Have you heard about the so-called deepfakes? The word, a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”, refers to a new AI-assisted human image synthesis technique that generates realistic face-swaps.
The technology behind deepfake is relatively easy to understand. In short, you show a set of images of an individual to a machine (a computer program or an app such as FakeApp) and, through an artificial intelligence approach, it finds common ground between two faces and stitches one over the other.
Deepfake phenomenon started to draw attention after 2017 porn scandal when an anonymous Reddit user under the pseudonym “Deepfakes” posted several porn videos on the Internet.
Deepfakes in politics
Deepfakes have been used to misrepresent well-known politicians on video portals or chatrooms. For example, the face of the Argentine President Mauricio Macri has been replaced by the face of Adolf Hitler:
Also, Angela Merkel’s face was replaced with Donald Trump’s.
In April 2018, Jordan Peele, from BuzzFeed, demonstrated the dangerous potential of deepfakes, with a video where a man who looks just like Barack Obama says the following: “So, for instance, they could have me say things like ‘Killmonger was right’ or ‘Ben Carson is in the Sunken Place,’ or ‘President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.'”