I'm a little disappointed that it took this long for people to get over the 'OMG celebrity porno' thing about deepfakes to actually start dealing with the real potential consequences. Deepfakes open up an amazingly large list of questions, from the mundane to the truly challenging. That someone will see imagery that fulfills a sexual fantasy is, by far, one of the most trite and harmless possible uses of this technology.<p>Realtime video synthesis has been around for awhile. I recall reading in 1999 that if you watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, the advertisements on the buildings you see won't be the advertisements that are actually present in real life. They were being replaced on the fly with different ads. Now, it's basically possible to replace people. Everywhere that people appear. And this isn't something we can deal with simply by going off of gut reaction and intuition, it really raises significant questions.<p>Who will be the first politician to use a younger version of themselves to promote themselves? Which celebrity will be first to replace not the face, but their body, in film to make themselves more attractive? Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? Or maybe they'll only bring in the actual celebrity for close shots?<p>This can be done on commodity hardware, and will only get easier. It will be used for schoolyard bullying, for amazingly uplifting and important artistic works, for debasement and aggrandizement. It's one of these things that we've got to do some thinking about as a society.