TOK Technology vs Ethics: Deepfakes

A video of your grandma in a lude position? The president of the United States calling Vladimir Putin a
“poo-poo head”? The answer to your confusion is deepfakes. Deepfakes, although harmless in the given
examples pose a tremendous threat to both our identity and the concept of reality. In this essay I will
unravel the topic of deepfakes with consequentialism and deontology.

Your identity is an authentic thing that you have, and your face is what distinguishes you from
someone else. It is on your passport so you can go to different countries and driver's license. However,
the development of deepfakes poses a tremendous threat to this authenticity, because you can be
depicted in multiple different situations that you haven’t been in. This could be you in pornography,
saying hate speech or the surveillance footage of a bank robbery which evidently can pose a threat to
politics, careers and court cases. However, the largest usage of deepfakes on the internet are women in
pornography, encompassing around 97%. This was the reality of a twitch streamer QTCinderella who
had her face deepfaked on to porn actors without consent which is sexual assault by definition. This
footage was then sent to her 17 year old cousin and other family members to harass and haunt her.

From an altruist consequentialist viewpoint, QTCinderella would have to succumb to the abuse of their
identity for the entertainment of others. This means that some aspects of deepfakes would be ethically
acceptable such as pornography and perhaps surveillance footage if used as entertainment according
to an altruist. However, paradoxically the exploitation of your identity would impose a threat to our
concept of reality due to an erosion of trust. The erosion of trust has a net negative impact on our
society since many of the operators within our society are based on trust. It would also mean that our
trust in the news and other media would decrease. An example of this is illustrated in wars where
opposite sides create fake news as propaganda. However, removing this erosion of trust by enforcing
watermarks to highlight it as a deepfake would make the result a net positive again. Thus, from a
consequentialist viewpoint, the use of deepfakes which are labelled as deepfakes is morally acceptable.
Conversely, from a deontologist perspective, the idea of universalisability is tough to digest. A
reasonable person would tend to consume and create content regardless of if it is real or not, if not,
fiction would not be popular. Thus, universalisability is satisfied. Nevertheless, using people’s faces is
not incommensurable therefore regardless of universalisability people aren’t valued equally if exploited
for other’s entertainment. Because even though it is fiction, implying that it does not include people
from real life, it does mean that there will be an impact on others because of the blurred line between
reality and fiction.

This is a good example of how Kant’s deontology calls for supererogatory actions compared to
consequentialism since it considers the people who are exploited. Whereas consequentialism cynically
acknowledges the happiness rooted in entertainment to the masses with limited people affected
because deepfakes revolve around mass productions of imitative content of an insubstantial amount of
people. However, with this same logic slavery is justified because it resulted in more happiness for the
West than the suffering of the slaves which alludes to the weakness of consequentialism.
Consequentialism is bad when it comes to the exploitation of others since the nature of exploitation
can benefit multiple people while using one person. Another example other than slavery could be the
murder of Junko Furuta who was tortured for 44 days by multiple guys which again would be justified
from a consequentialist perspective due to the happiness gained for the torturers. This is undeniably
the antithesis of morality and the unravelling of ethical issues of deepfakes is a similar case. In contrast,
deontology considers incommensurability which directly addresses cases of exploitation which
consequentialism cannot. Therefore, deontology is best suited to the topic.