User:Awchesley/sandbox

Deepfakes[edit]
Main article: Deepfake

Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are the most prominent form of synthetic media. They are media that take a person in an existing image or video and replace them with someone else's likeness using artificial neural networks. They often combine and superimpose existing media onto source media using machine learning techniques known as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their uses in celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud. This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.

The term deepfakes originated around the end of 2017 from a Reddit user named "deepfakes". He, as well as others in the Reddit community r/deepfakes, shared deepfakes they created; many videos involved celebrities’ faces swapped onto the bodies of actresses in pornographic videos, while non-pornographic content included many videos with actor Nicolas Cage’s face swapped into various movies. In December 2017, Samantha Cole published an article about r/deepfakes in Vice that drew the first mainstream attention to deepfakes being shared in online communities. Six weeks later, Cole wrote in a follow-up article about the large increase in AI-assisted fake pornography. In February 2018, r/deepfakes was banned by Reddit for sharing involuntary pornography. Other websites have also banned the use of deepfakes for involuntary pornography, including the social media platform Twitter and the pornography site Pornhub. However, some websites have not yet banned Deepfake content, including 4chan and 8chan.

Non-pornographic deepfake content continues to grow in popularity with videos from YouTube creators such as Ctrl Shift Face and Shamook, reaching millions of views. The Reddit community /SFWdeepfakes was created specifically for the sharing of videos created for entertainment, parody, and satire. A mobile application, Impressions, was launched for iOS in March 2020. The app provides a platform for users to deepfake celebrity faces into videos in a matter of minutes.

As part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 (NDAA), United States President Donald Trump signed the first federal law regarding Deepfakes on December 20, 2019. This law requires that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) provides an annual report on any weaponization made by foreign countries, specifically China and Russia, regarding Deepfake technology. The DNI is also required to report to Congress anytime a foreign use of Deepfake technology targeted towards a United States election is discovered. Lastly, this law provides that the DNI will run a Deepfakes competition, with up to a $5 million prize, to “to award prizes competitively to stimulate the research, development, or commercialization of technologies to automatically detect machine-manipulated media”