Deepfakes are now trying to change the course of war

Key Facts

“I ask you to lay down your weapons and go back to your families,” he appeared to say in Ukrainian in the clip, which was quickly identified as a deepfake.
As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation.
It just wasn’t easy to make a good deepfake, which requires smoothing out obvious signs that a video has been tampered with (such as weird-looking visual jitters around the frame of a person’s face) and making it sound like the person in the video was saying what they appeared to be saying (either via an AI version of their actual voice or a convincing voice actor).
(In the United States, there has also been some legislation to address the issue, such as a California law passed in 2019 prohibiting the distribution of deceptive video or audio of political candidates within 60 days of an election.) “We’re going to see this a lot more, and relying on platform companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter is probably not sufficient,” he said.