On the other hand, if deepfaking becomes common enough that everyone stops trusting everything they read / see on the internet, it would be a net good against the spread of disinformation compared to today.
Why would you expect this to happen? Lots of people are gullible, if it were otherwise a lot of well-known politicians would be out of a job or would never have been elected to begin with.
If it's even commoner than "common enough" then anyone could at least try to help their gullible friends and family by sending them a deepfake video of them doing/saying something they've never said. A lot of people will suddenly wise up when a problem affects them directly.
I don't see that as an outcome. We have already seen a grand erosion of trust in institutions. Moving to an even lower trust society does not sound like it would have positive consequences for discourse, public policy, or society at large.
The benefit is that you can only trust in person interaction with social and governmental institutions so people will have to leave their damn house again and go talk to each other face to face. Too many of our current problems are caused by people only interacting with each other and the world through third parties who are performing a MITM operation for their own benefit.
Over the past century and a half, we've moved into vast, anonymous spaces, where I'm as likely to know and get along with my neighbour as I am to win the lottery.
And this is important. No, it's not just a matter of putting on an effort to learn who my neighbour is -- my neighbour is literally someone whose life experiences are wildly different, whose social outcomes will be wildly different, whose beliefs and values are wildly different, and, for all I know, goes to conferences about how to eliminate me and my kind.
(This last part is not speculation; I'm trans; see: CPAC)
And these are my reasons. My neighbour is probably equivalently terrified of me, or what I represent, or the media I consume, or the conferences that I go to.
Generalizing, you can't take a bunch of random people whose only bond is that they share meatspace-proximity, draw a circle around them, and declare them a community; those communities are _gone_, and you can no more bring them back than you can revive a corpse. (This would also probably not be a good idea, even if it were possible: they were also incredibly uncomfortable places for anyone who didn't fit in, and we have generations of fiction about people risking everything to leave for those big anonymous cities we created in step 1.)
So, here we are, dependent on technology to stay in touch with far-flung friends and lovers and family, all of us, scattered like spiderwebs across the globe, and now into the strands drips a poison.
Daniel Dennett was right. Counterfeit people are an enormous danger to civilization. Research like this should stop immediately.
Ironically low effort deep fakes might increase trust in organizations that have had the budget to fake stuff since their inception. The losers are 'citizen journalist' broadcasting on Youtube etc.
Before photography this was just the normal state of the world. Think a little, back then any story or picture you saw was made by a person and you only had their reputation to go by. Think some more and you realize that’s never changed even with pictures and video. Easy AI generated pictures and video just remove the illusion of trust.
