Deepfakes vs Cheap fakes
What is the difference, when does each apply, and can both be at work at once.
Deepfakes
Audio, video, or images generated or altered by machine learning to show a real person saying or doing something they did not, or to fabricate an event, with a realism that defeats casual inspection.
Cheap fakes
Genuine images or recordings altered with ordinary tools, slowed, sped up, cropped, spliced, or simply relabelled, so that they appear to show something they do not.
The differences
| Deepfakes | Cheap fakes | |
|---|---|---|
| Method | Synthesis. Machine learning generates or alters a face, voice, or scene that never happened. | Editing. Real footage is slowed, sped up, cropped, re-captioned, re-ordered, or dubbed. |
| Skill and cost | Once high; now low, with consumer tools. | Always low. A phone and a caption will do. |
| Frequency | Rarer than feared in political use, though growing fast. | By far the more common, and responsible for most viral manipulated video. |
| Detection | Technical: artifacts, provenance metadata, detection models. | Contextual: find the original, check the date, read the caption against the footage. |
| Classic case | Synthetic video of a head of state announcing a surrender, 2022. | Footage of a politician slowed to make her appear impaired, 2019. |
| The tell | The event itself is implausible or unsourced. | The event is real but the framing does not fit it. |
A short video circulates in which a national leader appears to tell troops to lay down their arms. The face is slightly wrong, the voice is flat, and no outlet carried the address. It was generated.
A video of a speech is slowed by about a quarter and reposted with the caption that the speaker was drunk. The original, at normal speed, shows nothing of the kind.
Rarely in a single clip, but constantly in a campaign, which will use whichever is cheaper for the job. The practical lesson is that the alarm about deepfakes has drawn attention away from the technique that does most of the damage. For both, the first question is the same: where is the original, and who posted this first.