"Rise of Skywalker" opened while I was ever so briefly in LA last December.
In the immediate debrief of our communal viewing [namedrop] Ryan and Seth [/namedrop] strenuously disagreed with me that deepfake tech might have been (or should have been) used to enhance the late Ms. Fisher's performances. I have yet to re-watch, so I remain on the fence.

All things being equal?

Me being an idiot?

Me having not seen the movie?

Me being the most arrogant thing that has ever happened?

...

I think you're right.

...

This is going to be a touchy subject for VFXers.

Teague wrote:

This is going to be a touchy subject for VFXers.

So here's the thing: It's gonna be used. Absolutely no studio on the face of the planet is going to turn down what DeepFake, even in it's current infancy, can do. That's a given.

The problem (in my mind, other may not agree) is that it has just suddenly skyrocketed into this position of putting the morality of what VFX is and does at the forefront. There was a bit of a kerfuffle around Tarkin and Leia and things like that, but for the most part it was just the BIG studios that had the manpower and skills to be able to pull it off effectively, so it got swept under the rug and everyone moved on with their lives. DeepFakes though? Assholes were making /damn/ convincing fakes on their home computers 2 years ago. Today they're making stuff that completely passes for real.

Suddenly this is tech that is and will be available to everyone a couple years from now to do WHATEVER they want with it . And I think that /when/ the VFX industry decides it's gonna be okay with all the possibilities that brings; good, bad, and oh shit russia just took over the world; they'll be the single biggest force advancing the tech (that the public will know about *puts on tinfoil hat*). And like all things it can't and won't stay proprietary for very long. Granted it's probably going to take another decade for publicly available versions of the tech to get to the point where you could build a fake out of a feasibly small sample pool for it to learn from (AFAIU the tech, it needs a LOT of training data to make it work right now, which is really limiting on who you can dupe)... but even still.

Kinda went off the rails there for a sec... but to the actual point. I honestly don't give a shit about any arguments about whether or not it's valid VFX, or a lazy cheat or blehwhatever, everything we've ever done since we figured out how to project light onto chemicals to make an image has been a hack and a cheat to improve the quality and make it cheaper and easier. But I think there's gonna be a turning point, not just in VFX, but as a society around the morality and ultimately legality of DeepFakes, that VFX is gonna be a part of whether it wants to or not.

And this is where we start entering that section where near future theorizing gets real cyberpunk... what with governments banning Identity Scapers and Dupers while they secretly use them for their own gain, VFX studios are heavily regulated as to what they are and aren't allowed to do, and the world is forced to reckon with the idea that literally nothing they see can be trusted, and gaddamn I really need to go play Deus Ex again...

TLDR: BDA is a fatalistic asshole. DeepFake exists in the world now, it's too powerful and useful to not be used and improved, regardless of who's doing it. So how we proceed from there is a question of morality, not an if.