Understanding Deepfakes and the Taylor Swift Images: QuickTake

The world is awash in deepfakes — video, audio or images that make people appear to do or say things they didn’t, or be somewhere they weren’t. Many are devised to give credibility to falsehoods and damage the reputations of politicians and other people in the public eye. But most deepfakes are explicit videos and pictures concocted by mapping the face of a celebrity onto the body of someone else. That’s what happened in late January, when fake explicit images of pop star Taylor Swift cascaded across social media. Now that artificial intelligence allows almost anyone to conjure up lifelike ...