Deepfake

A deepfake is Synthetic Media consisting of images, video, or audio generated or manipulated using Artificial Intelligence, often Deep Learning, to appear authentic while depicting fabricated speech, actions, or events—typically showing people saying or doing things they did not actually say or do. This includes, but is not limited to, replacing a person’s likeness or voice. Generation methods include Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks, which train two Neural Networks in competition, and Diffusion Models, which generate content by learning to reverse a noise-adding process. Deepfakes have applications in entertainment and Computer Vision research, but they can also facilitate misinformation, identity fraud, and non-consensual content. Organizations including Meta, Google, and Microsoft have invested in Deepfake Detection and mitigation research. Detection uses varied approaches, including Digital Forensics and Machine Learning classifiers such as Convolutional Neural Networks, to assess visual, acoustic, temporal, and other signals of manipulation; it is not generally reducible to identifying artifacts in biometric patterns, and no single method reliably detects every deepfake.