Is It Possible To Create A Benevolent Deepfake?

Artist Stephanie Lepp hosts Reckonings, a narrative podcast that explores how people shift their political worldviews, transcend extremism, and make other kinds of transformative change. Recently, she has been experimenting with a maligned technology, deepfakes, to create Deep Reckonings, a series of synthetic videos that imagine controversial public figures having a reckoning; in the deepfake footage, Alex Jones, Brett Kavanaugh, and Mark Zuckerberg reflect on the damage they have inflicted on society. I spoke to Stephanie about the impact of her project, and the positive potential of deepfake technology. What inspired you to create Deep Reckonings? We think of social change as requiring large numbers of people pushing for change. But there's also the question of, what are the fewest number of people it would take to create broad-based social change?