Don't Worry About Deepfakes. Worry About Why People Fall for Them.

The use of AI to create high-resolution fake images and videos has raised concerns about the use of disinformation as a political tool. Over the past few years, the application of artificial intelligence to create faked images, audio, and video has sparked a great deal of concern among policymakers and researchers. A series of compelling demonstrations -- the use of AI to create believable synthetic voices, to imitate the facial movements of a president, to swap faces in faked porn -- illustrate the rapid speed at which the technology is advancing. Machine learning, the subfield of artificial intelligence that underlies much of the technology's modern progress, studies algorithms that improve through the processing of data. Machine learning systems acquire what is known in the field as a representation, a concept of the task to be solved, which can then be used to generate new iterations of the thing that has been learned.