Deepfake

The word joins deep learning and fake. An AI is trained on a person's face and voice, then produces video or audio of that person saying and doing things they never did. It used to take professional equipment, but now a few photos and a short recording can be enough.

There are good uses, such as movie special effects and dubbing. But there is a lot of harmful abuse: scam calls that imitate a family member's voice, fake speech videos before an election, and sexual fakes made without consent. It is getting harder to tell by eye, so you need the habit of checking the source and double-checking an urgent request for money through another channel.

It is as if someone wearing a mask of another person's face, and copying their voice exactly, has appeared on the screen. Looking at the surface, it is hard to tell if it is really them.

Anyone can become a victim, so many countries are strengthening laws that punish making or spreading them. The belief that "there is a video, so it is true" no longer holds.