Deepfakes have been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. But can they be used for good purposes as well? The answer is, yes. Deepfake technology can be very powerful and can be used in many productive ways too. In fact it will increasingly have a constructive role to play in many fields like Ecommerce, healthcare, art, history, etc.
Like with any other technology, there are bad actors and good actors, bad uses and good uses. Deepfakes are mostly known for their vicious uses. You've probably seen them already. For example, realistic videos of politicians and celebrities saying outrageous things that they never intended to say.
Deepfakes have even been used as weapons of war and disinformation. During the first weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy where he appears to ask his troops to surrender circulated on social media and was placed on a Ukrainian news website by hackers. Similarly, Jordan Peele made a deepfake video of former US President Barack Obama to precisely make a point about the dangers that deepfakes may pose in spreading political misinformation.
Most of the focus though has gone to these negative aspects of the technology. While all these concerns are more than valid we should also not lose sight of how we can leverage this technology for good. Many times you can find gold if you dig out the dirt.
Deepfakes, often associated with nefarious purposes, are a potent example of generative AI that can also be harnessed for positive applications in diverse fields like ecommerce, healthcare, art, and history. For instance, in the realm of ecommerce and video marketing, deepfake technology can revolutionize customer service by personalizing customer interactions, potentially enhancing customer lifetime value.
As AI-generated videos, deepfakes can also be integrated into email marketing campaigns, using AI video generator tools to create compelling, personalized content. This innovative approach could significantly boost click-through rates, demonstrating the potential of deepfakes as a valuable asset in digital marketing strategies.
Here are some of the ways deep fake technology can be used in positive ways.
4 ways deepfakes are being used for good
1. Personalization
There's a compelling case to be made for the proper commercial use of deepfakes: to allow personalization to happen at scale. Personalization is a good thing but to make it happen at scale is a problem that many businesses face today. Video Personalization is thus the business use case of deepfake technology.
Businesses and their influencers want to be able to connect with their customers or fan bases in a more personal way, especially through mediums like video that are so powerful, and video personalization adds an extra layer of effectiveness. Without AI and deep generative models (the same tech behind deepfakes) this would be impossible to achieve at scale.
Some may question if this would be the authentic thing to do. When used maliciously, deepfakes over-impose something that the individual never intends to say or do in a video. This is definitely not authentic and it's ill-intentioned. But there's a clear difference between that and when you actually intend to say every single word to every single recipient of your video.
Let's say a business or an ecommerce store founder wants to send a personal video message calling each customer by name. It becomes an impossible task when there are hundreds of customers or fans they'd like to greet or personally thank.
This is where the technology can come in handy and finally allow you to execute these great gestures. Customers want to feel special, they want to see the faces behind the brands, they want to connect with the real people behind the products that they are enthusiastic about.
Ecommerce founders and influencers should equip themselves with the tools and technology that enable them to connect and interact personally with each one of their customers to ensure they all have a great experience and feel appreciated. How you are able to execute it will not matter more than the good intention behind the gesture.
Maverick is a great example of how you can achieve video personalization at scale through AI and deepfake technology. Maverick helps businesses especially in the ecommerce space to send personal video messages to all their customers at scale. You only record once and the AI can generate multiple unique versions of the base video where you call each customer by their name.
This is a tool that enables ecommerce stores to finally connect with their customers in a more human way and allows them to act on these nice personal gestures at scale. Each video personalization represents exactly what you want to say to each customer.
Integrating deepfake technology, a form of generative AI, into video personalization offers an innovative approach to customer service, particularly in the ecommerce sector. By using AI video generators like Maverick, businesses can significantly enhance their video marketing strategies.
These AI-generated videos provide a scalable way to personalize customer interactions, potentially boosting click-through rates and customer lifetime value. This technology, particularly beneficial for email marketing campaigns, allows ecommerce platforms to connect with customers on a more personal level.
Leveraging tools like Maverick, which utilize AI text-to-video capabilities, ecommerce businesses can now send highly personalized messages to each customer, enhancing their overall marketing strategy.
2. Medicine and healthcare
Deep generative models can be also harnessed to have a positive impact in healthcare. In the realm of medicine and healthcare, deep generative models, a subset of generative AI, are proving to be revolutionary. These models, particularly GANs (generative adversarial networks), are instrumental in overcoming data scarcity due to privacy concerns or rarity of certain medical conditions.
They are capable of generating realistic medical images, such as brain MRI scans, enhancing the AI's learning process for better diagnosis and treatment. This innovation aligns with the best AI tools in medical research, offering a new dimension to email marketing platforms and ecommerce agencies in the healthcare sector by potentially improving customer service through advanced medical solutions.
Medical researchers often run into issues when trying to spot medical conditions using AI because of lack of data due to privacy reasons, financial constraints, and rare diseases with few examples and little data to pull from. Generative adversarial networks (GANs), also used to create deepfake videos, allow them to create realistic-enough medical images for their AI to learn and be trained on. This can lead to better ways of diagnosing and further treating diseases.
GANs have a lot of potential in medical research. According to the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, hospitals can now collect and use their small samples of historical real patient data and use it to recreate an entirely imaginary population of virtual patients, without having to use and share the data of their live real patients.
In 2018 the Mayo Clinic collaborated with Nvidia and the MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science to create 'fake' brain MRI scans using GANs. They found that they could get their algorithms to spot tumors by training them on these 'fake' medical images and on 10% real images removing the need to collect thousands of real images which can be expensive and daunting.
Deepfakes could also be used in other practical medical settings to help patients who have lost motor, speech or visual abilities (among other impediments and disabilities) to communicate better. This can help medical professionals and family members understand their needs better. They can give the power of better self-expression to people who are unable to do it themselves.
3. Art and History
Deepfake technology can help us recreate the past to be able to connect with it and understand it better. It can allow us to experience things that existed before our times and that we wouldn't be able to comprehend otherwise.
Recently a Scottish company, CereProc, was able to recreate audio of the speech that former US President John F. Kennedy was due to give in Dallas the day he was assassinated. They trained their own deepfake algorithms on audio recordings of the former deceased president to recreate the speech with his own voice.
A similar project from the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality recreated a speech that thankfully was never delivered by former President Richard Nixon. The speech was prepared in case the moon landing mission may have failed in 1969. These projects help us learn what our leaders were thinking and how they were preparing for important events like this.
For a special exhibition some years ago, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida used deepfake technology to have a life-sized recreation of Salvador Dalí (famous surrealist painter) say a number of quotes which he actually wrote during his life. The AI was trained thanks to thousands of hours of the artist's old interviews.
Similarly, AI researchers at Samsung Labs have developed an AI that can create high-resolution avatars from a single still image or painting. They were able to have the Mona Lisa come to life and move in a very natural way allowing us to experience the painting in a completely new way.
Art and history are being enriched through the application of generative AI and AI-generated video technology. Projects like recreating John F. Kennedy's speech or bringing Salvador Dalí to life in a museum exhibit showcase the potential of these AI tools to deepen our connection with historical events and figures.
Similarly, Samsung Labs' development of AI that animates paintings like the Mona Lisa illustrates how text-to-video AI and AI video maker capabilities are revolutionizing our interaction with art. This fusion of technology and history not only enhances educational experiences but also opens new avenues in video marketing and customer engagement for cultural institutions.
4. Media and entertainment
Reuters came up recently with the first synthesized news reports using deepfake technology. They were able to recreate new video reports using data from previous video recordings from popular news presenters. The main innovation here is that they were able to generate news reports that were personalized for each individual viewer as if the popular reporter was presenting them exclusively to each viewer.
Moreover, a UK-based NGO called Malaria No More UK used deepfake technology to create a professional marketing video where well known soccer superstar David Beckham appears delivering a message in nine different languages to raise awareness about malaria and its consequences. Thise video personalization garnered a lot of media attention and was able to be reproduced in many countries around the world in the different languages it was produced.
Nvidia has been also leveraging deepfake technology to improve graphics for video games at scale. Just Eat was able to localize a video commercial featuring Snoop Dogg in Australia thanks to deepfake technology. The original music video which was highly successful in Europe mentions Just Eat but its subsidiary in Australia is called Menu Log. With deepfake technology the video commercial that was shown in Australia adapted Snoop Dogg's video and voice to say Menu Log instead of Just Eat.
In the realm of media and entertainment, the use of generative AI and AI-generated video is rapidly transforming content creation and personalization. Reuters' synthesized news reports exemplify the power of AI video generator technology in delivering customized news content. The innovative campaign by Malaria No More UK, leveraging deepfake technology for video marketing with David Beckham, demonstrates the effectiveness of AI video in global awareness efforts.
Additionally, Nvidia's application of this technology in video games and Just Eat's localized commercial featuring Snoop Dogg underscore the versatility of AI-generated videos in enhancing viewer engagement and catering to diverse audiences.
Conclusion
Deepfake technology, often maligned for its misuse, is showing immense potential in positively transforming various sectors. In ecommerce, it revolutionizes customer service through personalized video marketing, enhancing customer lifetime value and click-through rates. In healthcare, generative AI aids in medical research and patient care. In art and history, deepfakes enable immersive experiences, bringing historical figures and events to life.
Lastly, in media and entertainment, they offer personalized content and innovative marketing strategies. This technological evolution underscores the importance of ethical usage and highlights the transformative power of AI in diverse fields, shaping a future where personalization and creative expression are seamlessly integrated into our daily experiences.
Maverick uses AI-generated video to help ecommerce stores have personalized interactions with each of their customers across their journey. Start boosting your customers’ lifetime value (LTV) today with personal videos at scale!
