Forgeries are hugely risky for legitimate organizations; if discovered, the backlash can hurt them quite a bit.
Fringe, extremist, criminal elements have used forgeries to further their goals, and they will do so with "deep fake" videos too.
But our society is dominated by organizations that run on trust. And those organizations will have to quickly learn (indeed, they are learning now) how to distinguish and filter out the deep fakes. Just like they did with fake letters, fake signatures, and fake photos.
I'd say that was a pretty big deal (Russians providing a "satellite image" showing a Ukrainian fighter plane shooting down a commercial airliner).
Bad actors use this kind of technology whenever they think they can get away with it. As someone else mentioned, they've used video game footage and pretended it was actual combat footage.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/emma-gonzalez-ripping-up-c...
Exhibit 1: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/fake-news-trump-flood...
Exhibit 2: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/us/emma-gonzalez-photo-doctor...
It will become even more apparent when the population is primed to believe it, pick your hot button issue of the day and some significant portion of the population would absolutely believe a fake video depicting the opposing party doing something horrible, without pausing to reflect.
Even seemingly harmless caricatures, like Tina Fey's infamous SNL skit of Sarah Palin ("I can see Russia from my house"), have a long term affect on people's perception of reality: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59838/1/USAPP_Blog_In_politics_cari...
In that paper a survey found that 7 in 10 Americans believed that Palin actually said that.
The mass production of deep fakes will have a deep and profound impact on society. I'm not keen on where this is heading.
But it definitely depends on the news source and how thorough they are with verifying stories.
Photoshopped images are a sort of "trial balloon" which has already proven that the system is pretty dang robust, that's my thesis.
what if you see satellite images of a country mobilizing or testing nuclear weapons? What if someone synthesized sensor measurements?
Another example I could think of is a highly sophisticated spearphising attack. What if someone impersonated a boss's voice over the phone? What kind social engineering/manipulation could that type of adversary get away with?
however, there are tons of gullible and/or wilfully stupid people who respond to photoshopped pictures on social media as if they are real.
especially when these images are politically charged, some of them probably believe it and some “believe” because it fits their world view and makes them feel righteous.
You're not paying attention then. Here's just one example.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/4333499/indi...
but it's not really the public sphere -- there is no nationwide uncertainty about these videos. the police understand perfectly that they are fake, for instance.