Deepfakes started as a bit of fun technology that allows you to put anyone’s face onto anyone’s body.

Naturally, people used this to create porn.

One creator of deepfakes, ‘Ctrl Shift Face’, also used it to make a very disturbing video featuring Bill Hader, Tom Cruise, and Seth Rogen.

It’s the stuff of nightmares, so watch it at your own risk.

Deepfake tech has gone from strength to strength and, while in a perfect world, this would mean the occasional funny video (and porn…we’ll never get away from porn), it could also be used for evil.

Mashable looked into two videos doing the rounds at the moment that show the potential of deepfakes to mess with politics.

As you might know, the UK is heading into another general election. Boris Johnson’s campaign strategy so far seems to hinge on pretending to know what’s going on with Brexit, and mishandling a mop.

A think tank called Future Advocacy has now released two videos ahead of the election. The one is a deepfake of Johnson appearing to endorse Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and vice versa.

Boris endorsing Jeremy:

Jeremy endorsing Boris:

Unsettling, to say the least.

Future Advocacy shared the videos as a warning to watch out for misinformation. I suppose they’re hoping that people will watch up until the part when both Johnson and Corbyn declare themselves deepfakes.

“Deepfakes represent a genuine threat to democracy and society more widely,” said Future Advocacy’s head of think tank Areeq Chowdhury. “They can be used to fuel misinformation and totally undermine trust in audiovisual content.

“Despite warnings over the past few years, politicians have so far collectively failed to address the issue of disinformation online. Instead the response has been to defer to tech companies to do more.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

Get on that, lawmakers.

[source:mashable]