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KamikazeArchon t1_jdu6lgd wrote

The answer to the title is "yes, obviously." Because you're asking just "can", which is easy. You have to ask a more precise question.

Can you fool some of the people some of the time? Absolutely.

Will you fool all of the people all of the time? No, and that will likely never happen (at minimum, because some people have access to deepfake-detection systems).

What you probably want to know is "what percentage of people can you fool, what percentage of the time?" And there's an additional potentially relevant detail - "how much does it cost to do this"?

Pretending to be someone else has been possible, and successfully accomplished, for centuries. Makeup - in the professional theater sense - can completely transform someone's appearance. The addition of technology to the "I look different" toolbox simply gives more options for speed and efficiency.

We've also had, from the very first days of photography, the ability to fake photos. And to do it well. Same thing for film; by spending enough resources, you can always fake something extremely convincingly.

The trick is not in whether it can be achieved, but in how much it costs. In particular, when and where we cross the "inflection point" that "identifying a fake of quality X" becomes more expensive than "creating a fake of quality X" - which may arrive at different times for different values of X.

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