You wake up on Election Day and unlock your phone to a shaky video of your state capitol. In other clips posted alongside it, gunshots ring out in the distance. You think to yourself: Maybe better to skip the polling booth today. Only later do you learn that the videos were AI forgeries. A friend calls you, distraught.

If you have seen the movie "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" you will know that we can see Carrie Fisher when she was young at one point in the movie, playing Princess Leia. But she is not Carrie Fisher as a young woman but a deepfake that imitates her. What uses do they have or what is it for? A deepfake is a video in which false images are shown where the face of a person appears in a situation that they have not experienced. Apparently real fake videos that have not happened but have been created by artificial intelligence and through machine learning techniques and deep learning algorithms capable of providing the face with the greatest possible realism.

Social networks, too, will play a key role in making sure deepfakes aren't used for ill. Their policies generally treat deepfakes like other content that misinforms or could lead to people getting hurt: Facebook and Instagram's policy is to remove "manipulated media," though it has an exception for parodies. TikTok's policy is to remove "digital forgeries" that mislead and cause harm to the subject of the video or society, such as inaccurate health information. YouTube's "deceptive practices" policy prohibits technically manipulated content that misleads and may pose a serious risk.

So you're interested in AI? Then join our online event, TNW2020, where you'll hear how artificial intelligence is transforming industries and businesses. In 2018, a big fan of Nicholas Cage showed us what The Fellowship of the Ring would look like if Cage starred as Frodo, Aragorn, Gimly, and Legolas. The technology he used was deepfake, a type of application that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to manipulate videos. Deepfakes are mostly known for their capability to swap the faces of actors from one video to another. They first appeared in 2018 and quickly rose to fame after they were used to modify adult videos to feature the faces of Hollywood actors and politicians.

Have you seen Barack Obama call Donald Trump a "complete dipshit", or Mark Zuckerberg brag about having "total control of billions of people's stolen data", or witnessed Jon Snow's moving apology for the dismal ending to Game of Thrones? Answer yes and you've seen a deepfake. The 21st century's answer to Photoshopping, deepfakes use a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to make images of fake events, hence the name deepfake. Want to put new words in a politician's mouth, star in your favourite movie, or dance like a pro? Then it's time to make a deepfake.

A new method for making deepfakes creates realistic face-swapped videos in real-time, no lengthy training needed. Most of the deepfakes that are shared online are created by feeding an algorithm hundreds or thousands of images of a specific face. The algorithm "trains" on that specific face so it can swap it into the target video. This can take hours or days even with access to expensive hardware, and even longer with consumer-grade PC components. A program that doesn't need to be trained on each new target is another leap forward in making realistic deepfakes quicker and easier to create.