After deepfakes, a new frontier of AI trickery: Fake faces

Alfonzo Macias looks unremarkable at first glance -- bearded, bespectacled, with a short widow's peak. But his strangely distorted glasses and the dissolving background behind him hint at a discomforting truth: Macias never existed. Undetectable to the naked eye, the uncannily human face is in fact the creation of an algorithm -- one used by pro-Trump media outlet TheBL to give an identity to one of the many fake Facebook accounts that it uses to drive traffic to its website. While less attention-grabbing than the viral deepfake videos that have manipulated the speech and actions of politicians and celebrities to popular effect in recent years, static artificial intelligence-generated faces are becoming an increasingly common tool for misinformation, experts say. Instead of making real people appear to say and do things they have not, the technique works by generating entirely "new" people from scratch.