Deepfakes: What Are They, and Why Are They So Dangerous?

The topic of deepfakes has been at the forefront of public discussion recently following two incidents that involved 2 well-known American figures. In one instance, the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office is investigating reports of an apparent robocall that used AI to mimic President Joe Biden's voice. The message reportedly discouraged state voters from voting in the primary election on January 23, 2024. Days after this report, the AP reported that explicit deepfake images of Taylor Swift were circulating on the social media platform X (previously Twitter).

The definition of "deepfake" is still in it's infancy and continues to develop. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines deepfake as "an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said." This term was coined in 2017 by a Reddit user, according to an article published on the MIT Sloan School of Management.

How are Deepfakes made?

The article on MIT's website detailed the steps that are needed to create a deepfake video.

"To make a deepfake video, a creator swaps one person’s face and replaces it with another, using a facial recognition algorithm and a deep learning computer network called a variational auto-encoder [VAE]," a portion of the article read, citing a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab. "VAEs are trained to encode images into low-dimensional representations and then decode those representations back into images."

According to the article, a VAE would be trained on images of the face of the person you want to make a deepfake of, while another VAE would be trained on "images of a wide diversity of faces," with further facial recognition algorithms applied to video frames, in order to "capture different poses and lighting conditions that naturally occur."

Afterwards, it was stated that the two encoders would be combined, which results in the deepfake target's face on someone else's body.

What are the impacts of Deepfakes?

The complete affects or impacts of deepfakes have yet to be actualized. Currently, we can predict that this technology has the ability to impact political outcomes, the perception of truth, and cybersecurity events. To learn more about the possible impacts of deepfakes on society, read the original article.

How to spot Deepfakes

• Unnatural eye movement
• Unnatural face expressions
• Lack of emotion
• Awkward-looking body or posture
• Video or audio not being reported by trustworthy news sources