Opinion: How the technology behind deepfakes can benefit all of society

Professor Geraint Rees, Pro-Vice-Provost of Artificial Intelligence at UCL, writes that AI can and must be used for good, to complement and augment human endeavour rather than replace it. Recent advances in deepfake video technology have led to a rapid increase of such videos in the public domain in the past year. Face-swapping apps such as Zao, for example, allow users to swap their faces with a celebrity, creating a deepfake video in seconds. These advances are the result of deep generative modelling, a new technology which allows us to generate duplicates of real faces and create new, and impressively true-to-life images, of people who do not exist. This new technology has quite rightly raised concerns about privacy and identity. If our faces can be created by an algorithm, would it be possible to replicate even more details of our personal digital identity or attributes like our voice - or even create a true body double? Indeed, the technology has advanced rapidly from duplicating just faces to entire bodies. Technology companies are concerned and are taking action: Google released 3,000 deepfake videos in the hope of allowing researchers to develop methods of combating malicious content and identifying these more easily.