Synthetic Media: Deepfakes, AI-Generated Content, and Authenticity in the Digital Society

Synthetic media are digital artifacts (image, video, audio, text, or multimodal content) that are wholly or partly generated or materially manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI), particularly by deep-learning models. In consequence, their form, source, identity signal, or evidentiary relation to recorded events becomes partly or wholly artificial. A deepfake is the best-known subclass: AI-generated or AI-manipulated image, audio, or video content (including audio-only voice clones and still images) that realistically depicts an existing or fictitious person, object, place, or event and could falsely appear to be authentic. Contemporary scholarly and legal usage defines deepfakes by their technological origin and their capacity to deceive rather than by the creator’s intent, so disclosed and beneficial applications (accessibility, dubbing, entertainment, and research) are synthetic media as well. They are distinguished from cheapfakes (or shallowfakes), which achieve deception through conventional, non-AI editing such as selective cropping, slowing, or recontextualization. The social significance of synthetic media is not intrinsic but depends on consent, context, disclosure, and distribution, and on the institutional conditions under which audiences judge authenticity across the expanding volume of AI-generated content (AIGC) in the digital society.