Beyond Porn and Discreditation: Epistemic Promises and Perils of Deepfake Technology in Digital Lifeworlds
Open accessAbstract
Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently most of their reach is limited to pornography, and they are also used to discredit people. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers. Our goal is to help set an agenda around these matters, to make sure this technology can help realize epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. Our project is exploratory in nature, and we do not aim to offer conclusive answers at this early stage. There is a need to remain vigilant to make sure the downsides do not outweigh the upsides, and that will be a tall order.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Of the 26 papers on non-consensual deepfake pornography included in the review, only two also mentioned potential ethical uses of AI pornography and encouraged its exploration.
“Of the 26 papers on non-consensual deepfake pornography, only two also mentioned potential ethical uses of AI pornography and encouraged its exploration [105, 122].”
From The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Sexuality: A Five-Year Literature Review 2020–2024 (2024) · cites this paper as [122]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 55 · Cited by 75
Research works printed but not linked: 12
- Brunton, F., and H. Nissenbaum. 2016. Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press.
- Griffiths, A. 2001. Wondrous Difference. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Hohfeld, W. 1919. Fundamental Legal Conceptions, edited by W. Cook. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- King, D. 2014. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia New Edition. London: Tate.
- Krücken, G., and G. S. Drori, eds. (2010). World Society: The Writings of John W. Meyer, 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- MacKinnon, C. A. 1987. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Origgi, G. 2017. Reputation: What it Is and Why it Matters, S. Holmes, and N. Arikha (translators). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Risse, M. 2020. On Justice: Philosophy, History, Foundations. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Smith, D. W. 2013. Husserl. London; New York: Routledge.
- Susskind, J. 2018. Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
- Wrone, D. R. 2003. The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.
- Authors
- Kerner, C., & Risse, M.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Risse, Mathias
- ORCID
- Risse, Mathias
- Venue
- Moral Philosophy and Politics
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2020-11-12
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 81-108
- ISSN
- 2194-5616 (ISSN-L)
- 2194-5624
- OpenAlex
- W3101432306
- Cited by
- 75
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 2
- FWCI
- 10.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- Moral Philosophy and Politics (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- Funders
- Universität Hamburg
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies
- Keywords
- deepfakes, synthetic media, epistemic justice, epistemic rights, discreditation, pornography, human creativity
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
