The fast development of artificial intelligence made it possible to create hyper-realistic synthetic media that are popularly called deepfakes. Although this technology has immense potential in terms of entertainment, education and accessibility, its ill intent use is posing very serious threats to privacy, security, democracy and trust in the society. Deepfakes have the potential to be used in misinformation, political manipulation, identity theft, and cybercrime, and their detection is a high priority worldwide. In this paper, I will discuss the landscape of AI-based detection tools that fight synthetic media, with particular attention to machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid methods. It discusses benchmark datasets, and evaluation metrics applied to measure detection effectiveness, and identifies the main challenges, including generalization, adversarial attacks, and data scarcity. Moreover, the paper addresses ethical and legal issues of deepfake technology and explains the future research perspectives to develop resistant detection systems. Powerful AI models can be complemented with policy frameworks to protect deepfakes through the promotion of digital integrity and trustworthiness.
Olatunji Olusola Ogundipe (2024) studied this question.