The realness of fakes: Primary evidence of the effect of deepfake personas on user perceptions in a design task

Deepfakes, realistic portrayals of people that do not exist, have garnered interest in research and industry. Yet, the contributions of deepfake technology to human-computer interaction remain unclear. One possible value of deepfake technology is to create more immersive user personas. To test this premise, we use a commercial-grade service to generate three deepfake personas (DFs). We also create counterparts of the same persona in two traditional modalities: classic and narrative personas. We then investigate how persona modality affects the perceptions and task performance of the persona user. Our findings show that the DFs were perceived as less empathetic, credible, complete, clear, and immersive than other modalities. Participants also indicated less willingness to use the DFs and less sense of control, but there were no differences in task performance. We also found a strong correlation between the uncanny valley effect and other user perceptions, implying that the tested deepfake technology might lack maturity for personas, negatively affecting user experience. Designers might also be accustomed to using traditional persona profiles. Further research is needed to investigate the potential and downsides of DFs.