Realizing Synthetic Media’s Potential While Overcoming Societal Risks

Synthetic media refers to digitally altered or AI-generated video, images, text, audio, and other content designed to credibly mimic reality. Powerful generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models can now produce disinformation-grade fake media with startling realism that we humans struggle to distinguish from authentic content.

Yet if guided and used correctly, synthetic media promises to profoundly benefit society across sectors like entertainment, marketing, scientific research, education, and more. Realizing this potential while overcoming risks requires nuanced understanding of synthetic media’s socio-technical landscape and deliberate, cooperative action from stakeholders.

How Synthetic Media is Made and Used

While most associate synthetic media with “deepfakes” - videos falsifying speeches or actions using machine learning - the technology encompasses various AI-powered techniques:

• Generative Networks: GANs train generative neural networks to create novel, realistic synthetic media outputs through an adversarial process, pitting the generator against a discriminator network judging real vs fake. Diffusion models generate media by reversing a noise diffusion process over time. Transformers employ attention mechanisms to model relationships in data and generate synthetic media without an adversarial setup.
• Manipulation: Algorithms can edit and modify existing media like videos, photos, or audio recordings to alter the original meaning or misrepresent the context. This includes techniques like facial reenactment, lip sync, voice conversion, and gesture/expression editing. These methods enable unethical editing of media to undermine reputations or spread false narratives.
• Simulation: AI algorithms construct completely synthetic fictional scenarios featuring digital doppelgangers of real people, orchestrating them to interact and behave in an AI-authored fabricated context. This enables inventing false or compromising situations with no basis in reality while appearing credible by leveraging AI-rendered likenesses.

Benefits of Synthetic Media

Synthetic media unlocks new possibilities across industries ranging from entertainment to research. Specific benefits include:

• Transforming Filmmaking: Synthetic environments, virtual actors, and adaptable visual effects slash production costs while enabling preservation of historical footage. Archived performances may also be revived using synthetic likenesses, like posthumous performances.
• Broadening Accessibility: AI-generated speech and sign language converts written materials into accessible formats for those with visual or hearing impairments. For example, synthetic media is employed to create sign language avatars, assisting deaf or hard of hearing users.
• Sparking Creativity: Novel synthetic art, music and media stimulates new directions across artistic fields. For instance, AI-generated images can inspire new art forms, while VR environments push boundaries.
• Personalized Engagement: Tailored synthetic video, images and audio aligned to individual interests and demographics improves user experience and campaign efficacy.
• Accelerating R&D: Simulated molecular models, weather systems, and galactic formations enable research formerly hindered by observational limitations. Scientists can efficiently probe hypotheses by manipulating variables in synthetic systems.

Societal Vulnerabilities Introduced by Synthetic Media

As synthetic media quality approaches indistinguishability from reality, several risks arise across society:

The Proliferation of "Deepfakes" and the Erosion of Truth

Advances in artificial intelligence have enabled the creation of hyper-realistic images and videos, known as "deepfakes," that are virtually indistinguishable from real footage. As the technology behind deepfakes continues to advance, their use threatens to undermine public trust and exacerbate societal divisions.

Deepfakes allow the malicious and unscrupulous to depict events that never occurred or to show public figures making inflammatory statements they never actually said. The resulting synthetic media, spread rapidly through social networks, blur the lines between truth and fiction in the public discourse. This proliferation of misinformation complicates the formation of evidence-based opinions on critical issues.

Moreover, realistic deepfakes provide material for conspiracy theories and enable the spread of hyper-partisan propaganda. They breed confusion, doubt, and distrust among the public. If unchecked, the weaponization of deepfakes through social media threatens to hamper democratic debate and divide society further into opposing filter bubbles unable to agree on basic facts.

The Synthetic Media Credibility Crisis

The rapid advancement and proliferation of synthetic media is fostering pervasive skepticism regarding the authenticity of all online content. This presents a credibility crisis whereby the integrity of all digital media has been called into question. The widespread presence of manipulated images, videos, and recordings leaves the legitimacy of even genuine evidence open to doubt. Without robust guardrails and verification measures in place, public faith in vital institutions—from journalism to government—stands to erode.

Synthetic Media and Evading Accountability

Sophisticated and realistic synthetic media capabilities are providing malicious actors with plausible deniability to dismiss legitimate evidence of wrongdoing as fabrication. This threatens accountability. Armed with synthetic persona production and media alteration techniques, criminals, and repressive groups now possess enough ambiguity and cover to plausibly deny misdeeds documented by real evidence. By preemptively casting factual documentation as fakery targeting them, responsibility for unlawful actions can be deflected and real accountability avoided. The weaponization of synthetic media poses dangers to privacy, civil liberties, and rule of law.

Potential for Misuse by Malicious Actors

Synthetic media carries risks spanning disinformation, fraud, reputational harm, and civil liberties violations:

Political Disinformation Campaigns

The ability to fabricate photo-realistic imagery and video enables the production of slanderous misinformation campaigns against political opponents. Autocratic regimes can also leverage synthetic propaganda to clamp down on dissent by actively distorting their populations' grasp on factual realities regarding those in power. In recent years, a deepfake video depicting Gabon's president helped instigate a coup attempt, illustrating the emerging threats synthetic media poses to governmental stability.

Identity Theft and Fraud

Voice synthesis and video alteration technology combined with stolen personal data can enable malicious impersonation attempts to steal finances, tarnish reputations, or unlawfully access sensitive systems. This threatens individuals' security and commercial stability as stronger identity verification systems continue to lag behind technical capacities for exploitation. In 2019, voice synthesis fraud led to $243,000 stolen, demonstrating the financial criminal potential.

Corporate Sabotage and Market Manipulation

Synthetic fake announcements regarding scandals, disasters and data breaches compiled using AI could enable market manipulation campaigns, short selling strategies, and coordinated efforts to undermine public trust in targeted corporate entities.

Realizing the Potential of Synthetic Media While Mitigating Risks

Synthetic media enabled by AI has immense potential for progress in how we communicate, create, and participate in the digital world. However, without the right safeguards in place, it also risks enabling new harms. By taking prudent, collective action across technology, industry, government and civil society, we can maximize its benefits while minimizing its dangers.

Recommendations for Mitigating Risks

Technology Focused Potential Solutions

• Incorporating blockchain attribution ledgers to cryptographically link media assets to their origin, aiding verification when suspicious instances appear online.
• Embedding tamper-proof digital watermarks in original assets to track downstream usage violations against creator consent.
• Further develop AI algorithms to automatically detect subtle technical artifacts in synthetic media and flag potential fakes.

Industry Best Practices

• Technology firms and creative houses should enact transparent policies preventing non-consensual use of synthetic faces/voices.
• Entertainment industry groups should establish ethical guidelines around depicting sensitive personal conditions using synthetic media.
• Research institutions and nonprofits should create public databases of synthetic sample media to advance detection capabilities.

Government Policy Actions

• Enact regulations compelling disclosure when synthetic media is used in advertising, politics, journalism or research.
• Reform educational programs to equip students of all ages with critical thinking skills to identify synthetic media.
• Subsidize workforce retraining programs to help creatives transition their skills to emerging AI-complementary roles.
• Foster inclusive governance of synthetic media to support cultural expression, economic opportunity, and societal progress.
• Proactively enhance media literacy and provide access to synthetic media verification tools.

With openness, accountability and democratic responsibility guiding development, synthetic media can profoundly enrich how we inform, inspire and engage around shared truths. But we must work diligently so its risks do not undermine public trust or destabilize society.

Join the Conversation:

• As synthetic media technology continues to evolve, what do you envision as its most transformative application in the future? Conversely, what potential misuse concerns you the most?

See you in the comments...