Among the many ways we have become aware that AI is gnawing away at the fabric of society is in doubting the evidence of our own eyes. Deepfakes have added fuel to existing social media, disinformation and online sexual abuse bin-fires – attracting almost uniformly negative sentiment. A 2020 study by UCL researchers published in Crime Science ranked them as the most harmful AI application.
Although there is no universally agreed-upon definition, a typical deepfake uses AI to replace a person in an existing video with another. The vast majority of deepfakes are used to switch pornographic actors with celebrity women, but they have attracted popular attention as tools of political disinformation. In March, a poor-quality deepfake of President Volodymyr Zelensky announcing Ukraine’s surrender to Russia surfaced on social media for a brief round of ridicule, before being removed.
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