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Concept
Synthetic media
Summary
Synthetic media (also known as AI-generated media, media produced by generative AI, personalized media, and colloquially as deepfakes) is a catch-all term for the artificial production, manipulation, and modification of data and media by automated means, especially through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, such as for the purpose of misleading people or changing an original meaning. Synthetic media as a field has grown rapidly since the creation of generative adversarial networks, primarily through the rise of deepfakes as well as music synthesis, text generation, human image synthesis, speech synthesis, and more. Though experts use the term "synthetic media," individual methods such as deepfakes and text synthesis are sometimes not referred to as such by the media but instead by their respective terminology (and often use "deepfakes" as a euphemism, e.g. "deepfakes for text" for natural-language generation; "deepfakes for voices" for neural voice cloning, etc.) Significant attention arose towards the field of synthetic media starting in 2017 when Motherboard reported on the emergence of AI altered pornographic videos to insert the faces of famous actresses. Potential hazards of synthetic media include the spread of misinformation, further loss of trust in institutions such as media and government, the mass automation of creative and journalistic jobs and a retreat into AI-generated fantasy worlds. Synthetic media is an applied form of artificial imagination.
Synthetic media as a process of automated art dates back to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, where inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria designed machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music. The tradition of automaton-based entertainment flourished throughout history, with mechanical beings' seemingly magical ability to mimic human creativity often drawing crowds throughout Europe, China, India, and so on. Other automated novelties such as Johann Philipp Kirnberger's "Musikalisches Würfelspiel" (Musical Dice Game) 1757 also amused audiences.
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