Why Deepfakes Are Flooding Social Media, and What Can Be Done

The internet is awash in deepfakes — audio, pictures or video made using artificial intelligence tools in which people appear to do or say things they didn’t, be somewhere they weren’t, or that change their appearance. Some involve nudification, where photos are altered to depict someone unclothed. Other deepfakes are deployed to scam consumers, or to damage the reputations of politicians and other people in the public eye.

Advances in AI mean it takes just a few taps on a keyboard to conjure up a realistic deepfake. Alarmed governments are trying to fight back, but it’s been a losing battle. Fraud attempts using deepfakes have grown more than 20-fold in the past three years, according to data from identity verification company Signicat.