As voters queued up early morning on November 30 last year to vote in legislative elections to choose the next government of the southern Indian state of Telangana, a seven-second clip started going viral on social media. Posted on X by the Congress party, which is in opposition nationally, and was in the state at the time, it showed KT Rama Rao, a leader of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti that was ruling the state, calling on people to vote in favour of the Congress. The Congress shared it widely on a range of WhatsApp groups "operated unofficially" by the party, according to a senior leader who requested anonymity. It eventually ended up on the official X account of the party, viewed more than 500,000 times. "Of course, it was AI-generated though it looks completely real," the Congress party leader told Al Jazeera.

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.

Think that AI will help put a stop to fake news? The Department of Defense is funding a project that will try to determine whether the increasingly real-looking fake video and audio generated by artificial intelligence might soon be impossible to distinguish from the real thing--even for another AI system. This summer, under a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the world's leading digital forensics experts will gather for an AI fakery contest. They will compete to generate the most convincing AI-generated fake video, imagery, and audio--and they will also try to develop tools that can catch these counterfeits automatically. The contest will include so-called "deepfakes," videos in which one person's face is stitched onto another person's body. Rather predictably, the technology has already been used to generate a number of counterfeit celebrity porn videos.