Deepfakes are manipulated images, videos or sound recordings generated with artificial intelligence. They are very easy to create, for example with an app – a very well-known and popular form of deepfakes is “face swapping”, in which your own face is mounted on someone else’s photo or video.
In Giffey’s case, someone may have used the face-swapping technique to speak to Vitali Klitschko’s face. In addition, there is also the possibility of “voice swapping”, where even the voice of the person who is to be represented can be artificially generated.
In a ZDFheute research two years ago, the IT forensic scientist Martin Steinebach from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology had already warned: “The deepfakes have the great risk that they can be generated by anyone and in social media to form opinions in filter bubbles to support False reports can be used.”