Videos are now basically have the same weights as words...

We live in a post-truth world now.

It's interesting that you start with a bold statement that is IMHO correct, namely that namely what was once taken as unquestionable truth now isn't, but also it's not new, just yet another media, but still conclude that it's different.

Arguably we were already in a post-truth World, always have been, it only extends to a medium we considered too costly to fake until now. The principle is still the same.

A hacker may have replaced the authentic video in the phone. The edit must be unnoticeable to the eyewitness who shot it.

To no longer be able to trust video evidence is a big deal. Sure the sky isn't falling, but this is a massive step beyond what Photoshop enabled, and a major powerup for disinformation, which was already winning.

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is "video" as in "moving images". Photoshop isn't a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it'd be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up

not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise

to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don't think that this is the "end of truth". There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we'd have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera

as on a cell phone

that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn't stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

What you end up stuck doing is deciding to trust particular sources. This makes it a lot harder to establish a shared reality

The real danger is the failing trust in traditional news sources and the attack on the truth from the right.

People have been believing what they want regardless of if they see it for a long time and AI will fuel that but is not the root of the problem.

Absolutely.

It's the accessibility and scale that's scary now. Anyone will be able to make convincing fakes of anything from their couch during an ad break on TV. The internet will be essentially useless for getting any useful information because the garbage will outnumber everything else by a million to one.

To be fair, if anyone was going to kill Onlyfans, it was Onlyfans. They haven't yet managed it.

Cryptographic signatures are something we should have been normalizing for awhile now.

I remember during the LTT Linux challenge, at one point they were assigned the task "sign a PDF." Linus interpreted this as PGP sign the document, which apparently Okular can do but he didn't have any credentials set up. Luke used some online tool to photoshop an image of his handwriting into the document.

Such a simple idea, not you designed authorized vendors and keep the signing keys secure forever.

While you’re at it, make sure the chip itself can’t be reverse engineered and run in a VM.

It’s been around with printer fingerprinting unique yellow dot patterns. I think the key is purchase dates that can be tied to locations and identities. But now you’re into big brother status.

What you need instead is a a public ephemeral bloom filter with plausible deniability built in.

We allow everything to sign, black box only overlays bloom filter bits. Have some longer lived biotokens around to extra harden it between manufacturers.

Now you’re in the real world and journalism. Camera equipment is disposable, so just rotate the key on unit build, load it in an fips wipe cipher to be extra sure.

Now you need that bloom central database with some “stewards” to be trusted hosts. No CA shenanigans anymore.

Picture output, steg encoded for authenticity by real lens IR laser verified. Can be traced if need be, but probably unnecessary.

The NFTs tried to solve this problem already and it didn't work. You can change the hash/sig of a video file by just changing one pixel on one frame, meaning you just tricked the computer, not the people who use it.

That’s not really feasible without phones doing this automatically.

Even then didn’t the first Trump admin already argue iPhone video can’t be trusted because it’s modified with AI filters?