Better Beware – Deepfakes

Once upon a time, there was a saying most people had heard of, and everyone believed. It went, “pictures don’t lie” and it referred to photographs, which were accepted as evidence in a court of law. People did create fake photographs, starting very early on, but it was always possible to tell that a photograph had been tampered with or deliberately created, because the process was a relatively crude chemical and physical one, and because the fakes were created by people. Well, that saying is gone with the wind today, because pictures – still pictures, moving pictures, any kind of pictures – can be made to lie very effectively. As recently as twenty seventeen, the name for these modern lies was coined by a user of the Reddit social medium – deepfakes.