The Upside of Deep Fakes

Jessica Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog

It’s bad. We know. The dawn of “deep fakes”—convincing videos and images of people doing things they never did or said—puts us all in jeopardy in several different ways. Professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron have noted that now “false claims—even preposterous ones—can be peddled with unprecedented success today thanks to a combination of social media ubiquity and virility, cognitive biases, filter bubbles, and group polarization.” The scholars identify a host of harms from deep fakes, ranging from people being exploited, extorted, and sabotaged, to societal harms like the erosion of democratic discourse and trust in social institutions, undermining public safety, national security, journalism, and diplomacy, deepening social divisions, and manipulation of elections. But it might not be all bad. Even beyond purported beneficial uses of deep-fake technology for education, art, and science, the looming deep-fake disaster might have a silver lining. Hear us out. We think deep fakes have an upside.