# Deepfake

> A fake video, photo or voice made with AI to look and sound like a real person.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: AI, Security
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/deepfake/
- In Spanish: [Deepfake](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/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.

## An analogy

A deepfake is a forged signature for faces and voices. A forger used to need years of practice; now the forging machine is available to anyone, so you check the document through another route instead of trusting how it looks.

## Keep in mind

- AI-made video, audio or images that imitate a real person.
- A voice can be cloned from a short recording.
- Common in scams: fake calls from relatives or bosses asking for money.
- Verify urgent requests through a second, trusted channel.

## Go deeper

- [Deepfake on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake)
- [What is a deepfake? (IBM)](https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/deepfake)
- [Increasing threat of deepfake identities (US DHS, PDF)](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/increasing_threats_of_deepfake_identities_0.pdf)

## Related terms

- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [Deep learning](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/deep-learning/): Machine learning with many-layered neural networks, behind most recent AI leaps.
- [Generative AI](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/generative-ai/): AI that creates new text, images, audio or code instead of just sorting things.