"Welcome to the other side of the uncanny valley of profile photographs. The attention of generated imagery has so far focused on "deepfake videos," in which a real person's face is grafted semi-realistically (for now) onto someone else's body. There's a different impact with deep-learning AI-generated fake still-photo faces that look realistic but aren't attempting to match the appearance of any actual person. And they're so new that these images have yet to get a name-perhaps deepfaces will win out.
Deepfaces have a greater potential to add to the noise of troll farms, social-media griefers, and outright scammers and fraudsters because they look legitimate and fail reverse-image searches. As Craig Silverman, a long-time exposer of online frauds and BuzzFeed media editor, says, "I think it presents a big challenge for some of the existing approaches used by investigators, journalists, and police and others to follow a breadcrumb trail.""
"That democratization of forgery is just around the corner. "I would say within another 18 to 24 months, that technology is going to get to a point where the human brain may not be able to decipher it," Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, recently told me. Soon, the forger will consistently fool us."
"We've lost signals of credibility. Before the online era, you would need to shell out a lot of money to print a fake newspaper, or it would look like an obvious counterfeit."