The verdict was in, and it was a comforting one: Deepfakes are the “dog that never barked.” So said Keir Giles, a Russia specialist with the Conflict Studies Research Centre in the United Kingdom. Giles reasoned that the threat posed by deepfakes has become so entrenched in the public’s imagination that no one would be fooled should they appear. Simply put, deepfakes “no longer have the power to shock.” Tim Hwang agreed but for different reasons, some technical, some practical. Hwang asserted that the more deepfakes are made, the better machine learning becomes at detecting them. Better still, the major platforms are marshaling their efforts to remove deepfakes, leaving them “relegated to sites with too few users to have a major effect.”
[…]