They don't need to be perfect. They just need to be convincing.

Consider MP3 files. Any audiophile will tell you that a compressed MP3 file is a piss-poor representation of the true sound. The best experience is to listen to a band live, then vinyl, then FLAC.

And yet the majority of people listen to MP3 files. They strike the right balance of file size and sound clarity for an overwhelming amount of systems, doubly so since online streaming took off. So now that people have become accustomed to the sound of MP3, they are not used to anything else. They are convinced that an MP3 file is the "true sound" of the song.

Right now deepfakes is in its infancy. Personally I think it is improving at an alarming rate. If I shared the moon video on Facebook I am willing to bet most people would think it is real. They don't notice the clipped speech, the subtle double head nods. Their minds are not as critical of video as you and I are. So to them, they are convinced it is real.

What happens when only machines can detect if something is authentic or a fake? What happens when not all site administrators scan for videos and fail to mark them as illegitimate? What happens when courts use deepfakes unknowingly as evidence to convict someone, or impeach a president, or fire a worker for sexual harassment? We have already seen what happens when "verified" twitter accounts are compromised - what if a CEO puts out a video announcing some controversial new endeavor, or admission to fraud?

There are very real concerns about this technology and I believe it will very soon become a weapon that takes misinformation and turns it into very real consequences.

They definitely don't all look crap, although speech style transfer is still pretty rudimentary. The first point I'd make is that you can mask most of the defects of current deepfakes simply by degrading the recording quality. A mediocre voice deepfake sounds pretty damned credible when played through a cellphone with poor signal and a bit of background noise. A mediocre video deepfake appears wholly believable if you post-process it to look like low-res CCTV. For adversarial applications, this would tend to increase rather than decrease credibility - we would expect a covert recording of someone doing something illegal or shameful to be of poor technical quality.

Secondly, we do legitimately need to be concerned about what deepfakes will look like in five or ten years time. We're making substantial algorithmic improvements in efficiency and quality, coupled with a multi-billion-dollar race to improve computational performance for deep learning tasks.

Deepfakes may never improve (unlikely), they may gradually improve with better algorithms and more compute power, or there may be a sudden breakthrough in either area that makes 100% convincing deepfakes commonplace. We could wait until that moment to start thinking about social and technological countermeasures, but I wouldn't recommend it. If there's anything to be learned from 2020, it's that we should be investing a lot more in preparing for low-probability/high-magnitude risks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho9h0ouemWQ

https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

You're getting down voted, but I agree. While the footage represents a technological marvel, it doesn't fill me with dread that there is some sort of deep fake genie waiting to jump out of the bottle.

I think the choice of speech is also quite telling. They chose a target with low video and audio resolution and a lot of interference that could mask some of the imperfections of their algorithm. Despite all this, oddness induced by the deepfake process is still quite evident.