The poor quality reflects that it is responding to demand for poor quality fakes, rather than to demand for high quality fakes
You’ve made the supply/demand analogy a few times on this subject, I’m not sure that is the best lens. This analysis makes it sound like there is a homogenous product “fakes” with a single dimension “quality”. But I think even on its own terms the market micro-dynamics are way more complex than that.
I think of it more in terms of memetic evolution and epidemiology. SIR as a first analogy—some people have weak immune systems, some strong, and the bigger the reservoir of memes the more likely a new highly-infectious mutant will show up. Rather than equilibrium dynamics, I’m more concerned about tail-risk in the disequilibrium here. Also, I think when you dig in to the infection rate, people are susceptible to different types of memetic attack. If fakes are expensive to make, we might see 10 strains in a given election cycle. If they are cheap, this time we might see 10,000. On the margin I think that means more infections even if the production quality is still at a consistently low level.
Even taking your position on its face I think you have to split quality into production and conceptual. Maybe deep fakes do not yet improve production quality but I strongly suspect they do already improve conceptual quality as they bring more talent to the game.
A great example is the “Trump being arrested” generated image. It was just someone putting in an idea and sharing, happened to go viral, many people thought it was real at first. I don’t think everybody that was taken in by that image in their Twitter feed was somehow “in the market for fakes”, it just contextually pattern-matched scrolling through your feed unless you looked closely and counted fingers. Under SIR we might say that most people quickly become resistant to a given strain of fake via societal immune-response mechanisms like Twitter community notes, and so the spread of that particular fake was cut short inside of a day. But that could still matter a lot if the day is election day!
Consider also whether state actors have incentives to release all their memetic weapons in a drip-feed or stockpile (some of) them for election day when they will have maximum leverage; I don’t think the current rate of release is representative of the current production capacity.
You’ve made the supply/demand analogy a few times on this subject, I’m not sure that is the best lens. This analysis makes it sound like there is a homogenous product “fakes” with a single dimension “quality”. But I think even on its own terms the market micro-dynamics are way more complex than that.
I think of it more in terms of memetic evolution and epidemiology. SIR as a first analogy—some people have weak immune systems, some strong, and the bigger the reservoir of memes the more likely a new highly-infectious mutant will show up. Rather than equilibrium dynamics, I’m more concerned about tail-risk in the disequilibrium here. Also, I think when you dig in to the infection rate, people are susceptible to different types of memetic attack. If fakes are expensive to make, we might see 10 strains in a given election cycle. If they are cheap, this time we might see 10,000. On the margin I think that means more infections even if the production quality is still at a consistently low level.
Even taking your position on its face I think you have to split quality into production and conceptual. Maybe deep fakes do not yet improve production quality but I strongly suspect they do already improve conceptual quality as they bring more talent to the game.
A great example is the “Trump being arrested” generated image. It was just someone putting in an idea and sharing, happened to go viral, many people thought it was real at first. I don’t think everybody that was taken in by that image in their Twitter feed was somehow “in the market for fakes”, it just contextually pattern-matched scrolling through your feed unless you looked closely and counted fingers. Under SIR we might say that most people quickly become resistant to a given strain of fake via societal immune-response mechanisms like Twitter community notes, and so the spread of that particular fake was cut short inside of a day. But that could still matter a lot if the day is election day!
Consider also whether state actors have incentives to release all their memetic weapons in a drip-feed or stockpile (some of) them for election day when they will have maximum leverage; I don’t think the current rate of release is representative of the current production capacity.