The dominant issue with deepfakes, though, is not so much the act of image manipulation itself, but the potential of such manipulations to deceive or mislead viewers, and their uses by bad-faith actors for persona appropriation, political interference, and involuntary pornography.
At the same time, it could be argued that the act of circulating a photographic or video replication of an individual’s face on someone else’s body, even playfully, if done without the individual’s permission, is never 100% ethically benign.
https://www.wittenberg.edu/sites/default/files/media/alcf-2019/Wahl.pdf
The ethical challenges of recreating deceased actors are potentially great and have not
been adequately addressed. A few examples of this potential include recreating actors and not
paying their estate, placing deceased actors in situations on film that they would not have been
comfortable with, and eventually, the possibility that actors can be essentially created in CGI and not based on any existing person. Once this technology becomes widely available, there would not be a need to hire actors
many films have used such CGI methods to digitally de-age actors with striking results (like those found in the Marvel films), or to create spectacular creatures without much physical reality (such as “Gollum” in The Lord of the Rings series).