The Cost of Deepfakes Goes Beyond Stolen Millions of Dollars

Preserving human existence necessitates mitigating the adverse impacts of deepfakes.

The film industry is witnessing a revolution with deepfake technology. Filmmakers have been leveraging deepfakes in recent years to unlock new realms of creativity and storytelling, including resurrecting late actors, creating hyper-realistic visual effects, and integrating digital doubles seamlessly. For instance, deepfakes were employed to digitally rejuvenate Robert DeNiro in The Irishman and to create a virtual twin of Paul Walker in Fast & Furious 7.

However, the implications of deepfakes extend beyond the film industry’s impressive applications of the technology. A recent case involved a Hong Kong company falling prey to a scam, losing $25.6 million due to deepfake technology. The fraudsters used AI to create a multi-participant video call where all participants, except the unsuspecting victim, were digital replicas of actual employees. The impersonated chief financial officer then directed the victim to transfer funds, resulting in a significant monetary loss.

Deepfake technology has been instrumental in numerous corporate frauds. In 2021, fraudsters used deepfake to mimic the voice of an executive from a Japanese company, deceiving a manager into transferring $35 million to them.

In another case, two fraudsters breached China’s tax system by creating identities with facial images obtained from the black market. They established a shell company that generated fake tax invoices totaling up to $76.2 million. Last year, a deepfake image depicting an explosion at the Pentagon caused a shocking $500 billion plunge in the stock market!

Deepfakes are artificial media that use artificial intelligence (AI) to alter the appearance or voice of real individuals. They can be used for entertainment, education, and malicious purposes. For instance, deepfakes can create the illusion of someone saying or doing something they never did or generate convincing replicas of celebrities or public figures.

The term deepfake originates from deep learning, the type of AI used in their creation. Deepfakes are created by using machine learning algorithms, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), to train a neural network on a…