It's always hard to know if tech based phenomenon is actually new or just a migration of something to digital form. There are two ways to be wrong, broadly. On

It's always hard to know if tech based phenomenon is actually new or just a migration of something to digital form. There are two ways to be wrong, broadly. One way is the "technically true" error. There are plenty of predecessors to twitter, spam, podcasting, etc. Legally, philosophically and such... it's usually easy to underestimate impact because it really is "nothing new." But... in different medium, at a different scale or higher velocity things change. Junk mail is like spam, but the junk mail problem rarely got beyond manual handling scale. The other way to be wrong is the opposite. Assuming that digitization will create change, but all we get is a digital version of the previous. It's hard to know the future. I agree that Deepfake is likely not going to change the world of imposter/fraud too much, though it may get a lot of attention. OTOH, I do think it has the potential to weird up the entertainment world. I also think it could be high impact in media. If nothing else, it'll strengthen the "skeptical of everything" segment's skepticism. That said, guessing these things is a losing game.