Deepfake potential ranges from destabilizing democracies to improving accessibility

Deepfakes are media created using generative AI tools that intentionally misrepresent real people or events—often for malicious purposes—at the cost of public trust, security, and privacy.

The ease of deepfakes creation may soon overwhelm our sense of digital truth

Shortly after the public release of related technology in 2017, some experts saw the technical limitations of deepfakes as preventing them from becoming widespread tools of disinformation. Since then, the neural networks behind diffusion models and generative AI have eliminated the barriers to creating convincing synthetic media for propaganda.

Malicious use of deepfakes can be found in scams, misinformation, and disinformation

Artificial neural networks can identify an individual's physical characteristics when provided with training data, such as real footage of the person speaking. Graphics techniques overlay these with matching characteristics from another real or generated person to create novel footage of things that have never taken place in reality.

AI-generated avatars allow users to create deepfakes in real time

Synthetic media tools can map voices and faces to make individuals appear as someone else. Although they open the door to new opportunities in immersive education and entertainment, they also raise concerns about the misuse of personal identity.

Deepfakes came to prominence in the form of nonconsensual pornography

The explosion of deepfakes depicting renowned people in both ridiculous and compromising videos has provoked widespread fears they will undermine public trust in authoritative knowledge. However, some scholars argue that real videos will always be distinguishable from deepfakes via the video-sharer's testimony and a broader social context.

Once limited to expert studios, automated tools can create convincing deepfakes

Although the best deepfakes are engineered using generative adversarial networks where systems compete to create and assess fake data until the two cannot be distinguished, simpler tools have allowed nonexperts to develop deepfakes for financial scams, political deception, and nonconsensual pornography.

Deepfakes images can be identified by visual elements that do not match real-world phenomena, including asymmetric eyes or earrings, surreal backgrounds, and indecipherable background text.

Deepfake pornography poses significant challenges in combating sexual abuse

In 2017, 96% of deepfake videos involved image-based sexual abuse, which has disproportionately targeted minority women, LGBTQ individuals, adolescents and celebrities. Cultural norms, misogyny and AI advancements have contributed to the proliferation of explicit deepfake content.

In 2024, deepfake audio of London Mayor Sadiq Khan nearly caused real-world disorder

The audio included incendiary remarks related to the ongoing Palestinian protests and played on the public's preexisting political biases. The technology has since destabilized the concept of truth in elections, where politicians blame the use of real gaffes on AI and deepfakes to spread misinformation.

Audio deepfakes have fooled voice biometrics at banks

Limitations in facial and body movements as well as mismatches between audio and lip movements can sometimes help flag a video as a deepfake, but removal of the video component significantly improves AI mimicry.

Audio deepfake tools can now impersonate anyone in real time

A cybersecurity company developed a tool that mimics a person's voice with no noticeable delay using only publicly available software, hardware, and voice samples, allowing users to have seemingly authentic conversations while pretending to be someone else.

Deepfake videos impersonating real doctors are spreading false medical advice

More than 100 videos, found primarily on Instagram and TikTok in August 2025, promoted products related to beauty, wellness and weight loss. While TikTok removed 94% of content violating its policies on AI-generated content, these deepfakes were watched and shared before removal, undermining public trust in medicine.

Governments are now using generative AI to manipulate public opinion

A Freedom House report found that AI-powered disinformation campaigns and censorship tactics are spreading, with 16 countries utilizing the technology to shape online narratives or suppress dissent, as of 2023. In Venezuela, deepfake software was used to push pro-government propaganda with fake news anchors.

Computer systems create artificial voices by stitching together phonemes—individual sounds that make up speech, such as 't,' 'long a,' and 'k' to say 'take.'

Listen to a deepfake robocall of President Joe Biden

Bad actors are not solely using deepfake technology to manipulate images. They can also manipulate audio for political purposes. In this example, eligible voters are asked to skip the 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary.

Digital re-aging and de-aging of faces in film and TV has become increasingly common

Traditional techniques for accomplishing this process were slow and labor-intensive, and often required manual frame-by-frame edits, forcing them to be reserved for "hero characters" and close-up shots. Deep learning methods used by Disney and other production companies now provide fully-automatic and production-ready methods to produce such deepfakes for entertainment purposes.

Warren Buffett has worried that AI might end up being as consequential as the development of the nuclear bomb

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is one of the many people who’ve come face-to-face with the downside effects of AI, and in particular, deepfakes. He was recently shown a deepfake of himself in a video, which caused him to worry about how bad actors will take advantage of the technology.

Take a quiz to identify whether you can spot deepfakes

Advances in artificial intelligence have made deepfakes increasingly difficult to identify, as they are intentionally designed to appear real. The technology has exacerbated some of the problems brought on by digital editing tools like Photoshop.

In China, deepfaking a dead loved one has become a growing industry

Digital replicas of the deceased provide individuals with another way to process grief in a culture with long-standing traditions of communicating with ancestors. The emotional and ethical implications of "digital immortality" are complicated further by cases of actors impersonating deceased relatives during deepfake video calls to hide their deaths.

Watch LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman interview his deepfake doppelgänger.

Through prompt injection attacks, bad actors provide deceptive prompts to generative AI systems in order to manipulate their outputs and acquire sensitive data.

The basis for AI image and video generation was first introduced in 2014

Through generative adversarial networks, the generator (a neural network that creates fictional data) competes against the discriminator (a neural network that assesses the data) to continuously train the former until it can make content indistinguishable from the real thing. Training with unstructured data can enable software to identify characteristics of gender, age, and expression.

AI experts argue that artificial intelligence could annihilate humanity in two primary ways: Humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI, or humans losing control of it.

Will AI kill us all? A debate

As AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what does that mean for the future of humanity? The podcast Entanglements hosts a pessimistic former OpenAI employee and an optimistic Princeton professor to discuss whether AI brings dystopia or a brighter future.

Decoding the hype around AI

2022 was the year AI broke onto the scene, with applications like ChatGPT amazing users with its ability to generate realistic-sounding answers. Technologist Arvind Narayanan presents a clear-eyed view of what the technologies can (and can't) do.

The journalist who let AI speak with his voice

Journalist Evan Ratliff became the object of his own story: He opted to clone his voice, feed it into an AI chatbot, and have it do the talking. What could seem like a fun experiment ended up revealing just how far the capacity of artificial intelligence can go in imitating our identities. Hear the ins and outs of how Ratliff achieved this in this fun and thought-provoking episode.

The AI that creates any picture you want and how it works

Since January 2021, advances in AI research produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed yet to be released text-to-image tools, and similar models have proliferated online. This video is a primer on how we got here, how the technology works, and its implications.

Explore a deepfake speech of an alternate reality where Apollo 11 failed

As the Apollo 11 astronauts prepared for their journey to the moon, two speeches were drafted for President Richard Nixon: one to be delivered upon the astronauts' success and another to comfort the public in case of failure. This interactive explores the creation of a believable version of the latter.

AI is not good at understanding satire

Social media has become rife with misinformation. In response, some organizations have deployed AI-assisted programs trying to curb the spread of this inaccurate content. The problem is that misinformation and satire, rhetorically speaking, often use the same kind of language, something AI struggles to understand.

Researchers found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites utilized AI for language generation

The study also found that pages using AI narrow the range of ideas and perspectives and skew more positively, though the measurable impacts on factual accuracy and writing style variation remain unclear.

Sam Altman acknowledges the fears around creativity, copyright, and misuse of AI

In 2022, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, popularized the use of large language models with the release of ChatGPT. He has emphasized the importance of involving society in shaping AI’s safety frameworks before models begin to act independently online.

The growing role of AI in journalism

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widely available, journalism must adapt and establish ethical norms for how the technology is used. This report from the Center for News, Technology & Innovation looks at the issue from every angle, including legal considerations, potential biases in datasets, and the speed at which AI capabilities are changing. It also includes links to recent studies on the use of AI in journalism.

Indirect prompt injection is a major security flaw of generative AI systems

These attacks can manipulate AI behavior by hiding instructions in websites and PDFs that become part of training data. The more companies connect sites, services, and sensitive datasets to AI tools, the greater the chances of exposure to malicious code.

In 2024, Meta launched an AI video generator to create or edit videos through prompts

The tool puts the Meta in direct competition with OpenAI and Google as more companies are investing billions of dollars to capitalize on the explosion of public interest in machine learning and generative media technologies.

Deepfake Tom Cruise goes viral

Tom Cruise isn’t on TikTok. But you might think that he actually does have an account on the service if you came across the TikTok deepfakes of the actor that have gone viral. They’re the work of a visual and AI effects artist named Chris Umé and a Cruise stand-in, actor Miles Fisher, who already bears a vague resemblance to the actor. Watch what happens after Cruise’s face is superimposed onto Fisher’s.

One man used an AI band called the Velvet Sundown to conduct what he called an elaborate social experiment.

Experiments involving AI agents operating in virtual societies for 15 days produced diverse outcomes, ranging from every agent dying to the creation of a functioning democracy, depending on the AI model used.

Unlike the models made by large AI companies, open-weight models can have their safeguards removed or weakened, a process that has become increasingly easy and may expose users to harmful information.

As of 2026, age verification systems on online platforms have included the collection of personally identifying information, such as government IDs, and biometric age checks that rely on AI-based facial recognition.

Watch Billy Joel deepfake himself in the 'Turn the Lights Back On' music video

Though deepfakes are often synonymous with manipulation and bad intentions, some artists have found creative uses for the technology. In this example, Billy Joel depicts himself in various eras of his career in keeping with the song's nostalgic message.

As occurred during the 2026 hack of an AI platform by OpenAI, agentic AI may exploit a system vulnerability to access sensitive data if that information enables it to complete its assigned task.

Balancing free speech while curbing misinformation has destroyed content moderation

Accusations of censorship and bias have led social media companies like Meta and X to scale back or abandon moderation tools—just as foreign propaganda surges. Researchers say their ability to track manipulation online has become severely limited.

Create professional-quality spoken audio from text

Generative AI now makes it possible to create everything from computer-generated written content to beautiful imagery and hyper-realistic videos in seconds from a user’s simple text prompt. Add to that list: High-quality spoken audio, which the AI software company ElevenLabs specializes in. Its natural-sounding speech synthesis and text-to-speech tech can produce human-like speech that mimics a variety of different tones, styles, and accents.

Fair use may shield AI companies from potential copyright violations

AI models are trained on enormous datasets built from content scraped from websites across the internet. Copyright law includes a four-factor test to determine whether copies of content fall under fair use, but the law's enforcement has been inconsistent.

Research suggests using AI for schoolwork may harm critical thinking skills

An MIT study finds lower brain engagement in students who used ChatGPT, resulting in consistent underperformance in neural, linguistic and behavioral levels. AI users struggled to recall their own essays, while the brain-only group showed the highest neural connectivity and satisfaction.

Art and video produced through generative AI involve competing neural networks

Generative adversarial networks are a type of deep learning architecture that consists of a generator, which creates data that appear real, and a discriminator, which attempts to distinguish authentic from fake data. The two train in a competitive loop until the real and fictional data are indistinguishable.

The promise and peril of AI in agriculture

Robots. Drones. Artificial Intelligence. All three are touted as potential saviors for farmers, and are already being deployed on large farms, where they assist with such tasks as managing crops, milking cows, and helping farmers make decisions about their land. But agricultural AI could have disastrous, unintended consequences.

The potential promises and pitfalls of AI in medicine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into healthcare, offering the potential to aid in diagnoses, answer patient queries, and streamline administrative processes. In a recent PBS interview, Dr. Isaac Kohane, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine AI and chair of Harvard’s department of biomedical informatics, discusses the current state and future of AI in medicine.

In 2026, a pilot program introduced two AI-powered humanoid robots to a San Diego charter school to increase engagement and academic gains, though some criticized the $500k purchase.

See the news with AI-generated data visualizations

Realtime uses generative AI to create immediate data visualizations of news items on its regularly-updated feed, pulling from public data feeds. Peruse stories around sports, economics, politics, and more with the helpful aid of charts and graphs. See the shape of the news with this clever AI tool here.