Introducing deepfakes

The name deepfake comes from a portmanteau of “deep”, referring to deep learning, and “fake,” referring to the fact that the images generated are not genuine. The term first came into use on the popular website Reddit, where the original author released several deepfakes of adult actresses with other women’s faces artificially applied to them.

Note

The ethics of deepfakes are controversial, and we will cover this in more depth in Chapter 2, Examining Deepfake Ethics and Dangers.

This unethical beginning is still what the technology is most known for, but it’s not all that it can be used for. Since that time, deepfakes have moved into movies, memes, and more. Tom Cruise signed up for Instagram only after “Deep Tom Cruise” beat him to it. Steve Buscemi has remarked to Stephen Colbert that he “never looked better” when his face was placed on top of Jennifer Lawrence’s and a younger version of Bill Nighy was deepfaked onto his own older self for a news clip from the “past” in the movie Detective Pikachu.

In this book, we will be taking a fairly narrow view of what deepfaking is, so let’s define it now. A deepfake is the use of a neural network trained on two faces to replace one face with another. There are other technologies to swap faces that aren’t deepfakes, and there are generative AIs that do other things besides swapping faces but to include all of those in the term just muddies the water and confuses the issue.