On the Horizon: Interactive and Compositional Deepfakes
This work highlights a critical societal problem by warning about the costly implications of these deepfake classes for disinformation and public trust, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deepfake concerns.
The paper identifies the emerging threats of interactive and compositional deepfakes, which use advanced multimodal interaction and synthetic content integration to create realistic impersonations and persuasive synthetic histories, potentially leading to a post-epistemic world where fact cannot be distinguished from fiction.
Over a five-year period, computing methods for generating high-fidelity, fictional depictions of people and events moved from exotic demonstrations by computer science research teams into ongoing use as a tool of disinformation. The methods, referred to with the portmanteau of "deepfakes," have been used to create compelling audiovisual content. Here, I share challenges ahead with malevolent uses of two classes of deepfakes that we can expect to come into practice with costly implications for society: interactive and compositional deepfakes. Interactive deepfakes have the capability to impersonate people with realistic interactive behaviors, taking advantage of advances in multimodal interaction. Compositional deepfakes leverage synthetic content in larger disinformation plans that integrate sets of deepfakes over time with observed, expected, and engineered world events to create persuasive synthetic histories. Synthetic histories can be constructed manually but may one day be guided by adversarial generative explanation (AGE) techniques. In the absence of mitigations, interactive and compositional deepfakes threaten to move us closer to a post-epistemic world, where fact cannot be distinguished from fiction. I shall describe interactive and compositional deepfakes and reflect about cautions and potential mitigations to defend against them.