That deepfake could have helped making the cheap horror film, Apollo 18, appear even more historically authentic by putting deep fakes of the President in them.
The real danger of Deep Fakes is an October Surprise release of an “open mic comment” or other fake-but-compromising situation designed to sway voters.
The election eve release of Bush’s decades old DWI arrest cost him the 2000 “popular vote”. It was a measurable loss and Gore’s boasted “Popular vote victory” was only by a 0.51% margin (half of 1 percent).
Dan Rather and AP tried to steal the 2004 election with some forged “national guard” memos. Nobody went to prison over that and CBS affiliates did not lose their FCC licenses. The FEC didn’t even punish them.
If they had dropped their Waco bomb closer to the election they might have survived the backlash over the MS Word origins of the document.