What Marketers Need to Know About Deepfakes

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gives a chilling address, speaking directly to the camera from behind a desk at his company’s base in Menlo Park, California. “Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” Zuckerberg says. 

The truly sinister part of this public web chat is that Zuckerberg never said those words. The Facebook CEO was deepfaked. The video was real enough, picked from a 2017 publicly streamed speech, but the audio was dubbed by an Israeli startup called Canny AI as an exercise to demonstrate the possible dangers of deepfake technology. 

“Deepfakes have been described as a propaganda weapon,” says Bill Bronske, senior solutions architect at Globant, an internet technology and software development company. “I’ve also heard them described as a potential serious threat to democracy, as well as a host of other negative descriptions. Those descriptions can be accurate, but I think we can more effectively describe deepfakes as a tool.” 

A deepfake is when video or audio is manipulated in a way that is undetectable to people viewing or listening, so that the result is a piece of media that seems authentic. In the era of deepfakes there are two outcomes for brands: They can become a target, or take control of the creative technology and use it to their advantage. …[Read More]