To gauge how believable these videos can be we conducted an experiment posed as a survey. We used a video created by artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe which shows a deep faked Mark Zuckerberg speaking bluntly about how Facebook’s mission is to profit off of the data of its users. Of course, Zuckerberg has never made such comments, but we wanted to see how many people would believe the video. We created a google form where participants would watch the video and give their thoughts. After writing in their thoughts the next page reveals that the video is fake and asks if they realized that the video was a deepfake, and if they did then what gave it away.

Go ahead and view the video yourself!

Video by Bill Posters and Daniel Howe

There are a few giveaways that help expose this as a default

  • The voice in the video is not Mark Zuckerberg’s
  • The body movement is a bit unnatural, too stiff to be a person
  • The lighting on his eyes isn’t natural, almost like they were pasted on

Results

Our results from the experiment

This video ended up fooling 30% of our participants. Just after their first viewing, people gave opinions such as “I feel that now I don’t feel like using Facebook because they basically not giving me privacy how he is telling me that he owned me” and “I think this video is telling the truth because there’s no such thing as privacy on the web especially social media”. This shows how problematic videos such as this can be. People can form strong opinions believing someone said something they didn’t. They can then go and spread what they saw and what they think to influence others, it’s where most of the danger deepfakes lie.