Artificial Intelligence in Digital Media: The Era of Deepfakes

The recent practical advances realized by artificial intelligence, have also given rise to the phenomenon of deepfakes, which can be considered as a form of fake news. Deepfakes is the phenomenon of creation of realistic digital products, and a plethora of videos has emerged over the last two years in social media. Especially, the low technical expertise and equipment required to create deepfakes, means that such content can be easily produced by anyone and distributed online. The societal implications are significant and far-reaching. This article investigates the deepfakes via multiangled perspectives that include media and society, media production, media representations, media audiences, gender, law, and regulation, as well as politics. Some key implications of these viewpoints are identified and critically discussed. The results indicate that as a society, we are not ready to deal with the emergence of deepfakes at any level. That we have not witnessed any severe impacts so far is due to their early stage of development, which shows imperfections to address the issue, a combination of technology, education, training, and governance is urgently needed.