Honestly, I don't find this very creepy. This is information you are already putting out there for everyone to see. If I post a video of myself speaking, I am not concerned about people seeing how my skin vibrates in that video.

As video generation tools become more advanced, we will need better algorithms to validate videos. The bar for "fooling the vast majority of humans" is much, much lower than the bar for "being literally indistinguishable from a real video". The main problem I see is that it's going to be a cat-and-mouse game, and I don't think any method you publish will remain valid for very long in practice. The same method will be used to improve the next version of video generators.

Also, lots of real videos use post-processing that might wash out some of the details they are looking for. Video producers might re-record lines so they don't perfectly match the video to begin with. It's been a long time since I used a Samsung phone, but on my old S6, I remember that it always had a beauty filter applied to the selfie camera that made me me look like a creepy porcelain doll. I could probably make a deepfake of myself that looks more "real" than those real videos and photos.

If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.

Or you are unfortunate enough to share a subnet with someone who got on Cloudflare's bad side, in which case there is basically no recourse.

There are a million legitimate reasons to use a VPN, for example, but Cloudflare doesn't care.

You're right, but I think there's a lot of overlap here. Large businesses are not laser-focused and are not rational actors.

Someone pitched this as a way to make money. Someone believed that was plausible and approved it. But the motivation for even pitching it was likely a step or two removed from that.

Executives and middle managers are not above bullshitting to justify their salaries.

The "problem" of having more people than we have meaningful work for. This is not a new problem, but it is increasingly exacerbated by automation. So we manufacture bullshit work just to keep busy, because we've decided people shouldn't have food or shelter if they're not doing work, bullshit or not.

The world would be better off if whoever got paid to plan and implement this instead got paid to just stay in bed. The economy is fundamentally broken.