How Deepfakes and Artificial Intelligence Could Reshape the Advertising Industry

Creative artificial intelligence technologies (e.g., deepfakes, generative adversarial networks) are enabling new ways of producing and editing the audio and visual content in advertising. These new tools highly automate extreme changes to—and the entire generation of—advertisements. Examples range from changing a model’s skin tone, age, or gender to swapping the entire body or voice of a model. This investigation finds that these creative tools may cause potentially dramatic changes in how advertisements are conceived, produced, edited, and targeted. This paper explores these changes, along with related ethical issues and areas of needed research.