Deepfakes and the Epistemic Apocalypse

Abstract

It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented epistemic apocalypse. In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology of recordings, deepfakes are much less concerning, (2) that the history of photographic manipulation reveals some important precedents, correcting claims about the novelty of deepfakes, and (3) that proposed solutions to deepfakes have been overly focused on technological interventions. My overall goal is not so much to argue that deepfakes are not a problem, but to argue that behind concerns around deepfakes lie a more general class of social problems about the organisation of our epistemic practices.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Habgood-Coote, J https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3427-3325
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Deepfakes; Technochauvinism; Post-Truth; History of Photography; Instruments
Dates:	Published: 9 March 2023 Published (online): 9 March 2023 Accepted: 14 February 2023
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number EU - European Union 818633
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	20 Feb 2023 14:32
Last Modified:	25 Jun 2023 23:15
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Identification Number:	10.1007/s11229-023-04097-3
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:196368

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Deepfakes and the Epistemic Apocalypse

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