The deepfakes are not just a risk: they are a new chapter in digital culture. Just like photography, film, TV, and video games, this technology is reshaping the way we think, feel, and learn. Only in this way can we educate students for a world where accessible apps, exponentially growing content, and “synthetic” philosophers shape our imaginations, decisions, and learning.

The role of the school is not to perpetuate fear: it is to understand, contextualize, and lead

Teachers who understand the aesthetics, technology, and ethics of deepfakes prepare students to navigate a world where images speak, imitate us, and sometimes teach us.

Deepfakes are no longer the stuff of science fiction, nor are they the work of criminals who profit from fabricated disinformation. Deepfakes dominate social media timelines, have become memes, and, unexpectedly, produce sophisticated cultural content.

As Professor Luli Radfahrer accurately and ironically observed, “Sora is the TikTok of deepfakes”: a tool that democratizes audiovisual creation with the same speed and aesthetic explosion that TikTok brought to short-form video.

At the same time, channels are popping up on social media that recreate, with impressive accuracy, the voices and faces of thinkers to debate current issues—from Plato analyzing the metaverse to Nietzsche discussing digital anxiety.

These two movements highlight a key point for education: before we treat deepfakes as a threat, we need to understand them as a media ontology. In other words, as a new way of existing and thinking through images, avoiding:

• 1) Teaching ethics without teaching language doesn't work;
• 2) Teaching technique without teaching aesthetics is superficial;
• 3) And teaching fear without teaching how to use technology produces digital illiterates. 

What is at stake is not just avoiding mistakes; it is learning from a medium that can be critical, creative, thought-provoking, and deeply educational.

The Aesthetic Versus the Ethical: Why Deepfakes Are a New Form of Expression

Deepfakes aren’t just “fake videos”; they are visual grammars. Common sense (and schools need to move beyond this) tends to frame discussions in moralistic terms—“it’s dangerous,” “it can manipulate elections”—without addressing the fundamental issue: understanding how the image is constructed.

Just as photography required visual literacy in the 19th century, and Photoshop did so in the 2000s, deepfakes call for a new form of aesthetic literacy. Students need to understand composition, realism, texture, rhythm, expressiveness, and digital “seams” in order to analyze them critically.

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On the other hand, ignoring aesthetics impoverishes the debate. Many of today’s best examples are not used to deceive, but to create impossible narratives: Einstein explaining black holes, Simone de Beauvoir discussing contemporary feminism, Paulo Freire responding to AI in education.

These videos, even though they are synthetic creations, help students view philosophy, history, and media as living languages —which opens the door t
, in-depth critical debates. Furthermore, they encourage students to be aware of what lies ahead in the near future and how to deal with it.

When the Algorithm Becomes a Classroom

Luli Radfahrer’s remarks about Sora sum up this cultural shift well: we are entering an era in which anyone can produce high-quality films using prompts. For schools, this means two things:

First, access to audiovisual production is no longer a technical matter; it is now a cognitive one. It is no longer about mastering the camera, the microphone, and the software, but about mastering ideas, references, and arguments.

Second, it means that the rate of adoption will skyrocket— just as it did with TikTok or GPT itself (perhaps here we see a convergence between the two languages).

How to Address Deepfakes in the Classroom. Photo: Freepik

But there is an educational risk: if we treat any app as a threat, we’ll miss the opportunity to use it as a cognitive tool. Teachers can create reimagined historical scenarios (“What would the arrival of the Portuguese look like if filmed by a drone?”), scientific simulations, literary dramatizations, and media analyses.

The point is not to replace the content, but rather to make the creative process visible in order to discuss authorship, intent, and responsibility.

The Philosophy of Deepfakes: When Thinkers “Speak” About Modern Issues

In recent months, the proliferation of channels that reimagine philosophers and thinkers to analyze current issues has opened up a new front in the teaching of the humanities. Videos such as “a Greek philosopher reacting to cancel culture” or “an Enlightenment thinker commenting on algorithmic inequality” are not just entertainment: they breathe new life into classical theories through storytelling.

For many students, listening to Epicurus “explain” self-care in the 21st century is more accessible than reading a treatise. However, there are important dilemmas: To what extent are these representations accurate? Are they drawing on the original ideas, or are they inventing discourses that never existed?

This sparks rich classroom discussions: asking students to compare the synthetic video with the actual text, identify distortions, create alternative versions, and evaluate the intentions behind them. Here, the deepfake ceases to be a trick and becomes a tool for epistemological comparison.

Education Without Black-and-White Thinking: How to Teach Ethics in a World of Ambiguities

The pedagogical ontology of deepfakes requires us to move beyond the simplistic. Education cannot be limited to“deepfakes are dangerous” or“deepfakes are magical.” The goal is to prepare students to analyze context, purpose, authorship, impact, and mediation. The same technology can be poetic, creative, ironic—or manipulative. And these uses coexist.

Education needs to reflect this complexity. One effective approach is to work with real-world examples: deepfakes used for humor, deepfakes as a form of whistleblowing, deepfakes as art, and deepfakes as fraud. Each example can be analyzed through a threefold lens: aesthetics, technology, and ethics. 

Thus, the school ceases to be a moral watchdog and becomes a critical curator. Furthermore, by understanding the process of production and creation, the entire school ecosystem begins to focus on two fronts:

• Technological Direction: Keeping Pace with the Next Steps Toward the Future — Where Technology Is, in Fact, Heading.
   
• Information integrity: recognizing fake news; understanding transparency, training sources, and biases; requiring that prompts, datasets, and procedures be made explicit. If you don’t know that “brilliant” philosopher, how can you know if he really said that? At the very least, verifiable curation is necessary.

Practical Educational Applications: From the Media Lab to Civic Education

Teachers can turn deepfakes into creative exercises with high cognitive value. For example: asking students to create a short video in which a historical figure explains a concept with theoretical rigor. Or having them produce synthetic versions of themselves to discuss digital identity. The key is always to provide context, explain the process, and analyze the result—never presenting the deepfake as “truth.”

In addition, deepfakes are excellent for teaching authorship, plagiarism, primary sources, storytelling, and remixing—essential topics in media literacy. Interdisciplinary projects can involve Portuguese, history, the arts, technology, philosophy, and the humanities. 

The world of work is still testing and refining the use of deepfakes —in training, multilingual dubbing, and accessibility—as part of a clear process of experimentation. Schools, in their role of educating people and developing skills, need to prepare students for this evolving landscape. Those who understand the technology before it becomes established are the ones who will define the next steps (in an ethical and safe manner, given the challenges).

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