Ethical and Social Applications

There are many ethical and social applications for deep fakes, and most of these are bad and some of them are good. With the ability to mimic people, this technology could be used to damage reputations as well as simplify things and make people not trust videos of people because they won’t know for sure if they are real. Cassandra Cross mentions in her article that romance fraud is an issue where people try to scam money from a romantic partner, hence the name “Romance Fraud”. Now the only way to combat these scams is by using a technique to search the images used and find out if a profile is fake. Cross states that “the creation of deep fakes and allows individuals to produce and promote images that are either altered or entirely synthetic in their creation, jeopardizes societal understandings of trust and authenticity. However, when combined, this takes the threat posed by romance fraud to an entirely new level of risk.” (Cross, 2022) These statements show why deep fake technology can be so dangerous because if they can make synthetic images, there will be no way for anyone to know if that profile is real or fake. This would make more people susceptible to this type of scam. This example shows just one of the ethical risks that come along with this technology and some of the applications that it can have for society as a whole. If this type of scam becomes commonplace, it could cause people to start distrusting videos, which could lead to a lot more problems. Now imagine if you were watching TV and you saw a commercial with a dead celebrity. How would you react? Confused, shocked? As Jan Kietzmann states, “Bringing back Michael Jackson for more Pepsi commercials is possible, and probably a very lucrative consideration” (Kietzmann, 2021). This is one potential rabbit hole of ethical and social issues that could arise from the use of deep fakes. In the example mentioned by Kietzmann, if Pepsi were to bring Michael Jackson back for more ads through deep fakes, would it be ethical to take advantage of people’s emotions attached to the music star? The use of this technology could lead to thousands of debates around the simple issue of using the technology to bring someone back from the dead and using it for the sole purpose of gaining more sales. Now, that isn’t the only possible use of bringing people back from the dead; they could also do it in movies and pictures. All these potential uses could raise many questions about whether it is okay to use that technology for that purpose. Another potential scenario would be using deep fakes of living celebrities to promote a product. Normally, if someone were to promote a product, they would get paid to do it, but now if you just use a deep fake, you don’t need to pay the person anything unless some legislative or legal action is taken to deal with this issue. Going further with this idea, imagine a company were to use you in a video or just audio to convince your family and friends to buy something; they wouldn’t need your permission. This just highlights even more potential social and ethical issues that could arise, with people getting scammed all around and organizations trying to take advantage of people. This could potentially happen soon, as everyone’s lives are online now more than ever. These scenarios all bring up major questions about whether it would be right for organizations to do this or whether they should even be able to do something like this. The social implications of this technology could cause major issues because people would stop trusting videos, which would create issues if a message needed to be given out; how would people trust that it was real? This could shake the very core of society because people would be doubting whether or not they should follow the instructions just because they weren’t sure if they were real or not.