A month in the past, the consulting firm Accenture offered a possible consumer an uncommon and attention-grabbing pitch for a brand new mission. Instead of the standard slide deck, the consumer noticed deepfakes of a number of actual staff standing on a digital stage, providing completely delivered descriptions of the mission they hoped to work on.

“I wanted them to meet our team,” says Renato Scaff, a senior managing director at Accenture who got here up with the thought. “It’s also a way for us to differentiate ourselves from the competition.”

The deepfakes have been generated—with staff’ consent—by Touchcast, an organization Accenture has invested in that provides a platform for interactive shows that includes avatars of actual or artificial individuals. Touchcast’s avatars can reply to typed or spoken questions utilizing AI fashions that analyze related info and generate solutions on the fly.

“There’s an element of creepy,” Scaff says of his deepfake staff. “But there’s a bigger element of cool.”

Deepfakes are a potent and harmful weapon of disinformation and reputational hurt. But that very same expertise is being adopted by firms that see it as a substitute as a intelligent and catchy new option to attain and work together with clients.

Those experiments aren’t restricted to the company sector. Monica Arés, govt director of the Innovation, Digital Education, and Analytics Lab at Imperial College Business School in London, has created deepfakes of actual professors that she hopes could possibly be a extra partaking and efficient option to reply college students’ questions and queries exterior of the classroom. Arés says the expertise has the potential to extend personalization, present new methods to handle and assess college students, and increase pupil engagement. “You still have the likeness of a human speaking to you, so it feels very natural,” she says.

As is commonly the case nowadays, we now have AI to thank for this unraveling of actuality. It has lengthy been doable for Hollywood studios to repeat actors’ voices, faces, and mannerisms with software program, however in recent times AI has made comparable expertise broadly accessible and nearly free. Besides Touchcast, firms together with Synthesia and HeyGen supply companies a option to generate avatars of actual or faux people for shows, advertising, and customer support.

Edo Segal, founder and CEO of Touchcast, believes that digital avatars could possibly be a brand new approach of presenting and interacting with content material. His firm has developed a software program platform referred to as Genything that can permit anybody to create their very own digital twin.

At the identical time, deepfakes have gotten a serious concern as elections loom in lots of international locations, together with the US. Last month, AI-generated robocalls that includes a faux Joe Biden have been used to unfold election disinformation. Taylor Swift additionally lately turned a target of deepfake porn generated utilizing broadly obtainable AI picture instruments.

“Deepfake images are certainly something that we find concerning and alarming,” Ben Buchanan, the White House Special Adviser for AI, informed WIRED in a current interview. The Swift deepfake “is a key data point in a broader trend which disproportionately impacts women and girls, who are overwhelmingly targets of online harassment and abuse,” he mentioned.

A brand new US AI Safety Institute, created below a White House govt order issued final October, is at the moment creating requirements for watermarking AI-generated media. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and different tech firms are additionally creating technology designed to spot AI forgeries in what’s turning into a high-stakes AI arms race.

Some political makes use of of deepfakery, nonetheless, spotlight the twin potential of the expertise.

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, delivered a rallying address to his occasion’s followers final Saturday regardless of being caught behind bars. The former cricket star, jailed in what his occasion has characterised as a army coup, gave his speech utilizing deepfake software program that conjured up a convincing copy of him sitting behind a desk and talking phrases that he by no means truly uttered.

As AI-powered video manipulation improves and turns into simpler to make use of, enterprise and shopper curiosity in reputable makes use of of the expertise is more likely to develop. The Chinese tech big Baidu lately developed a way for customers of its chatbot app to create deepfakes for sending Lunar New Year greetings.

Even for early adopters, the potential for misuse isn’t fully out of thoughts. “There’s no question that security needs to be paramount,” says Accenture’s Scaff. “Once you have a synthetic twin, you can make them do and say anything.”