Featured in Can You Spot a Deepfake?
From Stephanie Lepp to Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund, artists are using AI to reveal the fragility of our trust in basic information
Barack Obama never said: ‘President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.’ But, in 2018, a deepfake of him did. Deepfakes are synthetic videos (or speech, or text) created by a machine-learning algorithm that allows you to make faces, voices and even bodies look like they are saying, doing or writing something they didn’t. They rely on a type of deep learning called generative adversarial networks, in which two neural networks combine to generate a convincing replica: one creates fake images (here are some faces that look like Obama talking), while the other tries to judge if they are fake (this doesn’t look like Obama – do better), so the result is constantly improved until you have something that looks very like the former US president. Deepfakes are made using real training