Deepfake Videos: When good tech goes bad

More than a decade ago leading UK investigative journalist Nick Davies published Flat Earth News, an exposé of how the mass media had abdicated its responsibility to the truth. Newsroom pressure to publish more stories, faster than their competitors had, Davies argued, led to journalists becoming mere "churnalists", rushing out articles so fast that they could never check on the truth of what they were reporting. Shocking as Davies' revelations seemed back in 2008, they seem pretty tame by today's standards. We now live in a post-truth world of Fake News and'alternative facts'; where activists don't just seek to manipulate the news agenda with PR but now use advanced technology to fake images and footage. A particularly troubling aspect of these'deepfake' videos is their use of artificial intelligence to fabricate people saying or doing things with almost undetectable accuracy.