The realism and vividness of deepfakes makes them unusually effective at depicting alternative people and facts. People share deepfakes not necessarily because they believe them, but because they want to reinforce their identity and social position. Deepfakes rarely change minds; the threat they pose is to radicalize by sowing chaos and confusion. The following reviews the consequences of deepfakes in both the social sphere and people’s private lives and suggests potential interventions to reduce these negative consequencesFootnote 61
Deepfakes are hyper-realistic digital impersonations or falsifications of images, video, and/or audio created through neural networks using machine learning models called generative adversarial networks (GAN). They appear in a wide range of contexts, from arts and entertainment to advertising, and education. The most frequent application of deepfakes is in pornography; as of October 2019, 96 per cent of deepfakes on the internet were pornographicFootnote 62Footnote 63Footnote 64Footnote 65
Humans process visual data naturally and thus fluentlyFootnote 66Footnote 67Footnote 68Footnote 69
How Effective Are Deepfakes?
Studies disagree about whether people are able to discriminate deepfakes from real images. When compared to traditional sources of fake news, such as text or audio, some studies have found deepfakes to be no more credible or effective at implanting false memories than their counterpartsFootnote 70Footnote 71Footnote 72
Lago et al. (2022) reports that newer AI-synthesized images are perceived as realFootnote 73Footnote 74Footnote 75Footnote 76
Do People Care About Accuracy?
Information veracity is not a deciding factor when users choose to share content onlineFootnote 77Footnote 78
A hint about why people share and view deepfakes can be found where they are most common. The term “deepfake” was coined by a Reddit forum created for sharing pornographic videos of women whose faces were synthetically swapped for those of others, mostly celebritiesFootnote 79
Most deepfakes on social media will exist for the same reason as fake news, to attract ‘clicks’. To achieve this, fake news exploits two properties that engage people’s attention: novelty and negativityFootnote 80Footnote 81Footnote 82Footnote 83Footnote 84
People share with their ideological community because it satisfies a fundamental human motivation to strengthen one’s social attachmentsFootnote 85Footnote 86Footnote 87Footnote 88Footnote 89Footnote 90
Older people are more likely to be deceived by deepfakes, and political ideology influences how deepfaked news is evaluatedFootnote 91Footnote 92Footnote 93
Consequences
Societies, companies, and consumers are all potentially threatened by deepfakes. Caldwell et al. (2020) ranks fake audio or video content as the single biggest threat posed by AI for applications to crime and terrorismFootnote 94Footnote 95
Deepfakes also pose a threat to our governing structures. The uncertainty deepfakes introduce allows people to live in their own subjective realities, enlarging social divisions and obstructing the democratic processFootnote 96Footnote 97Footnote 98
In regards to businesses, threats include fake reviews of consumer items, defamation and sabotage, and damage to a firm’s image, reputation, and trustworthinessFootnote 99
Beyond such “deepfake phishing”, AI will render some technologies obsolete. Threats to consumers include new susceptibility to blackmail, intimidation, sabotage, harassment, defamation, revenge porn, identity theft, and bullying.
The personalized nature of deepfake pornography adds a new layer of emotional distress and threat for victimsFootnote 100Footnote 101
Even when citizens do not believe the misinformation presented to them or are not concerned about truth, deepfakes can increase uncertainty about content and decrease trust in mediaFootnote 102Footnote 103Footnote 104
The use of deepfakes against public individuals creates the Liar’s Dividend: individuals facing accusations can write off factual evidence as deepfakesFootnote 105Footnote 106Footnote 107
Deepfakes offer plenty of potential benefits. They have enabled new and intriguing art forms, served as excellent pedagogical tools, and been a benign source of pleasure and amusement. They can also offer business opportunitiesFootnote 108
In the wrong hands, deepfakes are a novel kind of social virus, and like all viruses, their future trajectory and consequences are hard to predict. On a societal level, their greatest threat is their ability to shape public discourse. When misinformation enters the public conversation, it becomes increasingly dangerous as it alters collective understanding and memory. Their increasing prevalence could also lead people to stop believing much of what they see.
Solutions
Deepfakes are created to trick us; the human mind is not prepared to always accurately identify the outputs of sophisticated technologies. While some tech giants have started flagging some content as misinformation, such flags are not a silver bullet. The shareability of fake news has been found to decrease when it is accompanied by warningsFootnote 109Footnote 110Footnote 111
Steps that might alleviate the problem include pre-exposure warnings that make people aware that information might be false before they see it. Warnings need to be specific; it is ineffective to merely mention that misinformation may be presentFootnote 112Footnote 113
From a legal standpoint, there is currently little distributor liability for social media platforms circulating deepfakesFootnote 114Footnote 115
Individuals have little power to prevent deepfake attacks. When deepfakes threaten reputations, individuals can increase their ability to deny actions by recording their activities, but this raises privacy concernsFootnote 116
Individuals are more easily persuaded and corrected by someone they know. Therefore, societal norms and discourse on deepfakes should be nudged to create a social environment where people are not only more skeptical about what they see, but also are encouraged to challenge each others’ informational claims.
To alter societal norms, thought leaders and those most central in social networks are key. Educational resources including digital literacy training are helpful tools, especially if directed at influencers. Videos explaining political deepfakes have been found to reduce uncertainty, and in so doing can increase trust in mediaFootnote 117
