Our team is made up of some of the world's leading AI artists and synthetic media creators. We love to create fun content and aim to delight audiences around the world with digital experiences that offer a glimpse of a hyperreal future. We are our own best customers and beta testers for our products. But we also believe it is imperative to create content that is used to educate viewers and raise awareness about the underlying technologies in order to disrupt the negative impact of unethical uses of synthetic media. Earlier this year, we released @deeptomcruise, a series of parody videos on TikTok that quickly garnered more than 100 million views and coverage from hundreds of media outlets around the world.

In retrospect, Nisos experts made the right forecast. However, this was a clear minority opinion. Before and after their report, dozens of politicians and institutions drew considerable attention to the approaching danger: 'imagine a scenario where, on the eve of next year's presidential election, the Democratic nominee appears in a video where he or she endorses President Trump. Now, imagine it the other way around.' (Sprangler, 2019). It is fair to say that deepfakes' high potential for disinformation was noticed long before these hypothetical consequences were evoked, mainly because they were revealed to be highly credible. Two examples: 'In an online quiz, 49 percent of people who visited our site said they incorrectly believed Nixon's synthetically altered face was real and 65 percent thought his voice was real' (Panetta et al, 2020), or'Two-thirds of participants believed that one day it would be impossible to discern a real video from a fake one.

For our February AI Ethics Twitter Chat, we invited expert guest, Dr. Brandie Nonnecke, Founding Director, Citris Policy Lab at UC Berkeley to discuss "Deconstructing Deepfakes". Mia Dand: Dr. Nonnecke, Let's start off with the basics, what are deepfakes? Dr. Brandie Nonnecke: "Deepfakes" are deceptive audio or visual media created with AI to depict real people saying or doing things they did not. The term "deepfake" is a portmanteau of "deep learning" (a type of machine learning) & "fake". Don't confuse deepfakes w/ "cheap fakes" or "shallow fakes", which are created w/out AI.