What Should Technical Experts Do About Deepfakes?
Synthetic media technologies are rapidly advancing, making it easier to generate nonveridical media that look and sound increasingly realistic.
So-called “deepfakes”, owing to their reliance on deep learning, often present a person saying or doing something they have not said or done. The proliferation of deepfakes creates a new challenge to the trustworthiness of visual experience, and has already created negative consequences such as nonconsensual pornography (Harris 2018), political disinformation (Vaccari and Chadwick 2020), and financial fraud (Bateman 2020). Deepfakes can harm viewers by deceiving or intimidating, harm subjects’ by causing reputational damage through misattribution, and harm society by undermining societal values such as trust in institutions (Diakopoulos and Johnson, 2020).
In this dialogical presentation the professors Deborah Johnson and Nicholas Diakopoulos will discuss what technical experts can and should do to mitigate the harms caused by deepfakes especially during democratic elections.
Professor Emerita Deborah Johnson previously was the Chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences of the University of Virginia.
Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University where he is Director of the Computational Journalism Lab (CJL) and Director of Graduate Studies for the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) PhD program.
Nicholas Diakopoulos
Northwestern University, USA