AI concerns | What are 'deepfakes', and how could they impact your workforce?

In May this year, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said his biggest concern around artificial intelligence is deepfakes.

Deepfakes first emerged on the Internet in 2017 and is powered by a deep learning method known as generative adversarial networks (GANs), hence the name ‘deepfakes’.

Deepfakes, which has been likened to a more sophisticated Photoshop for moving images, has shown the world Barrack Obama calling the former-President Donald Trump a ‘dipsh*t’, and has most recently portrayed Martin Lewis, the morning TV show finance expert, telling fans to buy an app as part of a scam. These moving images weren’t real, but an AI generated video aimed at tricking viewers.

These moving images have the power of depicting very realistic moving images of celebrities and global figures, often saying things they never have, or never would, but are becoming more and more prominent.