DeepFakes
Deepfakes are fake videos or audio recordings that look and sound just like the real thing. They allow their creators to make it look like someone has said a certain thing or acted in a certain way, when they didn't! (Scary idea, isn't it..)
Deepfakes are made using a type of artifical intelligence (AI). There are two parts to that AI - a generator which makes the content and a discriminator which decides whether the content looks real (and can be used) or artificial (and is rejected).
The generator learns and gets better based on what the discriminator accepts and rejects. The discriminator also learns to spot the fakes better. This means that as the content from the generator gets better, the discrimator automatically gets better at spotting fakes which leads to better content from the generator.
Watch the video to see how they are actually made (and can be spotted) and click here for some examples
Deepfakes create a real challenge - can any video recording on the internet be trusted anymore? The answer is not straight away, you need to ask the questions "Who, When, Where, Why?" as you would for anything in writing and then make a judgement call on whether you can trust it.
Deepfake videos explained