Long story short: I pioneered Deep Fakes 16+ years ago, but no body believed what I was demonstrating was possible, or they wanted to pursue porn, which I refused for multiple reasons.
More of the story:
Back in 2001 I was a very burned out video game developer. Back in '93 I was a OS developer on the 3D0 and then the original PSX. By '01 I'd lived through the EA Spouse era, wanting out of games, I transitioned to VFX. While being a hybrid developer / digital artist, I did some actor replacement work that was generalizable - meaning with some preparation, anyone could be inserted into a prepared video clip, with feature film quality.
At this time, about 2002, I realized that short form video, such as conventional TV commercials and pop music videos, treated with consumer faces and actor replacement, become a type of Personalized Advertising. Around 2002, digital cable and streaming video services were just starting to take hold, which meant individual consumers receiving digital video streams receive unique-to-them delivered streams - streams that could have Personalized Advertising in place of ordinary ads. In some cases, this would be very desirable, such as film trailers, or really any desirable wish fulfilling product or service.
So I got serious. I started an EMBA program while continuing at the VFX studio, making the actor replacement project my masters thesis. During this I recruited a team of other VFX people, 2 of which have Academy Awards for their work. By '06 I graduated my MBA program, 2nd in my class, and left working at the VFX studio to work on "the company" full time.
By '08 we had awarded global patents for Personalized Media: a combination actor replacement and product placement process, designed for global scale. We also had an operating VFX pipeline. But, this was 2008: we were in the midst of the global financial meltdown. From '08 through '11 I met with everybody and anybody, presenting and pitching to film studios, recording labels and major advertising firms. I was often met with disbelief the technology was possible or scalable or economically viable. If given the attention, I could explain and demonstrate, but that rarely happened. It was not uncommon for the pitch to receive a rude response, like the idea was crackpot.
Three times I managed to put together an investment pool, but each time one of the investors would realize what the tech could do with porn, and they'd fixate on that. They'd sway the other investors, and no matter how I explained the difficulty of controlling a system that let's anyone put anyone into porn, they insisted that become the direction of the company. I refused, and three times the investment pool disbanded.
After '11 I pivoted to a 3D geometry generator for digital artists and games. The twitter site for that is still at https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media?lang=en. That managed to squeak out an meager existence until '15. Never really generating traction, as people simply expected everything free, and these were professional products.
Simply to eat I'd been doing MBA and developer consulting. Over time, that became the majority of what I was doing, and the freaking global patents were $40K a year to maintain. In '15 I sold the patents, and took a job with one of the company's technology partners I'd licensed the 3D Reconstruction tech. The entire effort covered 13 years, I learned a lot, and destroyed my life savings. Can't say I would not do it all over again.