We need ways to sign and tag video and other media as authentic and ways for people and systems to vouch for it in a distributed fashion, and the tools to authenticate it built into media players. It needs to be part of the file formats, built into recorders and publishing processes. Then we can just treat everything that doesn't have proof as fake.

> To be honest, I was a bit surprised by the enthusiasm of the researchers in ethics I contacted

It's a hot topic right now and there's a fear that ordinary people will gain dangerous superpowers from machine learning models. So many people want to lock down access to and tighten controls, to regulate and have them edited and knobbled in ways that suit their agenda to the detriment of others.

Ethics researchers will have extraordinary powers if this comes to pass, and they are quite rightly very excited about this shift in power away from technologists.

If we normalize this then we will also normalize AI retouches of other historical media, and it can be done wholesale in a way that Stalin could have only dreamed of