[mudsnail]

What would you think about a deep fake depicting secret video footage (from a cell phone) of real climate scientists at at a real conference discussing how they are manipulating the data to convince the public and the lawmakers that climate change is a real phenomena. This deep fake would contain real people who really are climate scientists who really did attend a conference together. Its just that this discussion never took place. It was created by deep fake technology.

This type of scenario seems like a very real concern to me. You can extend this example into practically any hot button issue.

[pessimizer]

I wouldn't think it would matter at all. Nobody would know who the scientists were, so you wouldn't even need to use real ones for the same effect. I don't even think most warming deniers would really care, and it wouldn't even spend a week in the news cycle, if aired at all. Do a video of them sacrificing a child to Beelzebub, and maybe you'd get some attention.

Just telling everybody that you were told that this meeting happened through secret messages from a secret high-level traitor from the Soros Foundation would work just as well. It would work on hundreds of people even if you said that you were receiving these messages psychically or encoded through subtle changes in reruns of Law & Order.

[olyjohn]

What's to stop somebody from doing that now? If you have seen any movies in the last few years, you would know how good special effects and CGI are. We can already create fake people, and generate fake voices, or find people who sound close enough to pass. Ever since the invention of video, the potential for fakes has existed.

[owenmarshall]

We already have people willing to believe a conspiracy theory based on willfully misinterpreting emails, cough cough, so it seems like it probably won't make a difference.

In a highly polarized world people don't actually care about evaluating evidence. We pay attention to the voices that reinforce our beliefs and – at best – ignore those that don't.

[thu2111]

It'd have no effect at all.

We know this because that's exactly what ClimateGate was. A huge pile of hacked emails leaked, and they included climate scientists saying things like:

- The world had stopped warming and they couldn't explain that

- They were mixing and matching data to ensure graphs showed temperature's going up

- They were working to prevent papers that disagreed with them from being published

- They were deleting emails and other material to avoid having to release them

etc

Guess what - they denied everything, the emails were roundly denounced by a friendly media, and nothing happened to any of the people involved.

Really, you don't need deepfakes to create climatology skepticism. Climatologists are very good at creating it all by themselves.