Along with nuclear weapons and selfie sticks, deepfakes are among those rare technological developments that most of us wish didn’t develop at all.
A portmanteau of 'deep learning' and 'fake', ‘deepfake’ refers to an image, video, or audio snippet that synthesize real material with AI-generated content. You may have seen the TikTok of Tom Cruise dancing in his backyard or the photo of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga coat (neither of which were real, of course), but for every harmless meme, there are 100 nefarious deepfake scams designed to trick people out of their money.
