Can you believe Obama said this? 😮
What is Deepfake?
According to BBC news, a Deepfake is "The term deepfake is now generically used by the media to refer to any video in which faces have been either swapped or digitally altered, with the help of AI - a bit like how people use the brand names Kleenex or Hoover to refer to any tissue or vacuum cleaner." Lucky for us Most deepfakes are used as a way to entertain us.
Entertainment Value of Deepfakes
Unethical uses for Deepfakes
Forbes did an article about how Deepfakes are used to make nonconsensual porn of famous actors and actresses. They make a comment that "96% of those deepfake videos online can be categorized as "non-consensual" pornography; manipulating existing porn videos to appear to feature female celebrities. The top four deepfake porn sites were found to have had more than 134 million views of these videos that exclusively target women — some 99% of the deepfake videos targeted female celebrities from the acting and music professions. Without revealing the names of the victims, Deeptrace researchers reported that the top ten individuals most frequently targeted included three American actresses, three South Korean musicians, and two British actresses.". This calls into question about the ethical practices of the use of deepfakes in our society, with the hope we can get legislation passed on condemning the use of deepfakes in the use of pornography.
Deepfake is just another wrench being thrown into the already murky waters of media authenticity. Fake news, and the manipulation of media to present certain messages to certain crowds has created a world where nobody feels safe believing anything they see. Deepfake looks eerily real, and if the technology was unknown to the public, it would probably be passed as reality. This will bring about some major problems in the future, and provide a scapegoat for politicians to call “bullshit” on damning videos of them saying, or doing something that would show them in a negative light. How hard would it be for Trump to say, “that video of me calling so and so an idiot, or saying something incredibly off colored was faked?” On the flipside of this, videos can now be made that can paint someone in an incredibly unflattering light, and will have to be refuted as fake. Like any powerful advancement in technology, it can be used for good or bad. If used merely for entertainment purposes, and with the consent of certain people, it can provide future where your favorite actors or actresses never really die, and live on through frighteningly realistic imitations. The flip side is a dystopian media filled with the chaotic questioning of everything that you see as real vs fake.
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ReplyDeleteIt's very astounding how realistic the images and audio that deepfake creates can be. For some strange reasons, I've never heard of this technology until I came into this course, and am quite sure anyone outside of an English-speaking country hasn't, either.
ReplyDeleteIt's extremely funny to me how with such a useful technology, people are still aware of the repercussions of creating videos of false political statements, and instead only use it to make porn because they know it would sell.
The usage of deepfakes reminds me of Zartan from GI Joe: Retaliation (2013) who kidnapped and impersonated the president of the United States so perfectly that he used that persona to frame GI Joe for stealing nuclear warheads from Pakistan. Through a very long string of incidents taking place one after another, London ultimately got nuked. It's scary to think how that could be the potential consequence of deepfakes.
I have many predictions about the implications of deepfake, and how it might evolve within the next five years, but nothing concrete as of right now. Just like how people would scratch their heads wondering whether what they see is true whenever the involvement of deepfake is speculated, I’m scratching my head the exact same way when pondering what will happen to this wildcard of a technology.