Deepfake

The term "deepfake" was coined in autumn 2017 by an anonymous Reddit user posting under the handle "deepfakes," who used open-source face-swapping machine learning code to superimpose celebrities' faces onto other footage and founded the r/deepfakes subreddit to share the technique and its outputs. The subreddit was banned within roughly a year, but by March 2018 the term had already spread into mainstream news coverage, academic research, and government hearings.

Technically, deepfake methods build on earlier computer-vision and CGI face-manipulation research going back decades, with Ian Goodfellow's 2014 introduction of generative adversarial networks (GANs) providing the key technical leap that made convincing, automatable face-swapping practical; more recent deepfake tools increasingly use diffusion-based generative models rather than GANs alone. As a base concept, "deepfake" refers to the synthesis technique and its outputs themselves — the underlying capability — rather than to any particular cultural reaction to seeing so much synthetic media, which is covered separately by the related but distinct term "Deepfake Fatigue."