ELI5: How do deepfakes work

Deepfakes are like swapping faces in a photo, but done with a computer that learns to do it really well.

Imagine you have a bunch of pictures and videos of your mom and your dad. A deepfake uses those pictures to learn what your mom's face looks like from different angles and with different expressions. It does the same thing for your dad's face.

• Think of it like this: the computer is learning to draw two very detailed face masks, one for each person.

• It does this by carefully covering up your dad's face in each frame of the video.
• Then, it uses the "mom face mask" to paint a new face that matches the lighting, angle, and expressions of your dad's original face.
• It even tries to make the voice sound a little bit like your mom's voice!

It’s like teaching a robot to paint. The more practice it gets, the better it becomes at making the painting look real. That's why some deepfakes look very convincing, while others look a bit funny or fake. It all depends on how much the computer has learned. So, basically, it's a digital face swap, but the computer is really, really good at it.