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One of the biggest threats to society is the unrestricted and unregulated use of Deepfake technology.

As the growth of this technology continues and goes further into the mainstream, the whole concept of #Fakenews and being able to determine what is “truly real” becomes blurred. Among the negative impacts of the unregulated, free use of people's faces is an even greater impact on all forms of content businesses than what the mass availability of MP3 technology and free downloads did to the music industry.

Music piracy decimated the music industry… how will “facial piracy” enabled by deepfake technology affect all forms of visual content?

How would you feel if someone “took” your face and used it for a purpose you never authorized, or to spread to a message you are completely opposed to? What if someone simply created a new piece of content using your face and profited, but you never licensed it and will not gain anything from its creation.

In the following video, the faces of 5 well known personalities are “appropriated” for the benefit of the creator of this video. This effectively strikes me as “Facial Piracy” in a very similar vein to what was done to the music industry with the arrival of MP3s and peer-to-peer music swapping.

Blockchain is being explored as a powerful tool to authenticate and preserve the integrity of video content, but without government intervention and regulations – deepfake has the potential of distorting reality to the point where people will not trust anything they see.

You be the judge:

What do you think? Will deepfake technology destroy all visual artforms? Or am I making too much of a big deal out of something harmless and irrelevant? Leave your comments below.