deepfake

noun

deep·fake ˈdēp-ˌfāk

plural deepfakes

: an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said

Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never said, and uploaded it to Instagram.—

Samantha Cole

No law regulates deepfakes, though some legal and technical experts have recommended adapting current laws covering libel, defamation, identity fraud or impersonating a government official. But concerns of overregulation abound: The dividing line between a parody protected by the First Amendment and deepfake political propaganda may not always be clear-cut.—

Drew Harwell

With Mueller warning of future election meddling, [Representative Adam] Schiff said that one of his biggest concerns for future campaigns was the development of deepfake technology—the ability to manipulate videos or audio to change what a person appears to have said. 'How do we prepare against the late distribution of a fraudulent video?' Schiff said.—

Elias Groll and Amy Mackinnon

Did you know?

The old maxim "things aren’t always as they seem" seems more true than ever in the age of deepfakes. A deepfake is an image, or a video or audio recording, that has been edited using an algorithm to replace the person in the original with someone else (especially a public figure) in a way that makes it look authentic. The fake in deepfake is transparent: deepfakes are not real. The deep is less self-explanatory: this half of the term is specifically influenced by deep learning—that is, machine learning using artificial neural networks with multiple layers of algorithms.

Examples of deepfake in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web And Massachusetts lawmakers are wrapping up legislation that would criminalize the nonconsensual sharing of explicit images, including deepfakes. —

Natasha Singer, New York Times, 22 Apr. 2024 Wall Street Journal - Doing something about deepfakes. —

Emma Hinchliffe, Fortune, 17 Apr. 2024 Three deepfake-detection software experts testified to the Senate's subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law Tuesday about how Congress can regulate the artificial intelligence space, particularly the rise of malicious deepfakes. —

Kat Tenbarge, NBC News, 16 Apr. 2024 The Trump and the DeSantis campaigns both used deepfakes to sully their rivals. —

Manvir Singh, The New Yorker, 15 Apr. 2024 Detection software Some companies, including Reality Defender and Deep Media, have built tools that detect deepfakes based on the foundational technology used by AI image generators. —

Gerrit De Vynck, Washington Post, 5 Apr. 2024 With less local journalism and with fact-checkers at capacity, deepfakes could cause disruption. —

Huo Jingnan, NPR, 5 Apr. 2024 In an attempt to get out in front of the problem, state legislators have been introducing and passing bans on deepfakes — media created using AI to impersonate politicians — around elections. —

Kaleigh Rogers, ABC News, 27 Mar. 2024 This model can’t produce deepfakes, because it was trained on only a creative universe. —

Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Apr. 2024

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'deepfake.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.