Improvement in image synthesis, from, via Ian Goodfellow

The Path to Deepfake Harm

How, when, and why synthetic media can be used for harm

This is post is an excerpted section from a working paper with Jess Whittlestone (shared in 2019, but minimal updates were needed). While the full paper was focused on synthetic media research, this section is far more broadly applicable and often referenced in other contexts—it applies in general to malicious use of technologies, from video generation, to language models (e.g. GPT-3), to cryptocurrencies. This piece jumps into the meat, so for more background on this topic, see the paper overview here.

Factors Impacting the Likelihood of Harm

Below we explore the factors influencing whether a new capability overcomes activation energy and friction, and will lead to sustained mal-use in practice. We use artificial voice cloning — “copying” a voice so that it can be used to say anything — as an illustrative example. It is a relatively new capability with many useful applications (e.g. in voice translation and audio editing) but also significant potential for mal-use (e.g. in scams, political propaganda, and market manipulation).

1. Awareness: Do actors with malicious intent know about a capability and believe it can help them?

We can break this down into:

  • ‘Convincibility’ of those with resources: Are there compelling arguments, perhaps by authoritative third parties, for the effectiveness of new capabilities? For example, a scammer who realizes that voice cloning is useful might need to be able to convince a superior that this technology is effective enough to justify the costs and overcome institutional inertia.

2. Deployment: How difficult is it for adversaries to weaponize this capability in practice?

For a capability to be deployed for malicious purposes, adversaries not only need to be aware but to have the necessary skills and resources to productize and weaponize the capability. This isn’t a binary — e.g. having ML expertise vs. not — but rather many different factors will influence how easy a capability is to weaponize. At the extreme, we might have a product which can be immediately used by anyone, regardless of technical capability (such as free to use voice cloning software).

  • Reproducibility: How difficult is it to reproduce a capability given the information available? (e.g. is it easy to replicate a voice cloning capability given the available papers, models, code, etc.?)
  • Modifiability: How difficult is it to modify or use a system in order to enable mal-use? (e.g. if a voice cloning product makes it difficult to clone a voice without consent or watermarks, how hard is it to overcome those limitations?)
  • Slottability: Can new capabilities be slotted into existing organizational processes or technical systems? (e.g. are there already established processes for phone scams into which new voice generation capabilities can be slotted easily, without any need to change goals or strategy?)
  • Environmental factors: How does the existing ‘environment’ or ‘infrastructure’ impact the usefulness of the new capability for malicious actors? (E.g. currently, in the US it is easy to ‘spoof’ phone numbers to make it appear like a call is coming from a family member, which could impact the likelihood of voice cloning being weaponized for phone scams.)

3. Sustained use: How likely is it that a capability will lead to sustained use with substantial negative impacts?

Even if adversaries are aware of and able to weaponize some new capability, whether or not this leads to sustained use depends on:

  • Assessment of ROI: If malicious actors have no way of assessing whether new capabilities are helping them better achieve their goals, or if their assessments are flawed, they might not continue to put resources into using those capabilities.

Access Ratchets

We can think of this as a kind of progression, from a theoretical capability to scaled-up use in practice. Once a technology has progressed down this path and has become easy to use, and proven to have high ROI for mal-use, it can be much more difficult to address than at earlier stages — we call this the access ratchet (like a ratchet, increased access to technology cannot generally be undone). For any capability with potential for mal-use, it is therefore worth thinking about where it currently sits on this progression: how much attention and interest it is receiving; whether it has been weaponized and/or how costly it would be to do so; and whether it’s likely to be, or already in sustained use. This can help us think more clearly about where the greatest risks of mal-use are, and different kinds of interventions that might be appropriate or necessary in a given situation.

Indirect Harms and Disinformation Ratchets

Sometimes the path to harm from synthetic media will be fairly direct and immediate: such as a person losing their money, returning to our example of voice cloning being used in financial scams.


People often ask why synthetic media isn’t a significant problem yet, particularly given all of the prior concern around it. Was this a false fear?


Get the Medium app
