'Deepfake' doctored videos of celebrities, politicians

Technology needed to doctor images and videos is advancing rapidly and getting easier to use, experts have warned. Government agencies and academics are racing to combat so-called deepfakes, amid the spreading threat that they impose on societies. Advances in artificial intelligence could soon make creating convincing fake audio and video relatively easy, which the Pentagon fears will be used to sow discord ahead of next year's US presidential election. Deepfakes combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network. The video that kicked off the concern last month was a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives.