Deepfakes are video or audio clips of real people doing and saying fictional things. They’re usually generated by using artificial intelligence to “learn” the movements and sounds from two different recordings, and then combine them in a realistic way.
As AI improves, deepfakes have started to appear all over the internet, from Facebook to YouTube, from celebrity face-swaps to impersonations of political leaders. Now they are starting to have real financial repercussions. In the U.S., an audio deepfake of a CEO scammed one company out of $10 million, according to Symantec researcher Saurabh Shintre. And with the 2020 election not far off, there is huge potential for weaponizing deepfakes on social media. Now, Facebook is spending more than $10 million to figure out how to detect them, and tech giants like Google, Twitter and Microsoft are joining the fight.
Watch the video to find out how deepfakes are made, what’s at stake for businesses and what’s being done to detect and regulate them.
