Deepfakes: A New Era of Misinformation

The world that we live in today is flooded with information from sources that sometimes are true and sometimes are not. Just a simple change of narrative on the same thing might drastically change people’s opinions. With fabricated media already rampant, a new player has emerged in the synthetic media industry which goes by the name of “deepfake” which is a type of fabricated video made using deep learning, accurate to such an extent that it is sometimes impossible to differentiate the real video from the fake. The paper evaluates information from various sources and then expresses in a non-complex manner, the technical details of deepfakes, it’s formal definitions, an overview of the impact that it has had on the world till now, the technical process of making it also explaining the technical concepts in the process, and lastly the chapter talks about how some technical indicators that we can notice to spot deepfake videos, their place in today’s world and their legality is also talked about. This paper serves as the review of the technical details that we have about deepfake vides and then expresses the essential technical details about it in an organized, articulate, and an easy-to-understand manner. For people interested in making their own deepfakes, the chapter serves as an efficient starting point, by explaining the procedure in a simple yet technical way, and by explaining the tools that are required to make deepfake videos and how to use them. The paper might also serve as a way of spreading awareness about deepfakes and what the average person can do from his or her side to identify deepfake videos.