Quote Originally Posted by Justin View Post
On a deep psychological level, it doesn't matter if you are consciously aware of whether something is fake or not. Once you've seen it, the instinctual part of your brain accepts it as truth regardless of whether or not your conscious brain knows it's fake. This is why movies can evoke emotional reactions in us, even though we know the characters are all fictional people portrayed by actors.

So, once this becomes a thing, even news reports that start off with "KXYZ has verified that the following video of Senator so-and-so having relations with a farm animal is in fact a deep fake. In case you haven't seen it, here's the video."

Your brain will still have a visceral reaction, and it won't matter if what's in the video is real, you'll still get sick just at the thought of the Senator, who's career is now DOA.
Exactly. The reason for this is we aren't as conscious as we'd like to think we are, most of our apparent decision making is almost entirely done subconsciously. In FMRI studies, they can "see" the decision you're going to make (studied on selections of very simple items) up to eleven seconds before you even know you're going to make that decision. Our stream of consciousness is truly the tip of the iceberg and mostly an illusion.

So even if you consciously know something is faked, that logical determination only exists at the last 5% of the mental railroad tracks. Your brain circuits are always doing most of the mental processing under the hood and incorporating that imagery subconsciously in many tasks.... and it processes it as if it's true. You may not realize this as the "memory" may not enter your stream of consciousness, yet the consideration of it has already entered your decision making on a subconscious level, eliminating your ability to consciously reason it away.

A big reason why people are so easy to manipulate.