Being an ethical deepfaker

Deepfakes have many potential uses, both ethical and unethical. Knowing what is ethical or not is sometimes difficult to figure out. For example, are all pornographic deepfakes unethical? What if everyone involved consents? This can be difficult to answer sometimes, and there is a lot of ambiguity, but there are some guidelines that you can follow and some tests you can run to try to ensure your usage is on the right side of the ethical questions.

Consent

Probably the most important ethical concern is one of consent. Consent is quite simple: is everyone involved willing to participate? This is most obviously an issue when it comes to pornographic deepfakes – if not everyone is a consenting participant, then it’s unquestionably unethical.

However, this becomes less obvious when the video is satirical or an actor is put into a role that they didn’t originally perform. Very few deepfake creators can get explicit permission from...