Deepfakes

And now so can you. The technology to create “deepfakes” — videos of people doing things that never really happened — has arrived on smartphones. It’s simple, fun … and also troubling.

And MyHeritage, a genealogy website, lets anyone use deepfake tech to bring old still photos to life. Upload a shot of a long-lost relative or friend, and it produces a remarkably convincing short video of them looking around and smiling. Even the little wrinkles around the eyes look real. They call it “Deep Nostalgia” and have reanimated more than 65 million photos of people in the past four weeks.

These deepfakes may not fool everyone, but it’s still a cultural tipping point we aren’t ready for. Forget laws to keep fakes from running amok, we hardly even have social norms for this stuff.

All three of the latest free services say they’re mostly being used for positive purposes: satire, entertainment and historical re-creations. The problem is, we already know there are plenty of bad uses for deepfakes, too.

“You must make sure that the audience is aware this is synthetic media,” says Gil Perry, the CEO of D-ID, the tech company that powers MyHeritage’s deepfakes. “We have to set the guidelines, the frameworks and the policies for the world to know what is good and what is bad.”

The technology to digitally alter still images — Adobe’s Photoshop editing software — has been around for decades. But deepfake videos pose new problems, like being weaponized, particularly against women, to create humiliating, nonconsensual fake pornography.