I figured the first nefarious uses of Deepfake technology would be to smear politicians. Guess I didn’t think small enough.
A Bucks County woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to harass rivals on her daughter’s cheerleading squad, DA says
A Bucks County woman anonymously sent coaches on her teen daughter’s cheerleading squad fake photos and videos that depicted the girl’s rivals naked, drinking, or smoking, all in a bid to embarrass them and force them from the team, prosecutors say.
The woman, Raffaela Spone, also sent the manipulated images to the girls, and, in anonymous messages, urged them to kill themselves, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub’s office said.
Ah, the internet, always coming up with new ways to make people horrible and to give horrible people new power.
Of course, this indicates that this sort of thing will probably become reasonably common among random horrible people… if it isn’t already. Expect to see it used to blackmail people… if, say, a husband is known to cheat on his wife but clear evidence can’t be had, just make some up. Something that looks reasonable might be used to convince said philanderer to cough up a bucket of cash. On the other hand… if you expect that your bad behavior will be used against you, the thing to do is to whip up some deepfakes of your own showing a very convincing version of you doing some very bad things… but things that you can prove convincingly that you didn’t do. Say, the video of the Very Bad Things can be proved to have come from a movie or YouTube or something else that can be proved to predate your “bad behavior.” Thus when the *real* evidence against you comes in, you can say “Jeez, look at this… yet more deepfaked lies. Boy, they’re getting better at it though!”
And some people wonder why I don’t go spammin’ my face all over Ye Olde Internets.