{"id":102,"date":"2022-04-11T19:41:41","date_gmt":"2022-04-11T19:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.usnh.edu\/com743\/chapter\/synthetic-media-deepfakes-3\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T21:30:55","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T21:30:55","slug":"synthetic-media-deepfakes-3","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.usnh.edu\/com743\/chapter\/synthetic-media-deepfakes-3\/","title":{"raw":"Synthetic media: Deepfakes","rendered":"Synthetic media: Deepfakes"},"content":{"raw":"
\u201cA deepfake is meant to cause an incongruence between expectation and perceived reality.\u201d<\/em> - Dobber et al.\r\n\r\nOn deepfakes of public death, or \"digital desecration\": \"Public death has long been a site of spectacle and power, and mockery of the dead predates the internet. [What\u2019s new with AI deepfakes] ... is the medium\u2019s claim to presence. AI impersonation [of the dead] shifts desecration from depicting someone to ventriloquizing them: synthesizing face, voice, and affect and then staging \u2018new\u2019 actions, lines, and reactions. That\u2019s not just cruelty; it\u2019s an authored performance that borrows the authority of the person\u2019s likeness. AI also enables digital desecration at greater scale and immediacy.\"<\/em> - Julie Carpenter, Ph.D., author, \"The Naked Android: Synthetic Socialness and the Human Gaze<\/a>.\"<\/blockquote>\r\n

Overview<\/h2>\r\nThis chapter is a continuation of last chapter's exploration of purely AI-generated content. Deepfakes, however, combine existing real content with AI-generated media to create new content that appears to be representing a real person\u2019s communication.\r\n\r\nHere is a Bloomberg Quicktake that demonstrates what this looks like.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/youtu.be\/gLoI9hAX9dw[\/embed]\r\n\r\nNaturally, there are concerns beyond using deepfakes as a form of entertainment. If deepfake technologies were used exclusively by Hollywood film effects specialists, perhaps these clips wouldn\u2019t be too much cause for concern. (Do you recall how impressive it was in 1994 when Forrest Gump met President Kennedy<\/a> and Kennedy\u2019s speech was synthesized?).\r\n\r\nHowever, deepfake software is freely available today and nearly anyone with a desire to make them can do so at minimal cost.\r\n\r\nWhat does it mean when a single person can produce fake communication and impose asymmetrical chaos into our social and political well-being?\r\n\r\nBelow:<\/strong> A deepfake video experiment produced by Ethan Mollick<\/a>, a leading researcher and writer in the area of AI and LLMs. Note that the clip includes AI-generated voice and picture in multiple languages.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/youtu.be\/9EIsGra80_I?si=FVXq1z82revUrxRB[\/embed]\r\n

Key Terms<\/h2>\r\nThe Liar's Dividend:<\/strong> In the article \"Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security<\/a>,\" the authors, Robert Chesney and Danielle Keats Citron, propose that the risk of deepfake media permeating society is not so much in the misleading perception posed by actual deepfake content but, instead, in the notion that even legitimate media could be<\/em> synthetic. The \"dividend\" contained in the phrase refers to the benefit gained by powerful entities or individuals when the public does not know for certain whether any<\/em> media is real, particularly when an individual denies culpability for behaviors recorded on video by claiming that the video was a fake.\r\n\r\nRead more about the research<\/a> conducted to measure the impact of deepfake media on human perception.\r\n\r\nThere are two examples worth exploring that demonstrate the undermining effect of deepfake videos on the perception of actual, non-fake video content:\r\n