Friday, February 21, 2020

DeepFake and frightening advancements in technology



A couple months ago, a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video. I immediately clicked on the link due to curiosity and saw the title “Spot on impressions of Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger by Bill Hader”. “This should be fun”, I thought to myself, but as I watched the video, I saw Bill Hader’s face seamlessly morph into a young Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger. One second I saw Bill Hader, the next I saw Al Pacino. I didn’t know whether to be amazed or terrified. This video showed both incredible technological prowess and worrying ethical implications of this technology.

DeepFake is an AI technology where people’s faces can be synthetically replaced with another’s in photos and videos. It has an enormous potential for misuse, with applications in celebrity pornography, false news and even financial fraud. It’s no surprise that with these possibilities for misuse, an ethical discussion on how to appropriately regulate this technology.


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What’s also disturbing about DeepFake is its ability to further confirmation bias in people. Eli Saslow’s article is a perfect example of this, as it only took one glance at a clearly photoshopped picture of Chelsea Clinton and Michelle Obama giving Donald Trump ‘the finger’ to confirm some people’s pre-existing beliefs that democrats are ungrateful and classless. Saslow uses bullshit to bend people’s perceptions and at the peak of bullshit generating technology lies DeepFake. If one photoshopped picture could affect people that much, imagine how much more adversely DeepFake could affect our society.

DeepFake does have useful applications. Film studios have been using DeepFake to insert younger versions of actors into films, which ironically adds a level of authenticity to them. However, it’s doubtful that this niche benefit of DeepFake outweighs its potential to harm society.

While all technological advancement calls for greater ethical discussions, I believe that some technologies have greater potential for harm than others and these need to be at the forefront of these discussions. James Moor states in his paper, “We at least collectively can affect our futures by choosing which technologies to have and which not to have and by choosing how technologies that we pursue will be used”. This discussion needs to start now with artificial intelligence and DeepFake at the forefront of it because without it, the consequences of this technology could be disastrous.


2 comments:

  1. Hi Anish,

    Looking at this revised post and the previous post, there was not much change, besides trying to relate the Saslow piece to Deepfakes by referring to both being about bullshit and changing the wording of the last sentence.

    Overall the idea of deepfakes and AI is very interesting and the development of it is interesting. Howeer, this post could have benefitted from added reasons of why this could cause greater potential harm and why it needs to be talked about more than other emerging technologies besides the one Saslow example, which was photoshop and not DeepFake tech or AI.

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    1. I agree with Parth's comment here. I commented on your first version of this post, and it seems that the only change you made was adding one sentence and editing another. Your added sentence, which connects Saslow and Deepfakes to bullshit, definitely does bolster your post, but in my opinion this connection and analysis could have been expanded upon even more. Additionally, it seems you were trying to make a connection to Frankfurt's definition of bullshit, but you never brought up that article. On a more positive note, your reworking of the last sentence was a good change, and it added to the ethical insight of the post. All in all, your post did do a good job of opening up the topic of Deepfakes for an ethical discussion.

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