(Source: Egor Zakharov)
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to learn and grow, the realism and complexity of deepfakes is only going to grow.
While watching Jim Carrey replace Jack Nicholas in The Shining might make for entertaining content, it’s not so funny when the same technology is used for something more sinister than the cinematic representation of Stephen King’s novels — which is a high bar to beat.
“It is predicted that the media will move to the forefront in 2020 as it becomes widely adopted for both fun and malicious reasons,” says Forcepoint.
For instance, deepfakes can be used to impersonate high-level targets in order to carry out scams where employees are tricked into transferring money into fraudulent accounts. Another way they can be misused is by creating realistic videos of people in compromising situations to blackmail them.
Forcepoint notes that the deepfakes can also be used to manipulate political candidates. “In the arena of politics, we expect deepfakes to be leveraged as a tool to discredit candidates and push inaccurate political messages to voters via social media,” it says.