Have you watched a series of Tik Tok deepfake videos of Tom Cruise gone viral earlier this month? These fake videos generated by artificial intelligence continue to become more convincing and it raises concerns about authenticity of online media contents and the danger with deepfakes. These days, it is hard to trust what we read online. Now, deepfakes are making it harder to trust what we see as well.
It is so critical to educate ourselves on the truth about deepfakes and how to decipher what is true and accurate from disinformation/fake news online.
As time goes by, the technology behind deepfakes will only get better and more realistic. My question is – can we make positive use of this AI generated media in our lives? The following link here provides some positive examples of deepfakes in education, communication, entertainment, art, medicine, and training.
Esther this article on deepfakes is really interesting. I can think of one more area where deepfakes would work very well, and it is with culturally responsive teaching. This type of teaching uses the culture of the students to incorporate in the lesson plan. A deepfake would be excellent for explaining the emotional perspective of an indigenous group who is concerned about preserving their language, and therefore deepfakes may be used to tell this viewpoint and preserve it for future generations. Students can then explore the theory presented in class through a lens that they are familiar with and relate to.
Thank you for your response, Brittany. Utilizing the deepfake technology in teaching indigenous education and preserving their languages is an excellent example. Just like hologrammatic interviews created for Holocaust education in the article, the same can be achieved for educating, preserving, and revitalizing indigenous cultures and languages.
Hi Esther, thanks for sharing this post.
I have come across different deepfake videos before the Tom Cruise one became viral and every time something like this blows up, it really creeps me out because it looks so real! Honestly, I’m not sure if the benefits are good enough for this to be considered acceptable (at least not yet). I have read through the article you shared and I do see how it could be used in education, art, and entertainment but I am not quite convinced that this technology would offer more benefits than drawbacks. There’s already a lot of information online that we can’t and shouldn’t trust and this adds another layer to that.
Thank you, Seo-Whi for your response. I agree with you that deepfakes will continue to have a bad reputation for now, given that they are most well-known for manipulating videos, images and audios to discredit individuals or groups. Still, if we can educate ourselves to trust only videos delivered by reputable sources and teach our children how to spot fake news, personally, I hope to see the good of deepfake technology more outweighing the bad, because I find the the AI technology behind these deepfakes is so fascinating.