deepfake

29 May 2026

A deepfake is a piece of artificially generated or manipulated media, especially a video, that is convincing. Deepfakes were among the first products of artificial intelligence to come to the attention of the general public. They started appearing in late 2017 when pornographic videos where a celebrity’s face had replaced that of the original performer started circulating on the internet.

The deep in deepfake comes from the phrase deep learning, which refers to the method of training machine-learning algorithms. Deep learning dates to at least 1986. But the term deepfake first appears as the screenname of a Reddit user who posted such pornographic videos on that site starting in 2017.

The Reddit user deepfakes came to the attention of the wider world on 11 December 2017 when journalist Samantha Cole wrote about him on Vice.com:

It’s not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn’t track correctly and there’s an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It’s especially striking considering that it’s allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name “deepfakes”—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.

Two days later, the hashtag #DeepFake appeared on Twitter in a post linking to Cole’s article.

And Cole would use deepfake as a noun in a follow-up article on 24 January 2018:

In early January, shortly after Motherboard’s first deepfakes story broke, I called Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to talk about the implications of this technology on society at large: “I think we’re on the cusp of this technology being really easy and widespread,” he told me, adding that deepfakes were pretty difficult to make at the time. “You can make fake videos with neural networks today, but people will be able to tell that you’ve done that if you look closely, and some of the techniques involved remain pretty advanced. That’s not going to stay true for more than a year or two.”

In fact, that barely stayed true for two months. We counted dozens of users who are experimenting with AI-assisted fake porn, some of which have created incredibly convincing videos.

The following month, on 21 February 2018, a post on the blog Lawfare discussed the broader implications of deepfakes beyond porn:

Belated recognition of the problem has spurred a variety of efforts to address this most recent illustration of truth decay, and at first blush there seems to be reason for optimism. Alas, the problem may soon take a significant turn for the worse thanks to deepfakes.

Get used to hearing that phrase. It refers to digital manipulation of sound, images, or video to impersonate someone or make it appear that a person did something—and to do so in a manner that is increasingly realistic, to the point that the unaided observer cannot detect the fake. Think of it as a destructive variation of the Turing test: imitation designed to mislead and deceive rather than to emulate and iterate.

And by 5 March 2018, traditional media had taken notice of the term. From the New York Times of that date:

The video, which appeared on the online forum Reddit, was what’s known as a “deepfake”—an ultrarealistic fake video made with artificial intelligence software. It was created using a program called FakeApp, which superimposed Mrs. Obama’s face onto the body of a pornographic film actress—if you didn’t know better, you might have thought it was really her.

Sources:

Chesney, Robert and Danielle Citron. “Deepfakes: A Looming Crisis for National Security, Democracy and Privacy?” Lawfare (blog), 21 February 2018.

Cole, Samantha. “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked.” Vice.com, 11 December 2017.

———. “We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.” Vice.com, 24 January 2018.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2023, s.v. deepfake, n.; 2020, s.v. deep learning, n.

Roose, Kevin. “It Was Only a Matter of Time: Here Comes an App for Fake Videos.” New York Times, 5 March 2018, A1/2. ProQuest.

Ruiz-Adame, Manuel (@ManuelRuizAdame), Twitter.com (now X.com), 13 December 2017.

Image credit: Unknown creator using Midjourney software, 2023. Wikimedia Commons. Reddit. Public domain image.