The rise of deepfakes and mistrust in the digital age
In early 2022, a video circulated showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender to Russia. Within hours, experts identified it as a deepfake, an artificially generated content designed to fabricate reality. Though quickly debunked, the video briefly caused confusion among Ukrainian citizens that were already under extreme stress. This was not the only incident related to deep fake. As AI technology advances, deepfakes have evolved from being an innovation to genuine threat and in cases, psychological weapons, undermining our ability to distinguish truth from fiction in an already fragmented digital world. What exactly are deepfakes? Deepfakes use deep learning algorithms, a subset of artificial intelligence, to create hyper-realistic fake videos, images, or audio showing real people saying or doing things they never did. The technology behind deepfakes is not inherently malicious. They are the same AI techniques that po...