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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Among the responses to this post, one thing that I saw several times was that deepfakes do not affect the person they are made of, and so are ethical, or at the very least, there's no case for regulating them. But I think, as was mentioned at least once, that there is a case to be made that they are comparable to libel. That is, they are able to distort the reputations of people in a negative way. This is bad, and I think is something that can be pointed to as a harm to the person in question.

Furthermore, I think that the graphic nature of a deepfake would probably make it have a more substantial and lasting effect on the perception of someone in the eyes of its viewers than would merely verbal allegations, once fabrications of both varieties were learned to be wrong.

I don't think this is a complete answer to what's going on with my moral intuitions here, because I have a similar gut feeling in this case to someone dreaming up, rather than fabricating, illicit scenarios with someone, which means my intuitions are probably not quite the same as what I have written above, and this is probably to some extent a justification of those intuitions, but I still think this is at least a facet of what is going on that is worth considering.

It's also probably worth keeping in mind that a lot of people care a lot about what people think of them as an end-in-itself sort of thing, even aside from tangible effects on their lives. People want to be liked, respected, etc.

that there is a case to be made that they are comparable to libel.

Have a disclaimer saying "everything you are about to see is fake". Libel problem solved.

But I'm not sure that it is, given what I said in the second paragraph there, that this is the sort of thing that might lastingly affect how you view someone, even if you know that it is fake. I might be wrong there, but that seems plausible to me, and that would mean that while, sure, maybe it would get rid of whatever legal claims you could make, just saying that it's fake might not entirely work to prevent it from producing the harmful effects.

Humans aren't perfect Bayesian intelligences, and this might be one place where the differences show up, maybe.

That makes sense, but then you can't use existing notions of libel to justify your intuitions.

I think libel is still useful for thinking about it. Not to say that it violates the laws, and so should be illegal already (well, I assume there's no case for it being libel with the current laws, a lawyer would know better), just to say that the same reason that we might think libel laws are good laws might apply here. I was more arguing that it's fundamentally the same sort of thing as libel is, not that it's actually legally libel.

But again, I'm not sure how much of that is me rationalizing.

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