We’re living at the end of an era where it’s pretty safe to assume that a video on social media is an actual video of what you’re seeing rather than the result of a request made to an A.I.
Today, I saw videos of a guy paragliding with his falcon and the skinniest tiny home I’ve ever seen. And they are probably real, but already doubt creeps in because there are A.I. systems that may be able to make those.
While video manipulation has existed for a long time, and Hollywood, of course, can make anything seem to appear in a movie, when all you have to do is make a request of an A.I., the cost of fake video is so low that it changes the game completely.
An obvious partial solution is that all A.I.-made videos should have a hidden watermark that can be detected by software. We’ll see if the top AI labs implement it or if they irresponsibly enable a free-for-all. Watermarking is only a partial solution because bad actors will always be able to remove them, but it would at least make things a lot clearer in the many cases when videos are not being intentionally created by bad actors.