Biden speaking five languages shows potential, risks of deepfake tech

At a workshop hosted through the Air Force's military university on Aug. 26 in Montgomery, Alabama, students were shown a video of President Joe Biden addressing the UN while effortlessly switching between five languages including Mandarin and Russian. While Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams were fluent in several languages, Biden, like most U.S. presidents, is only known to speak English. The video was a piece of synthetic media, more commonly known as a "deepfake." Created using a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, deepfakes are hyperrealistic videos that replace one person's likeness with that of another, or appear to show them doing something they never did. And as the technology improves, they get harder to detect.