Encountering altered videos and photoshopped images is almost a rite of passage on the internet. It’s rare these days that you’d visit social media and not come across some form of edited content — whether that be a simple selfie with a filter, a highly embellished meme or a video edited to add a soundtrack or enhance certain elements.
But while some forms of media are obviously edited, other alterations may be harder to spot. You may have heard the term “deepfake” in recent years — it first came about in 2017 to describe videos and images that implement deep learning algorithms to create videos and images that look real.
For example, take the moon disaster speech given by former president Richard Nixon when the Apollo 11 team crashed into the lunar surface. Just kidding — that never happened. But a hyper-realistic deepfake of Nixon paying tribute to a fallen Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong appeared in a 2019 film, In Event of Moon Disaster, which showcased the convincing alteration of the president’s original speech.
