The first time I heard about deepfake, it was on YouTube. I was scrolling that day and I saw this video of my favorite player talking, his exact voice. Then I sent that video to a friend who later told me that he did not say anything like such.
In my country today, this deepfake of a thing has caused more harm than good because the voices of some people have been used to pass a wrong message across, and as we all know it, fake information spreads faster and this has tarnished the images of some people who did not know on time. Deepfakes move faster than we can imagine especially these days that the share on our social media is not far from our hands and overnight, the career of someone can get ruined because of this.
But then, can we put this one technology, my answer will be no, because that was just an invitation with pure motives, it is we humans that has turned it upside down. Because just as we can use a blade to cut our nails, we can also use it to cut the skin. The issue here is how we decide to make use of deep fake because it is like a mirror. We see ourselves in it.
Lemme use this as an example. Let's picture a school in an environment with insufficient teachers. The use of a deep voice can be used to communicate some subject effectively in a well explanatory way to some of the students using a familiar voice and in the language that they can understand easily.
And to be sincere, deep fake can be used in a lot of good ways most especially by the healthcare sector, and I have been seeing some videos of such where a doctor took his time to explain some necessary things to his patients who are finding it hard to read things easily. Hearing and watching this video or voice notes can help in a lot of ways expecially for those who have the phobia of going to the hospital.
However, to make this more effective, I think proper and strong rules must be put in place, people need to be educated about digital education too, and we all must be able to easily identify what is fake, real, edited. Because a lot of these good tools can be manipulated when they enter the wrong hands.
And it is no news that we are in the tech age already, so media literacy must be encouraged for everyone, those in the school, those in the market, those in the government house, those in the office. And even our school, and religious places can incorporate this into what they teach because we must be very sensitive and not turn a blind eye to what we click and watch these days because these are the basic things that give us peace, protect what we listen to and watch, and determine who to trust.
So what I would conclude with is that we should all be sensitive with how we handle this deep fake of a thing. We should not reject it or make it our god. And I think that we should only handle it like a time bomb waiting to explode if we misuse it.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by MetaAi