Forbes: DeepFakes: The Media Talks Politics While The Public Is Interested In Pornography

So-called “deep fakes” rocketed into the public consciousness in December 2017 with the rise of AI-constructed pornography in which celebrity faces were inserted into pornographic videos. A Reddit user named “deepfakes” published a series of videos that both ushered in a new era of thinking of the impact of AI and its move from the lab to the real world and gave us the name for this new kind of digitally constructed artificial reality. After that brief initial burst, it seems we’ve largely lost interest in the idea of “deep fakes” as the topic simply blends into the never-ending stream of AI advances, from driverless cars to facial recognition algorithms. Overall, the media has focused on the potential electoral impacts of deep fakes, while the public has focused on pornography.