The technology industry has continued to advance, causing ripple effects on different industries, including journalism. Deepfakes, a portmanteau of deep learning and fake, is a disruptive technology that fabricates photos, videos, and media types with high accuracy to the point of being convincing. Unfortunately, deepfakes have the ability to share fake news, cause misinformation, and jeopardize the credibility of journalistic sources. That is why the journalistic community must maintain ethical guidelines to ensure that the use of deepfake is transparent and acknowledges when and how it has been employed. However, deepfakes can be useful to the journalism industry as they offer new investigative journalism avenues, bring a new level of immersion and understanding to readers, and protect journalists located in jurisdictions with oppressive regimes on free-speech policies. Nonetheless, it is crucial to develop new tools and methods to verify media content, like AI systems designed to detect deepfakes or initiatives like the Content Authenticity Initiative and Project Origin, aimed at developing industry-wide content provenance standards for combating deepfake misinformation.
ExpressVPN is a virtual private network and cybersecurity company that conducted a study to see how deepfakes affect the public’s perception of reality and how it threatens sources of reliable information.
Chrissy Teigen and James O’Malley are among the celebrities and journalists who fell prey to the Midjourney’s deepfake technology that created false images of the Pope in a white Moncler-like coat and former president Donald Trump in an orange prison jumpsuit being arrested.
