synthetic media application

A deepfake refers to a specific kind of synthetic media where a person in an image or video is swapped with another person's likeness.The term “deepfake” was first coined in late 2017 by a Reddit user of the same name. This user created a space on the online news and aggregation site, where they shared pornographic videos that used open source face-swapping technology.The term has since expanded to include “synthetic media applications” that existed before the Reddit page and new creations like StyleGAN — “realistic-looking still images of people that don’t exist,” said Henry Ajder, head of threat intelligence at deepfake detection company Deeptrace.

Deepfakes, explained | MIT Sloan Meredith Somers 2024