#Deep fakes software

And while the vast majority of deepfakes are of non-consensual porn not misinformation, some in the intelligence community have warned that foreign governments could spread deepfakes to disrupt or sway elections.īarack Obama and Jordan Peele - BuzzFeed / Monkeypaw Productions Legislating for lies Since then, other examples of disturbing deepfakes have appeared, including a video of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi altered to make her sound drunk – it circulated widely after Donald Trump posted it and Facebook refused to take it down – and a video by two artists of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessing that his company “really owns the future”.Īctor Jordan Peele used a deepfake Barack Obama to warn of the dangers of deepfakes, highlighting how they can distort reality in ways that could undermine people’s faith in trusted media sources and incite toxic behaviour.

#Deep fakes software

That ‘Deepfakes’ used Google’s free open source machine-learning software also drove home how easily a hobbyist, or anyone with an interest in the technology, could masquerade falsehoods as reality. For many, the videos crossed basic lines governing consent and harassment and showcased a potent new tool for revenge porn.

The term first became widely used in 2017, after a Reddit user by the name ‘Deepfakes’ posted pornographic videos featuring actresses whose faces were digitally altered to resemble female celebrities, such as Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot. While there are plenty of examples that are benign and playful – Salvador Dali taking selfies with museum patrons, for instance – the origins of the technology show how harmful it can be. The deep-learning software used to make deepfakes has become cheap and accessible, raising questions about the potential for abuse. The AI ingests video, photographs or audio of a person or object, then learns to mimic its behaviour and output the results onto another target person or object, creating an eerily accurate counterfeit. By Morgan Currie, Lecturer in Data & Society at the School of Social and Political Scienceĭeepfakes are the result of machine-learning systems that manipulate the content of one piece of media by transferring it to another.