When a video purporting to show New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern smoking drugs surfaced on social media in recent months, experts quickly dismissed it as a fake. The video, which was viewed and shared thousands of times, showed a woman smoking from what appeared to be a crack pipe. The PM's face had been superimposed using artificial intelligence. But the video, created for YouTube, was convincing enough to the many who shared it. It was the latest example of how disturbingly authentic-looking videos can blur the lines between reality and fantasy.

The history of deep fake technology is surprisingly long. Researchers at academic institutions have been developing deep fake tech since the early 1990s. The idea is even older, as popular science fiction--like the 1987 film The Running Man--can attest. But deep fakes are no longer relegated to the realm of sci-fi; they are, in fact, more present in our daily lives than you might realize. It's easy to think of deep fakes as some sort of advanced CGI used to create highly realistic animated films or to replace established actors in a film or television series, especially in cases where actors pass away unexpectedly before filming is complete.

"Deep fakes"--a term that first emerged in 2017 to describe realistic photo, audio, video, and other forgeries generated with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies--could present a variety of national security challenges in the years to come. As these technologies continue to mature, they could hold significant implications for congressional oversight, U.S. defense authorizations and appropriations, and the regulation of social media platforms. Though definitions vary, deep fakes are most commonly described as forgeries created using techniques in machine learning (ML)--a subfield of AI--especially generative adversarial networks (GANs). In the GAN process, two ML systems called neural networks are trained in competition with each other. The first network, or the generator, is tasked with creating counterfeit data--such as photos, audio recordings, or video footage--that replicate the properties of the original data set.