As technology advances, experts warn that manipulated satellite images could be used as a form of disinformation aiming to downplay or cover up real-world situations.

When we think of deepfakes, we tend to imagine AI-generated people. This might be lighthearted, like a deepfake Tom Cruise, or malicious, like nonconsensual pornography. What we don’t imagine is deepfake geography: AI-generated images of cityscapes and countryside. But that’s exactly what some researchers are worried about.

In a crop of viral videos featuring Tom Cruise, it's not the actor's magic trick nor his joke-telling that's deceptive — but the fact that it's not actually Tom Cruise at all. The videos, uploaded to TikTok in recent weeks by the account @deeptomcruise, have raised new fears over the proliferation of believable deepfakes — the nickname for media generated by artificial intelligence technology showing phony events that often seem realistic enough to dupe an audience.

These clever Deepfakes would not take its toll on users anymore

The creator of a series of deepfake Tom Cruise videos that garnered more than 11 million views on TikTok said he never wanted to trick people.

A bearded Rihanna gyrates and sings about shining bright like a diamond. A female Jack Sparrow looks like she’d be a right laugh over a pint.

It’s hard to feel connected to someone who’s gone through a static photo. So a company called MyHeritage who provides automatic AI-powered photo enhancements is now offering a new service that can animate people in old photos creating a short video that looks like it was recorded while they posed and prepped for the portrait.

Deepfake voice technology based on voice cloning, or quasi-perfect reproductions of a persons voice, can be used both for the good and for the bad.

A fake Queen Elizabeth danced across TV screens on Christmas as part of a "deepfake" speech aired by a British broadcaster. Channel 4 said the video was supposed to offer "a stark warning about the advanced technology that is enabling the proliferation of misinformation and fake news in a digital age."

This year's Channel 4 alternative Christmas message will be delivered by a deepfake of the Queen. While the Queen is delivering her traditional message on the BBC and ITV, her digitally created doppelgänger will be sharing its "thoughts" on Channel 4. Buckingham Palace told the BBC it had no comment on the broadcast. Channel 4 said the intention was to give a "stark warning" about fake news in the digital age.

Deep fakes, deceptively real computer-generated images, audio and video recordings of people, are gradually moving into the focus of media and politics. In a world constantly struggling with fake news and disinformation, deep fakes are about to “wreak havoc on society”, at least that’s how Forbes recently put it. So how do deep fakes actually work and what can be done about them?

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone mocked Donald Trump over his election loss in the latest episode of their web series Sassy Justice. In the show, a deepfake (video technology where someone is replaced with another's likeness) of Trump sulks as he reads a reindeer story with a political twist to reflect his defeat in the US election and his failed attempts to cling onto power.

Plus: Watch a self-driving race car drive into a wall, and download the new version of PyTorch

A similar technology to DeepNude, the 2019 app that shut down shortly after launch, is now spreading unfettered on Telegram.

It turns out it doesn’t take much to fool the American public.

We're in the early stages of a pretty serious problem. Faster hardware and software might bring us new tools to help with accessibility or bring AI-powered conveniences into the phone in your pocket, but they can also be used to mislead. Deepfakes might be humorously awkward right now, the subject of entertainment and really obnoxious Twitter ads, but they're going to be a bigger and bigger problem as both software and hardware get better. Worse, we're also losing the arms race to detect them. But there's another potential solution.

AI-generated deepfakes aren’t just a problem for politics and other current affairs. Unless we act now, they could also tamper with our record of the past.

The news: Two political ads will broadcast on social media today, featuring deepfake versions of Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Both deepfake leaders will be giving the same message: that America doesn’t need any election interference from them; it will ruin its democracy by itself.

AI researchers are using heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos and even to figure out what kind of generative model created a deepfake.

Microsoft had debuted a new deepfake detection tool to give confidence in images' authenticity.