In 2024, three major figures were deepfaked more than any other celebrity. Can you guess who they are?
Have you ever watched a deepfake video or seen a deepfake image of a celebrity or prominent figure? Well, you may have without even knowing it wasn’t real.
Deepfake media is everywhere, and there’s seemingly no way to slow down its proliferation.
One of the more recent deepfakes, which garnered a lot of attention after being shared by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on his platform X, was a parody campaign advertisement depicting presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
The video features audio that sounds just like Harris but isn’t – it’s artificially generated.
Throughout the video, “Harris” says things like “I’m the ultimate diversity hire” and “Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate,” all statements that a Democratic candidate wouldn’t say in a promotional ad.
What’s even more shocking is that a prominent figure (who – spoiler alert – has been the target of deepfake prompts nearly 10,000 times) would push this content and even add, “This is amazing,” almost deeming this type of arguably defamatory content acceptable to his 199 million followers.
This is amazing 😂
undefined Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024
pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn
Regardless, we now live in a world where deepfakes are commonplace, and much of the media we way view online could be fake.
With intuitive artificial intelligence models and dedicated apps that help you build your own deepfake, deceiving your friends, family, and the public has never been easier.
Hence why deepfakes are so controversial as they raise ethical concerns and perhaps even legal concerns when dealing with prominent figures and members of the public.
As part of a campaign to raise awareness of the potential issues surrounding deepfake content, Kapwing, an online content creation platform, has released research on how many times celebrities and prominent figures have been the target of deepfake content.
The 10 most deepfaked celebrities of 2024
Kapwing found that many celebrities and prominent figures had been the subject of prompts used to create AI deepfake videos of popular people.
On Discord’s free (and most active) text-to-video AI tool, they analyzed the number of text-to-video prompts for over 500 influential American pop culture icons.
Overall, 10 were found to be the most deepfaked celebrities of 2024.
In first place is current presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump had the most number of deepfake videos, racking up 12,384 video prompts in 2024.
His partisan Elon Musk closely followed Trump, who came in second with 9,544 video prompts.
Unsurprisingly, the leading international artist who was at the helm of her own deepfake scandal back in January is Taylor Swift, with 8,202 video prompts.
Alongside the top three were US president Joe Biden, actors Tom Cruise, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, and Will Smith, world class footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and grammy award winning artist Beyonce.
You might’ve read through this article thinking, “What exactly is a deepfake? I see them on social media but don’t know how they’re created.”
What are deepfakes?
Well, the term deepfake is a portmanteau that refers to deep learning, which falls under the artificial intelligence (AI) umbrella. The second word is just fake, which is self-explanatory.
Deep learning is a form of AI that uses neural networks to tackle various tasks like natural language processing used in chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and image recognition that identifies objects in images. Consider neural networks like a digital version of the human brain.
In the context of deepfakes, understanding how these things work is rather confusing. But just to simplify things, deep learning is a kind of AI that helps to create fake content by learning from legitimate data and checking that content for inconsistencies.
Arguably, because there’s so much publicly accessible data on celebrities and prominent figures to train AI models on, it’s simple to use this data to generate fake footage.
That’s how you get a deepfake.
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