Deepfake

A deepfake is media created or altered with AI so that a real person appears to say or do something they never did. It can be a face swapped into a video, a cloned voice reading any text, or a photo that never happened. The word joins 'deep learning' and 'fake', and comes from a Reddit user who posted face-swapped videos in 2017.

Making one used to take skill and hours of footage. Today generative AI tools can clone a voice from a short recording and animate a face from a few photos, and the results keep getting harder to tell apart from the real thing. There are honest uses: dubbing films into other languages, restoring voices for people who lost them, visual effects, satire that is clearly labeled.

The harm comes from deception. Scammers call parents with a cloned voice of their child asking for money, or pose as a company's boss on a video call to order an urgent transfer. Deepfakes are used for non-consensual sexual images, which many countries now treat as a crime, and to spread political misinformation. Detection tools exist but are not reliable. The best defense is a habit: if a message asks for money, passwords or urgency, check it through another channel you already trust, such as calling back on a known number or agreeing on a family code word.