You may already be familiar with "deep fakes" — the colloquial term for manipulating video, warping its reality with a particular rhetorical objective in mind. But how pervasive, easy to use and convincing have deep fakes gotten in recent years?

On this 135th episode of E&P Reports, Host and E&P Publisher Mike Blinder; guest Sam Gregory, program director at WITNESS.org; and E&P contributor Gretchen Peck discuss Artificial Intelligence (AI) in video and audio and how computer-generated graphics (CGI) technologies have gotten exponentially more sophisticated and accessible in recent years.

Hear how AI will be used to take this very vodcast recording and translate the host's voice into Spanish — as though Blinder himself was speaking the language. It's allowing E&P Reports to reach much wider Spanish-speaking audiences here in the U.S. and worldwide.

The group also discussed the infamous Tom Cruise deep fake that circulated on TikTok and how a Russian propaganda deep-fake appeared to show Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy encouraging his country and troops to surrender to Russia. It was a stark example of how potentially dangerous deep-fake deployment can be.

How much of a threat are deep fakes to journalism, journalists and truth itself? It now falls on the shoulders of journalists and documentarians to invest resources in digital forensics to verify the veracity and sources of video content, so they can be part of the solution to stop the spread of disinformation.

Listen/watch now, and check out E&P’s May issue for a deeper dive on deep fakes.