deepfake

Origin

From the username of a Reddit user, 'deepfakes', who in late 2017 posted face-swapped pornographic videos of celebrities made with open-source deep-learning tools; Samantha Cole's report in Vice's Motherboard (December 2017) brought the name to wide attention, and Reddit banned the community in February 2018. The word soon generalized to any AI-made impersonation.

Usage note

Distinguish cheapfakes or shallowfakes, misleading media made with simple editing such as slowing, cropping or mislabeling real footage, which have often been more common in practice. Not all synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception. are deepfakes: the term implies a realistic depiction of a real, identifiable person.

Related

Sources

1. Cole, S. (2017). AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We're All Fucked. Motherboard (Vice), December 2017.
2. Chesney, R. & Citron, D. K. (2019). Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security. California Law Review 107, 1753–1820.

Mentioned in

AI riskAI risk, n.: The ways AI could cause harm: people misusing it on purpose, systems behaving in ways nobody intended, and slower effects on jobs, power and society that no single person causes., AI slopAI slop, n.: Low-quality content churned out in bulk by AI — bland articles, fake-looking images, filler videos — posted to grab clicks or fill space, with little care for accuracy or value., generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like., misinformationmisinformation, n.: False or misleading information that spreads, whether or not the people sharing it know it is wrong. AI can produce it by mistake and makes it cheaper to create., misusemisuse, n.: People deliberately using AI to cause harm — for scams, harassment, propaganda, hacking or weapons — as opposed to harm from AI making mistakes or pursuing goals of its own., non-consensual intimate imagerynon-consensual intimate imagery, n.: Sexual or nude images of a real person that are shared, or made, without their consent — including fakes created with AI that show someone undressed or in sexual scenes., text-to-image modeltext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds., text-to-speechtext-to-speech, n.: Technology that reads written text aloud in a computer-generated voice, used in screen readers, voice assistants, audiobooks and navigation apps., text-to-video modeltext-to-video model, n.: An AI that creates a short video clip — increasingly with matching sound — from a written description, such as 'a paper boat sailing down a rainy street'., voice cloningvoice cloning, n.: Using AI to copy a specific person's voice from recordings, so a computer can say new things that sound like them — useful for dubbing and accessibility, and abused in scams., xAIxAI, prop. n.: An artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2023 that makes the Grok chatbot. It is now part of Musk's rocket company, SpaceX., AI-generated content labelingAI-generated content labeling, n.: Marking text, images, audio or video as made by AI — with a visible notice, hidden data in the file, or both — so that people and platforms can tell synthetic content from real., content moderationcontent moderation, n.: Checking what people post, or what an AI produces, and removing, limiting or labeling whatever breaks the rules or the law — done by people, by AI, or by both together., deepfake detectiondeepfake detection, n.: Using software, often itself AI, to tell whether a video, photo or voice recording has been faked or generated by AI rather than captured from reality., digital replicadigital replica, n.: A realistic computer-made copy of a real person's voice or appearance — such as an AI clone of a singer's voice or a digital stand-in for an actor — that can say or do things the person never did., disinformationdisinformation, n.: Deliberate falsehoods or distortions dressed up as fact, for example from a government or campaign trying to sway an election or sow distrust., DreamBoothDreamBooth, prop. n.: A way to teach an image generator one specific subject — your dog, your face, a product — from a handful of photos, so it can draw that exact subject in new scenes., generative adversarial networkgenerative adversarial network, n.: Two neural networks trained as rivals: one forges fake images, the other tries to spot the fakes. As both improve, the forger's output becomes realistic enough to fool people., Ian GoodfellowIan Goodfellow, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who invented generative adversarial networks, in which two neural networks compete to produce realistic fake images, and who pioneered research on fooling AI systems., influence operationinfluence operation, n.: An organized, often secret campaign to sway public opinion — fake accounts posting propaganda, for instance — which AI can make cheaper by writing posts, translating them and inventing fake personas., inpaintinginpainting, n.: Filling in a missing or erased part of a picture so it blends seamlessly with the rest — removing a stranger from a photo, or repairing a damaged one., International AI Safety ReportInternational AI Safety Report, prop. n.: A large scientific review, led by the computer scientist Yoshua Bengio and backed by more than 30 countries, summing up what is known about what advanced AI can do and how it could go wrong., liar's dividendliar's dividend, n.: The advantage dishonest people gain once everyone knows fakes are easy to make: they can wave away real evidence against them by claiming it was made by AI., NO FAKES ActNO FAKES Act, prop. n.: A proposed US law that would let people control AI-made copies of their voice and face, and would require websites to take down unauthorized fakes once notified.