How do deepfakes work and what are their dangers?

Deepfakes are like fake faces on videos that can trick your eyes into thinking someone is saying or doing something they're not.

Imagine you have a toy robot that can move its mouth and say words, but it doesn’t know what the real robot looks like. If you take pictures of the real robot and make the toy robot look just like it, then you can make the toy robot say anything, even if it’s not true!

That's how deepfakes work: they use computer tricks to put someone’s face on a video where they weren’t really there.

A computer looks at lots of videos of a person, like a famous singer. It learns how their face moves when they talk or smile. Then it can copy those movements onto another person's face in a different video, like putting the singer’s face on someone else’s body!

Deepfakes can be used to trick people into believing fake news, like if a president says something silly that they didn’t really say. It can also make it hard for you to know who is real and who is just pretending, like when your favorite cartoon character suddenly starts saying things that don’t sound like them!