Deepfakes in Advertising? Innovative or Harmful? EP10

Episode 10 Transcript

Welcome to the Marketing Combat Podcast. My name is Jason Donnelly and the guy over here with these scary horns and hat is gonna introduce us to today's topic. His name, Chris Kubbernus. That's right, I am Chris Kubbernus and today we're talking about deep fakes in advertising, innovative or harmful and if you don't know, if you're brand new to the podcast, every day we take a topic, a hot topic and

marketing world and we debate it. Someone's for it, someone's against it. The good news is or the catch is that person doesn't know if they're for or against it until the person like me intros it and says what their position is. So today deep fakes and advertising for against it. I am completely for it. I love deep fakes and advertising. I think we need more deep fakes and advertising. I think it's a good way to connect with celebrities which we all love and admire.

and want to be like. So deepfakes, I mean, the only reason why you want a deepfake is because you want to emulate a person. So for example, I'm a little upset that Scarlett Johansson is super pissed at OpenAI right now, because if you don't know, OpenAI reached out to Scarlett Johansson and said, hey, we'd love to use your voice as part of our voice, I don't know, feature within Chad GPT -4. And because of her involvement in Her, which was a movie which was about artificial intelligence and

sort of companionship and she did the voice of the artificial intelligence companion and they really wanted that voice. They wanted ScarJo's voice because they thought that would bridge the gap between humans and AI and sort of start to lay the groundwork for us accepting more interactions with AI using ScarJo's voice. And she said no, no thanks, but they went ahead and made a voice similar to hers anyway and she's super pissed about it and I think it's gonna end up in court that she's like, hey, what the hell, you used my voice.

So they kind of deep faked her voice. And I think this is a good thing. I think they were spot on. It really did a good job of bridging that gap. did exactly what they intended to do. Was it unethical to use her likeness? That's up for debate. That's up for the laws, the courts to do this. But we're going to see more and more of this. For example, we saw bringing back the dead from people who had died many years ago. We saw some George Carlin comedy. I mean, that's just stuff that's really interesting, right?

I think deep faking in advertising, as long as you get the permission, I think it's going to be important. We'll be able to hear new works of art from Elvis, George Carlin, like I already mentioned, Richard Pryor. We'll hear new works of stuff from people that like... Also, for example, like Randy Travis, one of my favorite country singers, he actually just put out a new record using AI as his voice because he had a stroke.

15 years ago, something like that, which rendered him impossible to sing. Through the use of deepfaking his voice in AI, they actually cut a new record. Fantastic. This is exactly what we want with AI. This is exactly what's gonna work to help humans create more content, create more advertising that connects with people. And that's what I really like. Chris, you've made this so easy. Here's the thing.

Celebrities, if you're using it appropriately, like you just said with Randy Traverns, whoever that is. Travis, Randy Travis, come on, man. Come on. So whoever that is, that sounds really nice. It sounds really great that they're using the AI to help him put out a new record. The issue is when the celebrities don't approve it. And the George Carlin thing that you mentioned is exactly the problem.

George Carlin didn't write those jokes. George Carlin wasn't on that hour -long comedy special. His people were pissed about it and sued them to take it down immediately because it's not real. And the thing is, people are being tricked into believing this stuff is real, and then that's tarnishing the entire background of comedians like George Carlin. And the other thing is, the deepfakes, the other side of it, the dark side of it, is not just a voice or a comedy special, but it's...

sexual exploitation of those celebrities deepfake doing these horrible grotesque things that Chris and I would never look at but these things are going out there and that will also Tarnish these people's reputations forever even if it's not real so at the end of the day no I don't support deepfake unless it's completely and totally approved of by and for the people that are doing it not to be able to bring Tupac back because

because he's not here, he's not saying you can do this, and I don't agree with him being in any new music videos or new music anything or throwing concerts because he's not saying it's okay. I don't care about the people just holding, like, his reality, like, it's so inappropriate. That's all I'm saying. So, no, I don't agree with it, any of it. It's gross. I think that, I think that we've always had famous people showing up in...

different mediums. Obviously, like now from a technological standpoint, we're putting them into a medium where it is very close to real. It looks real. So it is confusing to people. And I think that there is a subset of the population that will believe that, okay, that's not real. They didn't do that. But I do think that the general population are smart enough to go, okay, that's not Scarlett Johansson's voice, or that's not Barack Obama having sex with Joe Biden.

We know that's not true. We know that didn't happen. And I think that the platforms will do a good job of sort of flagging stuff like that and censoring that kind of stuff. And I think anybody with a brain will be able to realize, that was deepfake. That's not reality. Now where it gets really interesting though is when you can be deepfaked, like Jason. We can deepfake you into some scenarios that may be questionable. And then we can use that to blackmail you. And that's just a good opportunity. That's what the internet's for. I mean, how much memeing, how much like,

Photoshopping. I mean, how much fun do you have Photoshopping your head onto other people's bodies? It's so much fun. And doing it is your favorite part of the day. So I do believe that from a medium standpoint, from a creation standpoint, it's where we've always gone this direction. We've always messed around with public figures, public, you know, their faces, their personas, their thing because it is out in the public.

image and we've always messed with it and it's not going away. But I do believe there is an ethical concern here and we'll have to see how that susses out. I think there's going to be a payment. There's going to be some sort of licensing. They'll start to license their likeness for deep fakes and things like that. And it'll just become another way celebrities can make more money. And they'll just be like, hey, listen, sure. I'll sign a general thing where you can use my face, my image for anything that you want. they'll just make money from that.

Go find our other episode of AI -generated content on social media because that's what's gonna happen. Celebrities are gonna sell their likeness and we're just gonna have movies and social posts and everything is gonna be taken over by the highest paying person. So back to Amazon. What do you guys think? Deep fakes, in advertising, deep fakes on the internet. Good, negative? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Tell us in the comments. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.