I mean, I'm no rationalism absolutist, but deepfake technology is in essence sophisticated lying/fraud. Kinda hard for me to see how it's not harmful. Sure, I could see how it could be used creatively, but outside of a few edge cases, deepfakes are a weapons technology. It's easy to use it for bad– mis/disinformation, smear campaigns–ultimately leading to an erosion of public trust in the information they use to stay informed. I think an informed populace is a good, yeah?

Meanwhile the number of ethical uses is relatively quite small. Maybe there is a novel use of this tech that will actually be useful, but I can't see how being able to easily impersonate someone else will be good. Maybe someone here has some ideas.