\n<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Giorgia Meloni posted<\/a> to X an AI-generated photo of herself wearing only lingerie. The Italian prime minister published the image to warn others about how easy it is to create perfectly believable images and videos. Her warning: Never believe anything you see without thoroughly fact-checking it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After all, we live in the end of reality.<\/p>\n \u201cDeepfakes are a dangerous tool, because they can deceive, manipulate, and hit anyone,\u201d Meloni said on X. \u201cI can defend myself. Many others don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n She is right, even though the image is not technically a deepfake. It\u2019s a fully AI-generated photo that features her face. Unlike early deepfakes, which simply switched the face of one human in a base source photo with the face of another human, generative AI can use different components\u2014like real faces, bodies, places, voices, and sounds\u2014to create a 100% new synthetic media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This process makes its true nature virtually, if not completely, undetectable: Since you can\u2019t reverse-search and match the base image to an original source on the web, you could believe it is original (and real).<\/p>\n