Synthetic Media & Generative AI News and Discussions

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[raklian]

To anime lovers.

[wjfox]

Deepfakes Leveled up in 2025—Here’s What’s Coming Next

Fake images, videos, and audio files crossed the “indistinguishable threshold" this year. Where do we go from here?

December 26, 2025

Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people.

For many everyday scenarios — especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platforms — their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions.

And this surge is not limited to quality. The volume of deepfakes has grown explosively: Cybersecurity firm DeepStrike estimates an increase from roughly 500,000 online deepfakes in 2023 to about 8 million in 2025, with annual growth nearing 900%.

I’m a computer scientist who researches deepfakes and other synthetic media. From my vantage point, I see that the situation is likely to get worse in 2026 as deepfakes become synthetic performers capable of reacting to people in real time.

Several technical shifts underlie this dramatic escalation. First, video realism made a significant leap thanks to video generation models designed specifically to maintain temporal consistency. These models produce videos that have coherent motion, consistent identities of the people portrayed, and content that makes sense from one frame to the next. The models disentangle the information related to representing a person’s identity from the information about motion so that the same motion can be mapped to different identities, or the same identity can have multiple types of motions.

https://gizmodo.com/deepfakes-leveled-u ... 2000703649

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[wjfox]

[firestar464]

Song banned from Swedish charts for being AI creation

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp829jey9z7o

I mean, whether it is worthy of being called "music" would really depend on the exact process by which the music was created.

[spryfusion]

[wjfox]

Debunking AI-generated wall of snow in Kamchatka, Russia

Richard Irvine-Brown and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify

10:48

We’ve been seeing dozens of posts on social media claiming to show huge snow drifts in parts of Kamchatka in eastern Russia. But many appear to have been made or manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI).

Looking at recent weather reports, an enormous amount of snow has fallen in the region since 12 January. However, many of the viral clips show characteristic signs of AI-generation.

Several videos and pictures have been shared on X, YouTube and Facebook - and used by some news organisations - without acknowledging they’re fake.

However the video we’ve taken this grab from, which has been viewed more than a million times on TikTok, has been labelled as AI-generated.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwy11n7 ... 5ab8a#post

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

White House Posts Deepfake Image of Arrested ICE Protester Crying
By Stephen Prager
January 22, 2026

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Continuing its bizarre and often legally questionable use of social media to publicize law enforcement operations, the official White House account published an artificially generated deepfake image of a protester arrested on Thursday by the FBI.

Earlier that day, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had posted about Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three people who were arrested for disrupting a service last week at the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer and field office leader, David Easterwood, reportedly serves as a pastor.

Additional Extract:

In her post, Noem shared a photo of Levy Armstrong being led away by an agent, whose face is pixelated to hide his identity. In the photo, Levy Armstrong appears stone-faced and unfazed by the arrest.

Hours later, the official White House account shared the exact same image—accompanied by text describing her as a “far-left agitator”—but with one notable difference. Levy Armstrong’s face was digitally altered to make it appear as if she was sobbing profusely while being led out by the agent. Nowhere did the account make clear that the image had been doctored.
…
CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale later said the White House had “confirmed its official X account posted a fake image of a woman arrested in Minnesota after interrupting a service at a church where an ICE official appears to be a pastor,” and that “the White House image altered the actual photo to wrongly make it seem like the defendant was sobbing.”

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/whit ... rotester

[wjfox]

The newly open sourced LingBot-World report reveals a breakthrough capability where the model effectively builds an implicit map of the world rather than just hallucinating pixels based on probability. This emergent understanding allows it to reason about spatial logic and unobserved states purely through next-frame prediction.

The "Stonehenge Test" demonstrates this perfectly. You can observe a complex landmark, turn the camera away for a full 60 seconds, and when you return, the structure remains perfectly intact with its original geometry preserved.

It even simulates unseen dynamics. If a vehicle drives out of the frame, the model continues to calculate its trajectory off-screen. When you pan the camera back, the car appears at the mathematically correct location rather than vanishing or freezing in place. This signals a fundamental shift from models that merely dream visuals to those that truly simulate physical laws.

[spryfusion]

Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

Inexplicably they are sitting in the middle of a busy road in the pouring rain with a birthday cake. The image is full of tell-tale signs that it was made with AI. But on Facebook it went viral with nearly one million likes and heart emojis.

The people liking it probably ain't real either. Dead internet.

If something is made clearly as a joke, it seems to be taken as such. But when AI slop has been created specifically to deceive, it can anger people.

Most important bit.

He talks of the risk of "brain rot" - the idea that our constant exposure to social media is harming our intellectual abilities.

Perhaps for some people, but it is better to promote intelligent thought as opposed to simply starting a satanic panic about synthetic memes, which doesn't solve the root causes of stupidity.

[raklian]

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[firestar464]