Stephanie Lepp

Deep Reckonings is a series of "deepfake" videos. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the former US President, Donald Trump, only talk about deeds and events that are already public knowledge. In these videos, however, they take responsibility for them.

With Deep Reckonings, Stephanie Lepp shows the extraordinary power of "synthetic" media, which can be used not only for revenge, deception, and manipulation but also for socio-political purposes in the struggle for justice.

Deepfakes refer to seemingly realistic images, movies, and sounds that have been created or manipulated using artificial intelligence techniques. The neologism combining “deep learning” (a machine learning method) and “fake” was first used in 2017.

Media manipulation is not a new phenomenon. However, deepfakes are almost indistinguishable from real images. In addition, these synthetic images can be generated largely autonomously and in vast quantities with the help of already available software.

The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve the training of generative neural network architectures such as Autoencoder or generative adversarial networks (GANs).