The next time you get on a Zoom call, you might want to ask the person you're speaking with to push their finger into the side of their nose. Or maybe turn in complete profile to the camera for a minute. Those are just some of the methods experts have recommended as ways to provide assurance that you are seeing a real image of the person you are speaking to and not an impersonation created with deepfake technology. It sounds like a strange precaution, but we live in strange times. Last month, a top executive of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance said that fraudsters had used a sophisticated deepfake "hologram" of him to scam several cryptocurrency projects.

The season 2 finale of The Mandalorian was an emotional roller coaster for a lot of fans (including me), but there was one big reveal that'll most likely have fans debating until the hit show returns for another season in 2021 on Disney Plus. Though Lucasfilm, via Industrial Light & Magic, is known for its cutting-edge digital mastery, one Star Wars fan thought the shocking cameo of you-know-who could use a touch-up using deepfake software. Deepfakes are fake videos that convincingly show people appearing to be doing or saying things they never did. In the season 2 finale, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) shows up to save the day with his lightsaber in hand, after getting Baby Yoda/Grogu's Force message. The digital re-creation of Hamill's 1983 film face is impressive.

A collaboration between a Chinese AI research group and US-based researchers has developed what may be the first real innovation in deepfakes technology since the phenomenon emerged four years ago. The new method can perform faceswaps that outperform all other existing frameworks on standard perceptual tests, without needing to exhaustively gather and curate large dedicated datasets and train them for up to a week for just a single identity. For the examples presented in the new paper, models were trained on the entirety of two popular celebrity datasets, on one NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPU for about three days. In this sample from a video in supplementary materials provided by one of the authors of the new paper, Scarlett Johansson's face is transferred onto the source video. CihaNet removes the problem of edge-masking when performing a swap, by forming and enacting deeper relationships between the source and target identities, meaning an end to'obvious borders' and other superimposition glitches that occur in traditional deepfake approaches.

Humans developed technology to serve them and now it threatens their very existence. "Deepfakes" or Deepfake videos are the latest addition to the league of AI-powered advancements that are doing more harm than good. Imagine this: Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, who is theoretically privy to the private data of two billion people, sinisterly claimed in an Instagram video, "I owe it all to Spectre. They showed me whoever controls the data, controls the future." To mimic the appearance of genuine news, the video is framed by broadcast chyrons saying "We're increasing transparency on ads."

Actor Jim Meskimen partnered with deepfake artist Sham00k to make his celebrity impressions a little more realistic. Meskimen and Sham00k shared the results in a YouTube video, and honestly, they're pretty remarkable. While Meskimen did the voices, deepfake software applied the facial features of 20 celebrities, including George Clooney, Nicholas Cage, Colin Firth, Robert De Niro, Nick Offerman, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Robin Williams and George W. Bush. The video speaks to Meskimen's talent as an impressionist but also to the capability of deepfake software. It proves how well the tech is able to blur the line between what's real and what isn't.