Disrupted Markets

The following are market industries that Deepfake has cause disruption upon in its proliferation.

Financial market

Deep Fakes are now being used by criminals for purposes including fraud, blackmail, and other unethical financial schemes. It is possible for criminals to distribute a face-swap video that falsely depicts a CEO making damaging private comments. This would result in a decrease in the stock price of the CEO’s company, which would allow the criminals to profit from short sales (Bateman, 2020).

Fraudsters can, for instance, pose as your company’s CEO or an employee of the bank in order to obtain personal information, force you to transfer money, or open a bank account in order to launder money (ING Wholesale Banking, n.d.).

Fraudsters also have the ability to use deepfakes to file insurance claims or other claims on behalf of deceased individuals. Claims can be successfully made on pensions, life insurance, and benefits for a deceased person for many years after the person’s death. Deep Fakes are utilized in this scenario in order to successfully trick the bank into believing that one of their customers is still alive (Kurup, 2022).

According to Borak (2020), as the use of facial recognition technology grows, people in China are becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of deep fakes and biometric data leaks.

Brewster (2021) quotes Jake Moore, a former police officer and current cybersecurity expert at security firm ESET, who says that while audio and visual deep fakes are fascinating examples of 21st century technological advancement, they also pose a significant threat to people’s personal information, money, and commercial enterprises.

Gaming industry

When impressive natural language generation models such as GPT3 are combined with gaming deepfakes, this will result in NPCs having the limitless ability to converse with your avatar using convincing synchronized face and mouth movements without the need to follow specific scripts. This will allow for a much more immersive gaming experience. Moreover, the so-called “voice skins’’ are making it possible for LGBT+ players to alter their in-game voices, which has led to a more enjoyable gaming experience. (Lalla et al., 2022)

Machine Learning

Using deepfake for creating malicious content can give users the wrong idea on how to use these innovations (Buzz Blog Box, 2020). It ultimately tarnishes the field of AI and what it can offer from a consumer’s perspective.

Entertainment Industry

Deepfakes have allowed movie studios to hire “deepfake actors” to stand in for actual celebrities. This is most impactful when the likeness of a deceased actor is brought back to life on screen but this can also be employed to age or de-age actors. Studios can also use deepfakes to enhance performances and when additional footage or reshoots are necessary. While these cases are definitely a boon to movie productions, the long term benefits to actors is still under debate. For one, the prolifieration of deepfakes may hurt lesser-known actors as it becomes easier to include big name celebrities in film or marketing projects. The careers of deepfake actors themselves may be stifled, their talents not being recognized in their own right. (Lalla, Mitrani, & Harned, 2022)

Deepfake has been used to swap the faces of celebrities into obscene images or videos online. This could negatively impat their reputation and brand as a whole (Buzz Blog Box, 2020).

As a Contrasting View to the Apparent Disrupted Markets

In the case of multimedia producers that have been incorporating deepfakes and slowly integrating it into their whole media production process, deepfakes may appear as a relatively sustaining service that caters towards large production firms, which can simultaneously use manpower and AI-generated deepfakes as a hybrid system. At the fundamental level of using deepfakes, a human operator is still required to train the images of the whole footage.

The current status of a deepfake software’s capacity is still below the finetuning capabilities that actual CGI artists fulfill when post-processing a production. There are obvious details on deepfaked images that would point out its syntheticity as opposed to actual live footage such as overly defined details or unrealistically smooth skins, confusing lighting, flimsy superimposition of facial hair, and disproportionate mouth or lips to the rest of the face. Without a ‘cleaning process’ made by professionals, the experience of watching deepfake would be extremely obvious to those who know how to spot it (“The Biggest Trends in Deepfake…”, 2022). The same goes for voice deepfakes, where some inconsistencies can be heard. In its current form, it simply cannot outperform human skills.

Nevertheless, the growing trend of deepfake usage continues, which means that deepfake technologies will continue to improve as user continue to feed the machine a large array of materials to learn and train from. That is to say that although its present state requires human assistance to be made hyperrealistic, it may, in the future, with the adequate amount of training resources and algorithmic development, completely function autonomously without human intervention.

References:

Bateman, J. (2020, August 10). Get ready for deepfakes to be used in financial scams. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Retrieved from https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/08/10/get-ready-for-deepfakes-to-be-used-in-financial-scams-pub-82469

Borak, M. (2020, November 17). Deepfakes, widely used for fake nudes, could disrupt financial markets. South China Morning Post. Retrieved from https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/3109565/deepfakes-have-potential-disrupt-financial-markets-not-just-fake

Brewster, T. (2022, November 9). Fraudsters cloned company director’s voice in $35 million bank heist, police find. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/14/huge-bank-fraud-uses-deep-fake-voice-tech-to-steal-millions/?sh=50c4a4bf7559

Buzz Blog Box. (2020, February 1). How Deepfake Technology Impact the People in Our Society? Medium. Retrieved from https://becominghuman.ai/how-deepfake-technology-impact-the-people-in-our-society-e071df4ffc5c

ING Wholesale Banking. (n.d.). Deepfake: Beware and know the risks. Deepfake: beware of the risk for financial services • ING. Retrieved from https://www.ingwb.com/en/service/corporate-fraud/deepfake-risks

Kurup, N. (2022, October 18). Clari5. Retrieved from https://www.clari5.com/deepfake_frauds_will_banks_be_the_next_stop/

Lalla, V., Mitrani, A., & Harned, Z. (2022, June). Artificial Intelligence: Deepfakes in the entertainment industry. WIPO. Retrieved from https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2022/02/article_0003.html

“The Biggest Trends in Deepfake Detection in 2022”. (2022, August 26). Inspired eLearning. Retrieved from https://inspiredelearning.com/blog/the-biggest-trends-in-deepfake-detection-in-2022/#:~:text=Deepfakes%20are%20rapidly%20becoming%20a,to%20manipulate%20faces%20in%20videos

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