Deepfakes in Business: Should You Worry About This Technology?
You must have witnessed a lot of examples of deepfakes on the internet, although you have not realised it. Deepfakes technology, in other words, is an advanced camera technology that lets you elongate legs, put on animal ears, or create fake videos and audios.
You will be able to make someone’s body movements based on another source. This technology creates faces that never existed. It is not very old technology. Until 2017, this technology was used to put the faces of actresses and celebrities into pornographic videos, but now apart from creating non-consensual sexual images, this technology is used in the business world.
What are deepfakes, and how do they work?
It is a form of artificial intelligence that combines two elements deep learning and fake. In other words, it involves fake videos created using deep learning technology. This technology is generally used to make people believe something is real, which is not, and this is what cybercriminals take advantage of to steal confidential data.
This technology is popular to harm the reputation of celebrities, ministers or millionaires by making them do or say something that they never did or said. This has become a power to create controversies and influence elections.
A deep learning system produces sham images and videos after studying photographs of the target from each angle and then mimicking its body language, including facial expressions and speech patterns. After the creation of a preliminary fake, generative adversarial networks try to identify flaws so an image, audio or video becomes authentic.
Multiple rounds are carried out for improvement, and a final piece is ready. Experts have suggested that manipulated images have already been created with the help of artificial intelligence. No deepfakes technology is required to put a face of a celebrity on the bodies of other people.
Deepfakes may not be associated with it, but it is more dangerous undoubtedly. It is vital to spot such images, audio and videos as they can embarrass and harass people doing something they never did. They have become the most credible tool to spread fake news and malicious content.
Thankfully, tech giants like Facebook are clamping down on deep fakes. This technology is not just used to calumnies celebrities and ministers. It is highly regarded in the business world because of the following two reasons:
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It whittles down the marketing and advertising cost.
Although you can fund such expenses with small business loans from direct lender with bad credit, deepfakes can drastically lower your marketing budget, so you do not need external funding sources. For marketing and advertising campaigns, you need real images of people that express real emotions.
Personalized marketing that influences customers’ buying decisions needs real emotions and feelings. Stock images can help you, but they are very expensive. Now you do not need to spend that much money because you can use deepfake technology to create thousands of royalty-free images with just at a single click. You can buy them at a nominal cost.
They are more affordable than stock images. In fact, you can generate customized images as well without any requirements of technical image editing skills. Since you can create a lot of images using this technology, it allows you to run several marketing campaigns to see which version is engaging your target audience.
Running parallel campaigns using different faces will let you understand how different facial expressions help with personalizing marketing. It allows companies to create effective campaigns for customer conversion.
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It enables easier content creation
Deepfakes technology helps create content smoothly, so small forms can easily compete against big companies despite a small marketing budget. Creating real images and videos is very expensive. You will need to film and edit content. Using the deepfakes technology, you can use millions of images and videos to be used for marketing content.
Cheaper content creation is the best way for start-up businesses to compete against big companies that have a large budget to spend on it. You can use deepfake content to reach out to your target audience. There are a lot of artificial video creation tools that use deepfakes to create videos without involving any human being.
It is a perfect way for small companies to invest in marketing without shelling out a lot of money. However, this technology generally helps with creating videos of product descriptions. You can create such videos with manual effort 15 times quicker than creating one. You just need to have a speech ready to be used in the video.
Deepfakes bring a threat to your business as well
Businesses will struggle to prevent their data. Disgruntled employees and cybercriminals can use deepfake technology to attempt fraud. For instance, deepfake audio technology can be used to mimic the voice of the CEO to encourage listeners to transfer a certain amount of money to a specified bank account. Your business’ reputation can be at stake due to the widespread use of this technology.
Another problem is that deepfakes criminals cannot be prosecuted easily because there is no specific law that defines it. It depends on the nature of the crime, whether civil laws or criminal laws will be applied to a perpetrator. If the former is the case, the perpetrator can take advantage of loopholes to beat the rap. However, the latter allows the right of a business to sue the perpetrator.
Can deepfakes be used for a positive reason?
The media has focused on its negative side, but this technology can be used positively:
- Deepfakes can be used for creating jokes and parodies.
- You can create realistic versions by using advanced software
- The film industry does not need to dub it in other languages. Using deepfakes technology, actors will be edited to make it look like they have been speaking other languages.
- This technology can help getting useful content. Now you do not need to just rely on Wikipedia. However, these sources may not be realistic.
The takeaway
Deepfakes technology is not as expensive as mining bitcoins, but when you look at the dangers you will likely face due to its widespread, you will certainly find it very expensive. If you are looking to use this technology for marketing, it can help save a lot of money, but do not forget that this brings a threat to data.
Your business reputation can be at risk. In fact, experts still do not know how it can affect your business. Research is in progress to find more drawbacks of using this technology. Incorporating deepfakes is not a bad idea for marketing your business, but you must understand its limitation.
If you do not have a considerable size of marketing budget, you should borrow money. If your current outstanding debts are keeping you from borrowing money, you should take out a debt consolidation loan bad credit no guarantor. These are personal loans that let you settle your debts soon. Once you have gotten rid of debt, you can borrow money for the marketing of your business.
Deepfakes can be used for various positive reasons, but they bring some issues along with them. Understand their threats and find ways to cope with them.
