"Deepfakes" as we know them first started to gain attention in December 2017, after Vice's Samantha Cole published a piece for Motherboard on AI-manipulated porn that appeared to feature "Wonder Woman" actress Gal Gadot.
The videos took on their unique name due to a prolific Reddit user called "deepfakes" who published a series of fake celebrity porn videos and was the subject of the Vice piece.
The videos were significant because they marked the first notable instance of a single person who was able to easily and quickly create high-quality and convincing fake videos.
According to Cole, who spoke to deepfakes, they used "open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning."
Attempts to superimpose celebrity or other faces onto porn wasn't something new, but the mode, speed, and seeming simplicity of the process was. According to AI-researcher Alex Champandard, who spoke to Vice, the process of creating a deepfake could take just a few hours with a consumer-grade graphics card.
Deepfakes also have the potential to differ in quality from previous efforts to superimpose faces onto other bodies. A good deepfake, created by AI that has been trained on hours of footage, has been specifically generated for its context, with seamless mouth and head movements and appropriate coloration. Simply superimposing a head onto a body and animating it by hand can lead to dead context mismatches.