In an age of Photoshop, filters and social media, many people are used to seeing manipulated pictures — subjects become slimmer and smoother or, in the case of Snapchat, transformed into puppies.
However, there is a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, that would allow for the creation of realistic-looking footage of public figures appearing to say, well, anything.
US President Donald Trump declaring his proclivity for water sports. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton describing the stolen children she keeps locked in her wine cellar. Actor Tom Cruise finally admitting what we suspected all along — that he is a brony (a My Little Pony fan.)
This is the future of fake news. People have long been told not to believe everything they read, but soon they will have to question everything they see and hear as well.
For now, there are several research teams working on capturing and synthesizing different visual and audio elements of human behavior.
Software developed at Stanford University is able to manipulate video footage of public figures to allow a second person to put words in their mouth — in real time.
Face2Face captures the second person’s facial expressions as they talk into a webcam and then morphs those movements directly onto the face of the person in the original video.
The research team demonstrated their technology by puppeteering videos of former US president George W. Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump.
On its own, Face2Face is a fun plaything for creating memes and entertaining late-night talk show hosts.
However, with the addition of a synthesized voice, it becomes more convincing — not only does the digital puppet look like the politician, but it can also sound like the politician.
A research team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has been working on voice impersonation.
With three to five minutes of audio of a victim’s voice — taken live or from YouTube videos or radio shows — an attacker can create a synthesized voice that can fool both humans and voice biometric security systems used by some banks and smartphones.
The attacker can then talk into a microphone and the software will convert it so that the words sound like they are being spoken by the victim — whether that is over the telephone or on a radio show.
Canadian start-up Lyrebird has developed similar capabilities, which it says can be used to turn text into on-the-spot audiobooks “read” by famous voices or for characters in video games.
Although their intentions might be well-meaning, voice-morphing technology could be combined with face-morphing technology to create convincing fake statements by public figures.
You only have to look at the University of Washington’s Synthesizing Obama project, where they took the audio from one of former US president Barack Obama’s speeches and used it to animate his face in an entirely different video with incredible accuracy — thanks to training a recurrent neural network with hours of footage — to get a sense of how insidious these adulterations can be.
Beyond fake news, there are many other implications, said Nitesh Saxena, associate professor and research director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s department of computer science.
“You could leave fake voice messages posing as someone’s mom. Or defame someone and post the audio samples online,” Saxena said.
These morphing technologies are not yet perfect. The facial expressions in the videos can seem a little distorted or unnatural and the voices can sound a little robotic.
However, given time, they will be able to faithfully recreate the sound or appearance of a person — to the point where it might be very difficult for humans to detect the fraud.
Given the erosion of trust in the media and the rampant spread of hoaxes via social media, it will become even more important for news organizations to scrutinize content that looks and sounds like the real deal.
Telltale signs will be where the video or audio was created, who else was at the event and whether the weather conditions match the records of that day.
People should also be looking at the lighting and shadows in the video, whether all of the elements featured in the frame are the right size and whether the audio is synced perfectly, said Mandy Jenkins, from social news company Storyful, which specializes in verifying news content.
Doctored content might not pass the scrutiny of a rigorous newsroom, but if posted as a grainy video to social media, it could spread virally and trigger a public relations, political or diplomatic disaster. Imagine Trump declaring war on North Korea, for example.
“If someone looks like Trump and speaks like Trump, they will think it’s Trump,” Saxena said.
“We already see it doesn’t even take doctored audio or video to make people believe something that isn’t true,” Jenkins added. “This has the potential to make it worse.”
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) are expected to meet this month in Paris to prepare for a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). According to media reports, the two sides would discuss issues such as the potential purchase of Boeing aircraft by China, increasing imports of US soybeans and the latest impacts of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs. However, recent US military action against Iran has added uncertainty to the Trump-Xi summit. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) called the joint US-Israeli airstrikes and the
RSS