Media manipulation has always required a social and technical fix.

It bans harassment with any "falsely created" footage.

The Wall Street Journal has formed a committee to help reporters navigate fake content, or "deepfakes."

The threat to the 2020 election is the most urgent when it comes to deepfakes, but it's not the only one.

In film and video games, we’ve already seen what’s possible with ‘digital humans’. Are we on the brink of the world’s first totally virtual acting star?

Doctored photos can easily create false memories. What happens when there’s fake video?

FOR WEEKS, COMPUTER scientist Siwei Lyu had watched his team’s deepfake videos with a gnawing sense of unease. Created by a machine learning algorithm, these falsified films showed celebrities doing things they'd never done. They felt eerie to him, and not just because he knew they’d been ginned up. “They don’t look right,” he recalls thinking, “but it’s very hard to pinpoint where that feeling comes from.”

Computer-generated videos are getting more realistic and even harder to detect thanks to deep learning and artificial intelligence. As WSJ’s Jason Bellini finds in this episode of Moving Upstream, these so-called deepfakes can be playful, but can also have real, damaging consequences for people’s lives.

‘Don’t believe everything you see on the internet’ is pretty standard advice, but it’s getting harder than ever to distinguish the real from the fake. A new algorithm from Nvidia could muddy the waters further by generating completely made-up human faces that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

Scarlett Johansson said fighting against “deepfake” porn videos, in which someone’s face is superimposed onto a clip they didn’t actually appear in, has become a “lost cause.” The “Avengers” star commented in a Sunday Washington Post story about how artificial intelligence software is being used to create increasingly realistic-looking fake porn videos — and how woman are inordinately targeted. One bogus video, with what is falsely described as “leaked” footage of Johansson, has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on a popular porn site.

Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí once said in an interview, “I believe in general in death, but in the death of Dali, absolutely not.” Now, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, has worked to fulfill the painter’s prophecy by bringing him back to life — with a deepfake.

One of Leonardo Di Vinci’s most famous pieces of artwork, the Mona Lisa, has been brought to life with the help of deepfake AI. For those of you who don’t know deepfake is a technology that has been in development for some time now and is getting to some scarily good levels. Deepfake AI examines and uses a series of images to render video footage of the person in the images. These fabricated videos have the subjects turning their heads and even speaking.

Watch for yourself

In the latest example of deepfake technology, researchers have shown off new software that uses machine learning to let users edit the text transcript of a video to add, delete, or change the words coming right out of somebody’s mouth.

With the election approaching, lawmakers are facing up to the fact they need to do something about the explosion in manipulated media.

It is now possible to take a talking-head style video, and add, delete or edit the speaker's words as simply as you'd edit text in a word processor. A new deepfake algorithm can process the audio and video into a new file in which the speaker says more or less whatever you want them to.

Finally, the HD remake we’ve all been waiting for: a series of neural nets took the classic pixelated mug of the space marine from seminal 1993 first-person shooter “Doom” and churned out an almost photorealistic portrait.

There exist, on the internet, any number of videos that show people doing things they never did. Real people, real faces, close to photorealistic footage; entirely unreal events. These videos are called deepfakes, and they’re made using a particular kind of AI. Inevitably enough, they began in porn – there is a thriving online market for celebrity faces superimposed on porn actors’ bodies – but the reason we’re talking about them now is that people are worried about their impact on our already fervid political debate.