’s reputation.

    Going further I think one way we might trust people we aren’t personally standing in front of would be a cryptographic circle of trust. I “sign” that I know and trust my close circle of friends and they all do the same. When someone posts something online, I could see “oh, this person is a second degree connection, that seems fairly likely to be true” vs “this is a really crazy story if true, but I have no second or third or fourth degree connections with them, needs further investigation.”

    I’m not saying any of this will happen, just it’s potentially a way to deal with uncertainty from AI content.


  • Well as I said, I think there’s a collection of things we already use for judging what’s true, this would just be one more tool.

    A cryptographic signature (in the original sense, not just the Bitcoin sense) means that only someone who possesses a certain digital key is able to sign something. In the case of a digitally signed photo, it verifies “hey I, key holder, am signing this file”. And if the file is edited, the signed document won’t match the tampered version.

    Is it possible someone could hack and steal such a key? Yes. We see this with certificates for websites, where some bad actor is able to impersonate a trusted website. (And of course when NFT holders get their apes stolen)

    But if something like that happened it’s a cause for investigation, and it leaves a trail which authorities could look into. Not perfect, but right now there’s not even a starting point for “did this image come from somewhere real?”


  • In this case, digitally signing an image verifies that the image was generated by a specific camera (not just any camera of that brand) and that the image generated by that camera looks such and such a way. If anyone further edits the image the hash won’t match the one from the signature, so it will be apparent it was tampered with.

    What it can’t do is tell you if someone pasted a printout of some false image over the lens, or in some other sophisticated way presented a doctored scene to the camera. But there’s nothing preventing us from doing that today.

    The question was about deepfakes right? So this is one tool to address that, but certainly not the only one the legal system would want to use.








  • What do you think about “altruistic surrogacy”, mentioned in the article? Presumably if someone is volunteering that avoids the exploitation angle?

    Approaching from another angle, do you think sex work should be legal? It’s another area where exploitation and abuse are a concern. But if we expect someone can earn money using their body in one area (sex work, or even just physical labor) then why should it be illegal to earn money by carrying a baby to term? Exploitation should be made illegal, not the act itself.

    Lastly, my understanding is that surrogacy is more often used when a woman is unable to carry the baby, than when a man is unable to impregnate.

    I hear you that rich people are selfish and causing any number of problems. That said, I think your approach misses the suffering of many normal people who want to raise a child and would be unable to otherwise.

    Even if this was an activity that someone thinks should be restricted, should it be punishable with jail time? I don’t think so. The law in Italy seems clearly designed to target LGBT people.


  • I’m very pleased. I have a 2023 Bolt.

    For us there was no way we’d get one without a home charger. It’s great because every day you wake up and it’s like a full tank of gas.

    My wife still has a gas car and we bought the electric planning that we’d still use the gas one for road trips. The Bolt in particular doesn’t have super fast charging (probably like 45 minutes to get to 80% using a fast charger) so if we didn’t have the second car that might be my one concern.

    My wife wasn’t sold when we got it, but the electric was for me so we went ahead. Now she likes it. I’m banking on better EV options being available when we get our next car but I think it will be electric too.