Positive Use Cases of Deepfakes
Deepfakes can create numerous possibilities and opportunities for all, regardless of who they are and how they interact with the world around them.
Technology is an excellent enabler and can be very empowering. New ideas and capabilities for empowerment have emerged because of the advancements in data science and Artificial intelligence. AI can create possibilities and opportunities for all people, regardless of who they are and how they listen, speak, or communicate.
AI-Generated Synthetic media, also known as deepfakes, have many positive use cases. AI-Generated Synthetic Media, aka Deepfakes, advances have clear benefits in certain areas, such as accessibility, education, film production, criminal forensics, and artistic expression.
In this article,I will explore some of the positive use cases of deepfakes. I firmly believe that as technology evolves and societies adjudicate the deepfake phenomenon, most of the use cases of deepfakes will be to improve people’s lives and empower communities and institutions.
Technology can give people a voice, purpose, and an ability to make impact at scale and with speed.
Accessibility
Artificial intelligence can build tools to hear, see, and soon with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), reason with increasing accuracy. AI-Generated Synthetic media can help make the accessibility tools smarter and, in some cases, even affordable and personalizable, which can help people augment their agency and gain independence. Technology, specifically AI-based tools, can bring accessible solutions to all.
Deepfake can accelerate the accessibility quest to improve equity.
Microsoft’s Seeing.ai and Google’s Lookout leverage AI for recognition and synthetic voice to narrate objects, people, and the world. AI-Generated synthetic media can power personalized assistive navigation apps for pedestrian travel.
Canetroller, a haptic cane controller, can help visually impaired navigate the virtual reality world with simulation and cane interactions. It can enable people with visual impairments to navigate a virtual environment by transferring their cane skills into the virtual world. The technology can help bring equity and empowerment.
For the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients’ synthetic voice is very empowering as the horrible disease impacts the ability to speak, communicate, and motor skills. Imagine being able to talk in your own voice with your loved ones even after losing the ability to speak. Team Gleason, which provides technology, equipment, and services for people living with ALS, is working with technology companies to enable and develop AI-Generated synthetic media scenarios for people living with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
There are other use cases of Synthetic voice. VOCALiD leverages voicebank and proprietary voice blending technology to create unique vocal personas for any device that turns text into speech for those with speech and hearing difficulties. Synthetic voice is also essential to enable such patients to be independent. Deepfake voice can also help with speech impediments since birth.
Education
Deepfake technology facilitates numerous possibilities in the education domain. Schools and teachers have been using media, audio, video in the classroom for quite some time. Deepfakes can help an educator to deliver innovative lessons that are far more engaging than traditional visual and media formats.
AI-Generated synthetic media can bring historical figures back to life for a more engaging and interactive classroom. A synthetic video of reenactments or voice and video of a historical figure may have more impact, engagement, and will be a better learning tool. For example, JFK’s resolution to end the cold was speech, which was never delivered, was recreated using synthetic voice with his voice and speaking style will clearly get students to learn about the issue in a creative way.
Synthetic human anatomy, sophisticated industrial machinery, and complex industrial projects can be modeled and simulated in a mixed reality world to teach students and collaborate using Microsoft Hololens.
Creative use of synthetic voice and video can increase overall success and learning outcomes with scale and limited cost.
Art
For many decades, Hollywood has used high-end CGI, VFX, and SFX technologies to create artificial but believable worlds for compelling storytelling. In the 1994’s movie, Forest Gump, the protagonist meets JFK and other historical figures. The creation of the scenario and effect was accomplished using CGI and different techniques with millions of dollars. These days sophisticated CGI and VFX technologies are used in movies to generate synthetic media for telling a captivating story.
Deepfakes can democratize the costly VFX technology as a powerful tool for independent storytellers at a fraction of the cost.
Deepfakes can be a great tool to realistically realize the primary tenant of reflection, stretching, contortion, and appropriation of real events in comedy or parody. AI-Generated synthetic media can bring unprecedented opportunities in the entertainment business, and we see a lot of realization of the opportunity by independent creators or YouTube. Some great examples of movie deepfake using GANS are YouTube creators like ctrl shift face and shamook.
Cultural and entertainment businesses can use deepfakes for artistic purposes. Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, created an exhibition called Dalí lives, bringing him back to life using deepfakes for visitors to interact and take a selfie with surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Similarly, Samsung’s AI lab in Moscow brought Mona Lisa to life by using Deepfake technology.
In the video gaming industry, AI-generated graphics and imagery can accelerate the speed of game creation. Nvidia demoed a hybrid gaming environment created by deepfakes and is working on bringing it to market soon.
Audio storytelling and book narration is another good use case of synthetic voice. The author’s synthetic voice font can be used to create the author’s book’s audio format. Businesses can use synthetic voice-overs of the same actor in different languages to broaden the reach of their content. The creative voice technology to implement the above scenarios must be used ethically and responsibly[1] with a robust consent framework as it has a direct impact on the livelihood and agency of a voice artist.
Autonomy & Expression
Synthetic media can help human rights activists and journalists to remain anonymous in dictatorial and oppressive regimes. Using technology to report out atrocities on traditional or social media can be very empowering for citizen journalists and activists. Deepfake can be used to anonymize voice and faces to protect their privacy.
Deepfakes may be used to create avatar experiences for individuals online for self-expression. Personal digital avatar gives autonomy and can help individuals to extend their purpose, ideas, and belief and enable self-expression, which otherwise may be difficult for some[2]. Individuals suffering from certain physical or mental disabilities could use synthetic avatars of themselves for online self-expression.
Deepfakes can give individuals new tools for self-expression and integration in the online world.
Deep Empathy, a UNICEF and MIT project, utilizes deep learning to learn the characteristics of Syrian neighborhoods affected by conflict. It then simulates how cities around the world would look amid a similar conflict. The project created synthetic war-torn images of Boston, London and other key cities around the world to help increase empathy for victims of a disaster region.
There are voice technology startups that will create synthetic voice as a new kind of bereavement therapy or help people remember the deceased and connect with them.
Reach and Message Amplification
In April last year, a health charity partnered with David Beckham to produce a video and voice campaign to help end malaria. In the “malaria no more” campaign, Beckham spoke nine languages seamlessly for public appeal. The social campaign was a great example of using deepfakes to broaden the reach of a public message. Synthesia, the company behind the Beckham video, and VOCALiD, a voice startup, create tools to natively localize video and audio content for learning tools, brand marketing, audience engagement, customer service, and public messaging to broaden the reach and amplification of the message.
Text to Speech models can assist podcast creation by podcaster’s voice font to create synthetic audio from text with fewer mistakes and more speed.
Deepfakes can be used by influencers to broaden their reach and increase their audience. Using deepfakes, a brand can reach many customers with highly targeted and personalized messaging. Zalando, with Cara Delevigne executed a campaign, which can become even more personal with influencer video shots and voice fonts. Lil Miquela, a CG 19-year old “taco truck expert” and social media personality, has 2.4m followers. Digital Models, AI-Generated deepfakes are becoming a new trend in fashion and brand marketing.
AI Foundation is creating personal AI for influencers and celebrities, with their consent, to engage and amplify their reach with the audience, create deeper engagement with the fans, and deliver personal experiences at scale. AI Foundation recently launched a personal digital avatar of Deepak Chopra.
Deepfakes will take influencer marketing to another level.
A few days ahead of the Delhi elections, a politician in India created a deepfake to reach out to different linguistic voters. It was the first documented use of a deepfake by a political party for campaigning purposes.
Public Safety & Digital reconstruction
Reconstructing the crime scene is a forensic science and art, using inductive and deductive reasoning and evidence. AI-Generated synthetic media can help reconstruct the scene with the interrelationship of spatial and temporal artifacts. In 2018, a team of civil investigators used cell phone videos, autopsy reports, and surveillance footage to reconstruct a virtual crime scene.
Innovation
Data and AI are helping in digital transformation and automation in many industries. Deepfake or AI-Generated Synthetic media is becoming a foundation to engage customers and provide personalized value. Reuters demonstrated a fully AI-Generated deepfake presenter-led sports news summary system to help personalize news at scale. In the fashion retail business, deepfakes can help turn customers into models by virtually trying out the latest apparel and accessories[3].
An exciting app will capture customers’ faces, bodies, and even micro mannerisms to generate a deepfake and try out the latest fashion trends. Data Grid, a Japanese artificial intelligence company, created an artificial intelligence engine that automatically generates virtual models for advertising and fashion. The deepfake approach gives the ability for brands to have a virtual trial room for users to experience products before buying them. Retail brands can also engage customers at home by creating an AI-generated mixed reality world to try, furnish, and decorate their space.
Microsoft Hololens opens enterprise and industrial mixed reality innovative scenarios to provide value. Product Visualize lets customers explore an industrial product visually. Teams and technicians can work together in industrial products together with Remote Assist, an mixed reality collaboration tool.
AI technologies can also be used to enhance and improve the resolution of low-resolution images. These enhancing techniques to build deepfakes are super useful for older media or media created by low-resolution lenses. Google published a paper to create high-resolution images using Latent Adversarial Generator. Microsoft Research published an article to enhance and fix imperfections of the degraded photos using triplet Domain Translation Networks.
Synthetic data can empower medical researchers to develop new ways of treating diseases without actual patient data. They can use AI-Generated synthetic data for the training model to yield similar results. NVIDIA, MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science and the Mayo Clinic showed how they used GANs–algorithms that iterate and improve by competing against each other–to create synthetic brain MRI images with tumors[4]. By training algorithms on synthetic medical images and combining them with just 10% real images, they became just as good at spotting tumors as algorithms trained only on real images.
Deepfakes may also mitigate some of the patient privacy concerns.
A vast amount of training data is required by deep learning algorithms to create an efficient model and even to develop deepfake detection models. Since there are not many real-life deepfakes, companies like Facebook had to create synthetic media and deepfakes for the Facebook Deepfake detection challenge[5]
Conclusion
Deepfakes provide an excellent opportunity to have a positive impact on our lives. AI-Generated synthetic media can be very empowering and a great enabler. Deepfakes can give people a voice, purpose, and ability to impact scale and speed. New ideas and capabilities for empowerment have emerged from all walks of life, from art, expression, and public safety to accessibility and business. Deepfakes can create possibilities for all people irrespective of their limitations by augmenting their agency
However, as access to synthetic media technology increases, so does the risk of exploitation. Deepfakes can be used to damage reputations, fabricate evidence, defraud the public, and undermine trust in democratic institutions.
[In the next post, I will discuss some of the malicious use cases of deepfakes].
References
[1] https://medium.com/microsoft-design/responsible-innovation-the-next-wave-of-design-thinking-86bc9e9a8ae8
[2] https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1640&context=faculty_scholarship
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebaron/2019/07/29/digital-doubles-the-deepfake-tech-nourishing-new-wave-retail/