Ethnic Diversity, Organizational Diversity Climate, and the Perceived Value of Deepfake Personas: A User Study with Marketing Professionals

Beyond fraud, deepfake personas can be utilized in human-centered design to represent user groups. This study investigates how deepfake persona sets of different ethnic diversity can offer strategic value for human-computer interaction (HCI) design processes. In an online experiment with 81 marketing professionals evaluating persona sets of varying diversity, the more diverse sets were perceived as significantly more inclusive, more inspiring for market coverage, and more valuable for identifying market opportunities, with no compromise of perceived persona quality or task performance. Findings show that these perceived strategic benefits were consistently associated with organizational diversity climate, consistent with institutional theory. These findings advance persona, advertising, and HCI research by repositioning deepfake technology from a solely technological risk to a strategic design resource driven by the organizational diversity climate, with direct implications for inclusive HCI practice and diversity policies.