Explained: Why it is becoming more difficult to detect deepfake videos and what are the implications

Doctored videos or deepfakes have been one of the key weapons used in propaganda battles for quite some time now. Donald Trump taunting Belgium for remaining in the Paris climate agreement, David Beckham speaking fluently in nine languages, Mao Zedong singing'I will survive' or Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a pilot episode of Star Trek… all these videos have gone viral despite being fake, or because they were deepfakes. Last year, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, said deepfakes are as potent as nuclear weapons in waging wars in a democracy. "In the old days, if you wanted to threaten the United States, you needed 10 aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles. Today, you just need access to our Internet system, to our banking system, to our electrical grid and infrastructure, and increasingly, all you need is the ability to produce a very realistic fake video that could undermine our elections, that could throw our country into tremendous crisis internally and weaken us deeply," Forbes quoted him as saying.