Catfishing and the use of false profiles to scam and extort individuals online has become an unfortunate fact of our modern digital life. Even prison inmates have used such tactics to extort money from US servicemembers. Yet, catfishing has been limited to some degree by its traditional reliance on preexisting imagery and personas misappropriated from innocent user accounts to create the fake catfishing profiles. As deep learning approaches increasingly allow the creation of entirely artificial faces and voices, we are fast approaching an era in which catfishing risks overwhelming the world of online dating and being used as an intelligence tool. Automated approaches to generating entirely artificial human imagery have improved dramatically over the past few decades, from primitive systems useful only for the creation of background characters in large crowds to state-of-the-art systems capable of generating fake human faces almost indistinguishable from photographs.

Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, video games were often talked about as a looming threat to cinema. The advent of CD-Rom technology promoted the medium's blocksome characters from avatars to actors, complete with lines of dialogue written by professional scriptwriters and spoken by performers loaned from TV and film. Soaring orchestral soundtracks backed three-act structures and, as games popped from 2D to 3D, the composition of scenes, lighting and lines of sight became concerns for digital directors as well as film. At some point the trajectory shifted. Games still borrow filmic techniques, but the truly cinematic video game – that which seeks to mimic the characterisation, structure and run-time of a blockbuster movie – is endangered, squeezed out by world-conquering, team-based eSports on one side and, on the other, everlasting online worlds where the game's geography expands to match the player's wanderlust. Naughty Dog remains one of the few purveyors of the filmic game.

Today on In Case You Missed It: The Burner chatbot would let a machine ghost on acquaintances you'd rather not text with anymore. But this Dutch inventor should more than switch that around with a small prototype of the ocean fence that is designed to collect ocean trash passively, allowing currents to push plastic and other stuff that doesn't belong in the water into a collection fence. If it all works out, a huge, 60-mile long version of his invention will grace the Pacific Ocean within a few years and hopefully be a solution to solving the Great Pacific garbage patch. If you're into Nerf guns, you must watch this video. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

"Interspecies love is in the air!" enthuses one movie fansite at the prospect of the forthcoming Warcraft movie. There's a lot to get up to speed with in Warcraft. The original video games were so wildly popular that their community of players exceeds the population of Norway, and the World of Warcraft wiki has over 100,000 pages. For novices, it's a fantasy world not far removed from Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons: a realm of elves, dwarves, mythical creatures and medieval weaponry. Warcraft the movie revolves around Azeroth, a kingdom apparently ruled by European humans.