This argument is going in circles, though. Plain-old-media has been used, to great success, to manufacture news.
Consider, nearly a decade ago, the BBC (And that's an outfit that many believe to have journalistic integrity) airing video footage of a protest in India, with people waving Indian flags, and claiming it to be video footage of anti-Ghadaffi protests in Libya, in the run-up to the Libya bombing campaigns. Millions of people have seen it, a few of them noticed that they are being fed a line of horseshit, and then they shrug their shoulders and go on with their day, because Gell-Mann amnesia is probably a real effect, and they didn't actually care too deeply about this.
Worrying about deepfakes is a lot like worrying, around the invention of scissors that they could be used to stab people. Yes, they can be, but knives have been around for a lot longer, are easier to make, and work just as well.
Going through the trouble of deepfakes, to convince the subset of people that will not be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies, but will be convinced by deepfake-multimedia-lies seems like a poor ROI maneuver - especially given that we live in a world where the number of people that can be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies is sufficient to achieve whatever end you seek.
Consider, nearly a decade ago, the BBC (And that's an outfit that many believe to have journalistic integrity) airing video footage of a protest in India, with people waving Indian flags, and claiming it to be video footage of anti-Ghadaffi protests in Libya, in the run-up to the Libya bombing campaigns. Millions of people have seen it, a few of them noticed that they are being fed a line of horseshit, and then they shrug their shoulders and go on with their day, because Gell-Mann amnesia is probably a real effect, and they didn't actually care too deeply about this.
Worrying about deepfakes is a lot like worrying, around the invention of scissors that they could be used to stab people. Yes, they can be, but knives have been around for a lot longer, are easier to make, and work just as well.
Going through the trouble of deepfakes, to convince the subset of people that will not be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies, but will be convinced by deepfake-multimedia-lies seems like a poor ROI maneuver - especially given that we live in a world where the number of people that can be convinced by plain-old-multimedia-lies is sufficient to achieve whatever end you seek.