It’s surprising how quickly this has become so realistic. It can be unsettling and even dangerous, since at a glance it’s hard to tell what’s real. The cuffs don’t look quite right, but I can see how someone could easily be fooled.

Suddenly there's a new generation of memes in the form of realistic video clips. We are accelerating to the point at which our whole media environments can be generated at will at trivial cost. It feels like the body politic is walking along an epistemic cliff.

Not convincing - still in the store - "I didn't do nutting" seems really racist and the way it escalated from 0 to 100 in half a second...

And this is good.

Anyone skilled with AI, even just regular CGI, has been able to do this convincingly for years. What's changing is that it's becoming better, easier and more widely available. This is a good thing. It's significantly increasing every individual's potential for creative expression, and it's simultaneously making the general public aware that you can't just trust random media without knowing the source. Not before, and not now.

You can try regulating, banning and censoring models, adding silly invisible watermarks, require Gen AI content to be labelled as such, and live with a complete false sense of security. You'd be making it way easier to deceive people.