Deep Fakes: That’s not real?!?
A couple years ago (2019), the news found itself full of stories about “deep fakes”. Since then, it has more or less fallen off society’s radar, but the technology has by no means gone away: in fact, it has improved drastically.
For reference, here is a gif (from the Guardian) that was taking the internet by storm when deep faked photos were all the rage in 2019:
No, Jimmy Fallon and Donald Trump are not practicing their synchronized-speaking. Rather, there is an original recording on the left, and on the right the same video with Trump’s face projected onto Fallon’s. Convincing fakes like this forces us to consider how else this technology might be used — perhaps in malicious ways. Granted, this is two-year-old technology, so this begs the question: where is this technology now?
This was easily made with a few photos of my father and a mobile app (FaceApp)! Not only can we deep-fake faces, but also voices!
Consider the company Descript which has released a product they call Overdub. According to Jay LeBoeuf of Descript, Overdub only needs to hear you speak a few sentences to be able to produce any sentence in your voice! Descript, recognizes the potential for the misuse of this technology, and as such has issued an Ethics Statement. Here, they note that while their technology is the first of its kind, other technologies will surely follow — technologies that may not exhibit the same constraints. Then comes the question of how to detect deep fakes, to which Descript has to say “It’s unclear.”
When technology like Overdub becomes publicly available like FaceApp, there will be nothing — besides a few pictures and audio clips —to stop the creation of videos of anyone doing anything: this is a bit of a terrifying thought. Then again, there are practical implications to this technology, such as the pursuits of Descript, face touch-ups to video, and digital de-aging.
Everything comes at a cost, and this technology is no exception: Intentions are good with practical uses in mind, but we can imagine how this could be used for manipulation. So we must ask ourselves, “Is the practical benefit worth the risk of this technology being used by someone with malintent? Is such technology and its development ethical?” In his book The Ethics of Information, Luciano Floridi pleads that “ethics is not only a question of dealing morally well with a given world. It is also a question of constructing the world, improving its nature and shaping its development in the right way.”
The burden comes on each and every one of us for shaping this world in a responsible way and guiding its development in an ethical fashion, but the question remains of just how to do that with technology like this at our fingertips.
