Opinion

There are a number of plausible reasons why cheapfakes have outpaced deepfakes in the political domain. One is that, despite their crudeness, cheapfakes spread widely and can capture public debate and discourse. On pure cost-benefit grounds, fakers may opt to get more bang for their buck by using existing, proven techniques for editing and manipulating media. There are also technical reasons: a recent paper by one of us points out that sophisticated machine learning systems still require plenty of time for "training," which can slow the production of a faked video to the point where it is no longer relevant to the rapidly moving social media conversation.