What is a Deepfake?

A deepfake is a piece of information, photograph, video, or other media that has been created with artificial “deep learning” to fool the viewer into thinking it is real. The word, deepfake, is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”. Deep fakes are usually photographs or video and are created with a machine learning algorithm (artificial intelligence or AI) from many training examples.

The above face is generated by the ThisPersonDoesNotExist website. The face is a computer-created composite of millions of images, created from many training examples for the computer algorithm to determine how to shape a face. I then took this fake face and used the app, Wombo, to generate a video of the face singing a song. We now have a video of a person that never existed, lip synching a song.

This video turned out very well for 10 minutes of work. I was surprised at how easy this was. Of course it’s not as sophisticated as some of the videos created on YouTube have been lately.

— In case you haven’t already guessed it, my avatar image is a deepfake.

Written by makerminx

Cook, gardener, crafter, computer programmer, amateur cryptographer, freethinker, former military officer. Welcome to my little corner of the internet where I discuss my various interests and anything else that comes up.