Disinformation in Latin America

The pace of technological change is unrelenting, with some increasingly sophisticated technologies expanding the potential for disinformation. One of these is the rise of so-called deepfakes. These are artificial intelligence (AI) programmes that use a form of deep learning to produce synthetic videos, photographs, or audio tracks that realistically mimic real people. The technique was initially used by pornographic websites to map the faces of well-known female celebrities onto the bodies of porn stars. Deepfakes have been made of Barrack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and many more international politicians. In 2019 it was reported that a deepfake audio had been used by fraudsters to impersonate the voice of a German chief executive and demand a US$243,000 money transfer. Various techniques can be used to detect whether a video of a politician is genuine or fake, but these all take time and resources.