Clearly, the tech has come a long way since Max Headroom.

Augmented by machine learning, today’s AI-generated faces are imbued with physical characteristics that engender trust. These synthetic faces are so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from real humans.  

Generated Photos has a bank of many millions of photos of AI-created people leveraging AI and machine learning to train a GAN – or generative adversarial network – on data sets of people allowing it to make unlimited fake people. Need a new unidentifiable, untraceable profile pic? All set.  

Nightingale’s and Hany’s research found that the average rating for synthetic faces was 7.7% more trustworthy than the average rating for real faces, a statically significant finding.

Which raises more questions. Of course, synthetic influencers like Lil Miquela have been around for a while, generating millions of followers and millions of dollars for the companies who created them. 

But recent technical advancements suggest dark implications and present a significant (and not new) ethical dilemma. Think of the consequences of even more sophisticated deep fakes populating people’s feeds. We’re creating a world where the authenticity of any image or video can be called into question, further blurring the line between truth and fake content—a world where any image or video can be faked.

The global political implications are beyond scary, especially in parts of the world where checking content’s veracity is simply not possible.  

This should scare you.