Is It Time for a Data Scientist Code of Ethics?

As news broke of a new app called DeepNude, which allowed anyone to alter a photo of a woman to make them appear nude, I found myself deeply disturbed by the speed at which deepfakes are evolving. Such a tangible and accessible tool highlights the darker side of AI, computer vision, and other machine learning techniques in the wrong hands. And while there are some incredibly overt examples of how deepfakes can be used to doctor videos of individuals, their appearance, their activities, as well as what they are saying, the accessibility of this technology has mostly been in the hands of the technical few that understood it. Even with this knowledge, the time it takes to generate convincing deepfakes was also a barrier. But DeepNude showed that altering images can be done in seconds versus the days it previously took on incredibly powerful machines out of reach of the general public.