Deepfakes On Demand
Imagine Zooming with a coworker and discussing confidential information, only to discover the person on the other end of the call is actually a bad actor using deepfake tech to impersonate your colleague.
A brighter hypothetical — imagine you need to quickly turn around content, so you generate high-quality photos or videos free of any privacy or copyright concerns at the click of a button.
One more. Imagine your boss calls you about transferring funds, but it’s really a scammer using deepfake tech to flawlessly imitate their voice.
In the case of all three examples, there’s a startup for that. In fact, the last scene has already happened, conning one CEO out of $243,000. And the others are well on their way to reality.
Yes, there are interesting commercial use cases for deepfake tech. But be careful what you wish for. New innovations suggest a content creation boom is coming with speed, variety — and ambiguity — as we’ve never seen before. Potential opportunities aside, most associate the technology with malicious intent. Searches for “deepfake detection” have risen by 2,400% in the last two years according to Exploding Topics.
Throughout 2019, the number of deepfakes on the Internet grew from just 7.9K to 14.6K. But as of December 2020, 60K deepfakes were created online. Scammers, nation-state hackers, political special-interest groups, and corporate rivals all stand to benefit from growing ease of access. The threat to individuals, businesses, and even national security is too big to ignore.
As the tech continues to improve, so will the ability to mislead or create full-blown disinformation campaigns that endanger personal reputation and big business — from consumer trust to the bottom line. Communicators face a whole new set of considerations from head-on risks to an increasingly ever-present air of doubt surrounding news, statements, and personal attacks.
So where do we go from here? Conventional practices for defense will not apply. The need for external partners with expertise in emerging detection tech will be key to getting ahead of the risk. As we continue to develop collaborations against information disorder, deepfake detection will be core to our service mix. Like all new tech, deepfake opportunities for communicators continue to intrigue. But we must simultaneously anticipate and navigate dangers that await.
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