Meaning
A fabricated image, video, or audio clip made with machine-learning tools so convincingly that it appears to show a real person doing or saying something they never did; also used as a verb for creating such media. The word usually signals harm, because applications include political disinformation, voice-cloning fraud, and non-consensual sexual imagery. Technically neutral but almost always pejorative in practice, since most uses involve deception or abuse. Regional use: General English worldwide; strongest in tech, security, and policy contexts.
Origin
A portmanteau of deep learning and fake. It emerged in late 2017 from a Reddit user posting under the handle deepfakes, who shared celebrity face-swap videos that were largely non-consensual pornography; Vice's Motherboard was among the first outlets to report on the videos, carrying the anonymous handle's name to a general audience. Consumer-friendly software such as FakeApp spread the technique to hobbyists, and Reddit banned the r/deepfakes community in February 2018, by which point the word was entrenched in tech journalism. It has since broadened to cover AI-generated and AI-edited media generally and has entered major dictionaries, even though the underlying research, such as 1997's Video Rewrite project, long predates the name.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- deepfakes
- deepfaking
Usage Examples
- The bank lost millions after a finance officer joined a video call populated entirely by deepfakes.
- Detection software flagged the clip as a deepfake within hours of it appearing online.
- Scammers cloned her voice into a deepfake that begged his parents for emergency cash.