What are deepfakes? AI that deceives

The original example of a deepfake (by reddit user /u/deepfake) swapped the face of an actress onto the body of a porn performer in a video – which was, of course, completely unethical, although not initially illegal. Other deepfakes have changed what famous people were saying, or the language they were speaking. Deepfakes extend the idea of video (or movie) compositing, which has been done for decades. Significant video skills, time, and equipment go into video compositing; video deepfakes require much less skill, time (assuming you have GPUs), and equipment, although they are often unconvincing to careful observers. Originally, deepfakes relied on autoencoders, a type of unsupervised neural network, and many still do.