What should marketers be aware of regarding video deepfakes

If you've heard the term "deepfake," you might immediately be thinking of ethically ambiguous, fraudulent, or even downright unsettling videos that have been circulating around the internet in the last couple of years. However, as fake videos - and the AI technology behind these videos continue to get advanced, it is essential that both creators and marketers in all industries understand how they work and explore how they can be applied to stay and keep ahead of the changing environment.

For the uninitiated Deepfakes are fake media that has been altered digitally to substitute the appearance of a person convincingly. This gives them the ability to create videos that look and feel real yet don't. This is why it's normal that they could get a bad rap as they spread misinformation and exploit the likenesses of people.

Similar to any technology, however, it's all in how you use it. Forward-thinking marketers and creators are already using deepfake technology -- legally and responsibly-to develop new forms of art as well as tell brand new stories as well as improve their own video marketing campaigns.

In this piece, we'll cover some examples of how deepfake technology is being utilized to good ends and useful purposes, along with suggestions about how to play around with the tech yourself.

What's a fake deepfake?

A deepfake is a film or audio record of a person whose face or body has been digitally altered. Deepfakes use AI to make likenesses, by using patterns to identify facial appearance, tone as well as movement.

Some other definitions for a deepfake can include synthetic or artificial media or artificially-generated content.

 An overview of deepfakes

The development of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) began the trend towards realistic fakes in the year 2014. GANs comprise two artificial intelligence systems that create fake images and identify forgeries which allows the AI to improve over time.

They can also be made using a deep learning computer network, also known as a variational auto-encoder (VAE). VAEs are trained to encode images into low-dimensional representations of the subject and then decode those representations back into moving images.

The term "deepfake" was not coined until 2017 and, in the year media massed sounded the alarm over deepfakes as the first viral deepfake video featuring Barack Obama and Donald Trump making the rounds across social networks.

However, deepfakes have other uses which are getting more relevant to everyday marketers and not only hackers or internet trolls trying to disseminate false information.

What are the effects of deepfakes?

Machine Learning AI is a crucial component of the process of making a deepfake. Deepfakes rely on this technology to identify patterns in the visuals and information.

To create a fake deepfake video, an artist needs to feed these machine learning algorithm with a lot of actual footage, which then trains the deep neural network to recognize the patterns in tone, facial expressions, and many more. The next step involves combining those learnings with graphics.

There's nothing difficult to make a fake, just existing video or audio of the person you want to imitate. While it could seem difficult at first making a fake, it doesn't require complicated tools - only basic graphic design knowledge as well as video editing abilities.

Examples of artful video deepfakes

Marketers are at the beginning stage of using deepfakes and other AI techniques to create video content and digital marketing. The following deepfake examples don't precisely fit into the marketer's toolbox just yet, but they showcase the capabilities of these AI technologies right now.

 1. Chris Shimojima's "Dolche - Big Man"

This stunning Staff Picked music video from the filmmaker Chris Shimojima takes deepfake technology and flips it over its head, using faces from 14 different performers (and 40 contributions) in a single story. The result is a stunning, unexpected combination of tech as well as human voice.

 2. David Beckham's many different

Malaria must die made use of AI to influence soccer superstar David Beckham to speak in nine languages. They used deepfake technology to make a big splash and dramatically increase their campaigns' reach.

 3. Salvador Dali's museum greeting

It took over 1000 hours of machine learning to enable the Dali museumMuseum to arrive at their deepfake version of Salvador Dali just right. The new technology gives visitors to museums an opportunity to see things from a different angle and allows them to gain knowledge about art directly from the creator himself!

Three common uses of deepfake video tech

Although some of the applications for deepfakes are beyond an typical marketer's capabilities however, there are a variety of creative and exciting ways to leverage the technology of deepfakes in your job.

• Correct sloppy lines within post: If you have even cursory editing experience, you know the trials and frustrations of putting together edited audio clips from a casual interview. Whether your subject misspoke or did not respond in a the full length of a phrase, using the technology of deepfake to fill in the gaps is a great method to keep your post production workflow moving along with no need to reshoot. (Just be sure to get the subject's permission first, of course!)
   
  
• Customize videos for customers on a large the scale of Marketers can use simple personalization through sending video greetings or promotional videos that include prospect's names or the names of their companies. All you require is their names, and some audio recorded from your camera for the deepfake technology to incorporate the information to any video.
   
  
• Translate your video Deepfake technology opens an entirely new realm of simple translation. Instead of using subtitles, AI can add spoken, translated audio or created using an audio bank or from the voice of the actor who recorded it.

New tech, new opportunities

We don't know how the next generation of AI is going to provide however there is one thing that's for certain: deepfakes will not go away. Just as with other AI-powered tech (chatGPT perhaps? ), those who are willing to play with deepfakes with eyes wide open to potential pitfalls are well-equipped to be competitive in the ever-changing world of video.