What is a deepfake?
Quick Answer
A deepfake is a video, image or audio clip created or altered with artificial intelligence to make someone appear to say or do something they never did.
The Full Story
Deepfakes use deep learning, a type of AI trained on large amounts of photos, video or voice recordings of a person, to generate realistic fakes. The term came from a Reddit user called deepfakes in 2017, building on generative adversarial networks, a technique introduced by Ian Goodfellow in 2014. Early viral examples included a 2018 public service video in which Jordan Peele voiced a fake Barack Obama. The risks are serious: in 2024 an employee at engineering firm Arup in Hong Kong was tricked into transferring about 25 million US dollars after a video call with deepfaked colleagues. Laws are catching up, including the US TAKE IT DOWN Act of 2025 targeting non-consensual intimate deepfakes, and the EU AI Act requires AI-generated content to be labelled.
Key Facts
YouTube Angle
Suggested video title for this topic:
"Can You Spot the Fake? How Deepfakes Are Made and Detected"