Deepfakes: Seeing is not Believing

By: Ryan Wells, Journalist

“deepfake” by ApolitikNow is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Deepfakes are fake videos where an existing image or video is spliced together with a video of someone else talking.

These can be in the form of harmless memes, but they can also be used to harm other people. For example, someone could fake a video of Joe Biden or Donald trump saying something super controversial or discriminatory and post it on YouTube the night before the election. This could have lasting impacts on America. This is just one example and many other worse things can happen. Thankfully, with our current technology, there are ways to tell whether a video is fake or not. You can tell that it might be a deepfake if there are spots that are smudged, blurry, or over-sharpened. Sometimes, patches of skin may look scaly. Other times, the face in the video looks warped and is moving around in an unnatural manner.