What is a deep fake?
Deepfakes are described by Microsoft as "photos, videos or audio files manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) in hard-to-detect ways."
The most common deepfakes – a word that combines computational deep learning and fake – replace the real person in a video with someone else. And they can be used very effectively to make it look like someone, typically a famous person, is saying and doing something they never said or did.
Typically, deepfake videos are created using facial mapping and artificial intelligence to create eerily similar digital mockups of a person to impersonate their identity.
Deepfake videos have already been flagged as a growing threat to America’s national security when a House Intelligence Committee hearing in 2019 served up a public warning about the deceptive powers of artificial intelligence software.
"Deepfakes include a video, an image, or recording convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said," the FBI explains.
How Deepfakes work
Deepfake content is created by using two competing AI algorithms -- one is called the generator and the other is called the discriminator. The generator, which creates the phony multimedia content, asks the discriminator to determine whether the content is real or artificial.
Together, the generator and discriminator form something called a generative adversarial network (GAN). Each time the discriminator accurately identifies content as being fabricated, it provides the generator with valuable information about how to improve the next deepfake.
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