In Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes, Data & Society Affiliates Britt Paris and Joan Donovan trace decades of audiovisual (AV) manipulation to demonstrate how evolving technologies aid consolidations of power in society. Deepfakes, they find, are no new threat to democracy.
Coining the term “cheap fakes,” Paris and Donovan demonstrate that the creation of successfully deceptive media has never necessarily required advanced processing technologies, such as today’s machine learning tools. A “deepfake” is a video that has been altered through some form of machine learning to “hybridize or generate human bodies and faces,” whereas a “cheap fake” is an AV manipulation created with cheaper, more accessible software (or, none at all). Cheap fakes can be rendered through Photoshop, lookalikes, re-contextualizing footage, speeding, or slowing.
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