What a Deepfake Is

Transcript

Picture a video of your principal announcing that school's canceled tomorrow. Their face, their voice. They never said it.

That's a deepfake. It's a photo, a video, or a voice clip made by AI to look or sound like a real person, doing or saying something they never did.

It works like the rest of AI. A program studies a pile of examples, in this case someone's face or voice, picks up the patterns, and makes something new that fits them. And there's a lot of most people's faces and voices out there to learn from.

For a while, the advice was to look for the glitch. Weird hands, blurry edges, eyes that don't blink. The good ones don't have glitches anymore. Honestly, I build AI for a living, and I have a hard time telling.

So we teach kids a different habit. Realistic doesn't mean real, and staring harder won't settle it. What settles it is where it came from. Trust the source, not the sharpness.

That doesn't mean doubting everything. It just means "it looks real" stops counting as proof.