The challenge of deepfakes

The original Star Trek show from the 1960s has proved prescient again and again. Starfleet’s pocket communicators and slightly larger tricorders anticipated smartphones. Hospital beds today with their sensors and screens look a lot like the diagnostic beds in the Enterprise’s sickbay. We talk with Siri, Alexa, and other digital assistants the way the Enterprise crew talked with the ship’s computer.

Star Trek also foreshadowed the deepfake. Deepfakes are convincing, technology-enabled forgeries where it looks like people are saying things that they’ve never said or stood next to…