It depends on what you do with the tool. Going with your murder analogy, if there's a stabbing epidemic what do you do? 1) Ban knives 2) invest in public safety 3) investigate the root causes and improve on them?
I'm also not sure what's so regulated about the internet besides net neutrality in certain countries. Of course the government can put limits on the network, like banning services, but it's easy since they are rather easy to target. With content traveling on the network it's much harder to say if it's legit or not.
> lots of countries
What about those countries that don't regulate it and people will keep pumping out better, leaner and faster models from there? Spreading software is trivial, all you achieve is the public won't be aware of what's possible.
The more I think about it if anything should be regulated that's a requirement to provide third party (probably government backed) ID verification system so it would be possible for my mom to know it's me calling here. Basically kill called ID spoofing.
>I'm also not sure what's so regulated about the internet besides net neutrality in certain countries.
generally things are regulated on the internet that were not going to ever be regulated because it was on the internet - example - sales taxes, perhaps you are old enough to remember when sales tax collection would not ever be enforceable on internet transactions - those idiot lawyer don't know, it's on the internet, the sale didn't happen in that country or in that state no sales taxes will never happen on the internet hah hah. It's unenforceable, it is logically undoable, there are so many edge cases - ugh, the law just does not understand technology!
oops, sales taxes now on internet purchases.
GDPR is another example of things that are regulated on the internet that basically most of HN years before it happened was completely convinced would be impossible!!
If this thing becomes too big a problem for the societies regulations will be done, with varying levels of effectiveness I'm sure.
And then in twenty years time we will be saying what, you can't regulate genital eating viral synths because a guy can make those in his garage and spread them via nasal spray, this technology is unstoppable and unregulatable, not like some open source deepfake library!!