What are your thoughts on these two upcoming media technologies?

Okay, this is a bit long, but please bear with me (and/or skim through it). I’m setting up some of the background:

I was listening to an episode of RadioLab, Breaking News. They talk about Adobe’s still-in-production “VoCo,” an audio doctoring program, and walk through a couple of ways that technology can digitally manipulate a person’s face like a puppet. Throughout the episode, they worry about how these technologies might be used to further complicate the divide between what’s real and what’s not (misinformation/fake news), although none of the technologies seem to be there, yet.

“VoCo” is supposed to be the PhotoShop of audio, to be used in media editing. In theory, you can take 20–40 minutes of speech by someone, and use that to have them say anything else you want them to. I was impressed by the way it seems to take the cadence and intonation of the speech sample as a way to get around what would otherwise be toneless and robotic-sounding voice generation. I found the video of the conference mentioned in the podcast on YouTube. Turns out, near the end of the video, Zeyu Jin (the presenter) answers questions Jordan Peele (guest host) presents about how this technology might be abused, i.e. audio recordings faked and then released as real. Zeyu promises that Adobe is working on ways to digitally stamp doctored audio as doctored, to prevent that very thing from happening.

As for the facial puppetry, I found the “real-time facial reenactment” video the podcast mentioned, again on YouTube. This video shows how the researchers can port the facial expressions of “source actors” onto the faces from YouTube videos in real time. For whatever reason, they use political figures for their examples.

So, I was just wondering—what are your thoughts on these technologies? I know fake news isn’t anything new to humanity, that even records in Mesopotamia show rulers changing or making up history to legitimize their power (I’m currently working my way through a book on Mesopotamia, so the example isn’t out of nowhere)… But I also know that people have real concerns about how rapidly and readily misinformation can travel today.

Are these just interesting and/or inevitable developments for, or inspired by, the film industry? Are these technologies going to shift the way we view—or trust, vet, etc.—information? Will we just need to be skeptical as we’ve always needed to be? Are fears about them as overblown as fears of any new technology before them? Etc. I’m curious to know your thoughts on these technologies. What do you know about them? How do you predict they’ll affect us?