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Deepfakes, Intellectual Cynics, and the Cultivation of Digital Sensibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2022

Taylor Matthews
Taylor Matthews*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In recent years, a number of philosophers have turned their attention to developments in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular to deepfakes. A deepfake is a portmanteau of ‘deep learning' and ‘fake', and for the most part they are videos which depict people doing and saying things they never did. As a result, much of the emerging literature on deepfakes has turned on questions of trust, harms, and information-sharing. In this paper, I add to the emerging concerns around deepfakes by drawing on resources from vice epistemology. As deepfakes become more sophisticated, I claim, they will develop to be a source of online epistemic corruption. More specifically, they will encourage consumers of digital online media to cultivate and manifest various epistemic vices. My immediate focus in this paper is on their propensity to encourage the development of what I call ‘intellectual cynicism'. After sketching a rough account of this epistemic vice, I go on to suggest that we can partially offset such cynicism – and fears around deceptive online media more generally – by encouraging the development what I term a trained ‘digital sensibility'. This, I contend, involves a calibrated sensitivity to the epistemic merits (and demerits) of online content.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 92: Values and Virtues for a Challenging World , October 2022 , pp. 67 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2022

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