Humans spent thousands of years in a pre-truth world believing all sorts of crazy things, and many of those societies produced great things and had people living normal lives. It's only been the last 100 years or so that people's perception of reality has been anywhere close to accurate. And even then, most people believe plenty of things that are false. So basically people and civilization are going to muddle along as they always have. Deepfakes, etc. will make some things worse, they'll probable have some unrecognized upsides too. John Boyd used to say "People, ideas, machines. In that order." It was true about jets and its still true about modern technology.
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The stakes are different. Back in the day they lived more independent life, these crazy things they believed in didn't really matter as only the people from your close geographic area would be affected.
Giving conflicting informations to people all around the world expected to interact with each other is a bigger issue.
>Humans spent thousands of years in a pre-truth world believing all sorts of crazy things, and many of those societies produced great things and had people living normal lives.
Also burned a couple of people as witches in the process...
No internet, no cell phones. Just people being people, living in the moment.
There may be upsides to the ability to fake video and audio of someone (better CGI effects in films, for example). But in my experience when people refer to a deepfake they seem to mean that the fake has been distributed to confuse or deceive, for which I can't really see any probable upsides.
> So basically people and civilization are going to muddle along as they always have.
I agree with this, but consider the drawbacks to rampant disinformation and the proliferation of deepfakes (all this is IMO): it will make any video or audio deniable and unusable as evidence. Real images will be denounced as fakes. Fake images will catch on and possibly cause real damage. People will rapidly lose trust in most sources of news, entrenching established known quantities.
I feel like if we could reasonably put a stop to this we should. I don't think we can in general, though.