AI will weaponise lies faster and easily. Cheap media will be drowned by a sea of misinformation. So plan ahead. Be proactive on your comms and reaction plan. Gain awareness of this technology and its consequences. Focus on harms, not just technology itself.
Deepfake technology, although innovative, has become an affordable and powerful tool for deception. It played a significant role in South Korea's PM Yoon Suk-yeol's presidential election last year. Yoon's team who thinks AI is the future of campaigns developed "AI Yoon," a deepfake bot which displayed a sense of humour and sarcasm while interacting online through "WikiYoon."
Deeptrace Labs’ report 96 percent of deepfake videos found online are nonconsensual pornography. But AI-generated propaganda can also affect global events, like the deepfake video of Ukraine's president telling people to surrender to Russia.
The internet used to be an escape from reality, but now we need to escape from the fake world created by AI. Some experts predict that as much as 90 percent of online content could be synthetically generated within a few years.
The Center for Data Innovation say we need nimbler soft law approaches: "Policymakers should encourage sites susceptible to hosting nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes to work with experts on best practices for reporting and taking down content, develop their own state-of-the-art detection tools, and use age-estimated tools to remove deepfakes of underage users (which are never consensual)".
Laws are important, but building trust and a responsible digital culture is also crucial. We need users to be careful about the information they see. Brands who partner with trustworthy publishers and media approaches will remain the best investment.
What if Deepfake technology could train us to be less gullible and help increase our ‘digital sensibility’? For example, we could partner with Belgium's Safe Online to create "Faces of Reality" where we follow different deepfake celebs and show how we could accurately tell true from false.