Deepfakes overview

Deepfakes is an all-encompassing term representing content generated using artificial intelligence (in particular, deep learning) that seems realistic and authentic to a human being. The generation of fake content or manipulation of existing content to suit the needs and agenda of the entities involved is not new. In the introduction, we discussed a few movies where CGI and painstaking manual effort helped in generating realistic results. With advancements in deep learning and, more specifically, generative models, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between what is real and what is fake.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have played a very important role in this space by enabling the generation of sharp, high-quality images and videos. Works such as https://thispersondoesnotexist.com, based on StyleGAN, have really pushed the boundaries in terms of the generation of high-quality realistic content. A number of other key architectures...