Today, the events in realistic-looking or-sounding video and audio recordings need never have happened. They can instead be automatically, by powerful computers and machine-learning software. The catch-all term for these computational productions is "deepfakes".

    The term first appeared on Reddit, a messaging board, as the username for an account which was producing videos. An entire community up around the creation of these videos, writing software tools that let anyone automatically one person's face onto the body of another. Reddit shut the community down, but the technology was out there. Soon it was being applied to political and actors.

    Tools for editing media have existed for decades—think Photoshop. The power and peril of deepfakes is that they make fakery cheaper than ever before. Before deepfakes, a powerful computer and a good chunk of a university degree were needed to produce a realistic fake video of someone. Now some photos and an Internet connection are all that is required.

    The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are likely to be , albeit slow to unfold. Plenty worry about the possible impact that believable, fake footage of politicians might have on civil society—from a further loss of trust in media to the for electoral distortions. These technologies could also be deployed against softer targets: it might be used, for instance, to bully classmates by creating imagery of them in embarrassing situations. In a world that was already saturated with imagery, deepfakes make it plausible to push that even further.