Hey, this is Flor Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Deepfakes have been deep in the news lately.

Right after the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and capture of Nicholas Maduro, fake AI images of him in custody circulated online.

Then there was the news that X's AI chatbot Grock was generating

non-consensual images of real people in clear bikinis. And if you missed all that, you probably

have had your own deep fake close encounter on your very own feed. Maybe rabbits bouncing on a trampoline

or an animal friendship that seems

just a little too good to be true. So deep fakes are now everywhere. They have moved beyond the

realm of novelty. It's more difficult than ever to know what's actually real online. So how did we

get here and what is there, if anything, to do about it?

And just a warning, I think this conversation may get dystopic and disturbing. Here with me now is

Dr. Hani Fareed, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and chief science officer

at Get Real Security. He's studied

digital forensics and how we relate to AI for over 25 years. And we have Sam Cole, a journalist

at 404 Media, who's covered deepfakes and their impact since 2017, which is before deepfake was

even a word. Honey and Sam, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having us. Good to be with you,

Flora. Okay, honey, let's start with you. Is it just me or have deep fake images and deep fake voices

and deep fakes now become basically indistinguishable from real media? It is not just you. In fact,

we have science to answer this question. In my lab here at UC Berkeley,

we do perceptual studies. We show people images. Half of them are real, half of them are fake,

or we have them listen to audio recordings with people voices, half of real, half are fake. And most

recently, we are just wrapping up a study on full blown video as well.

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