What is Synthetic Media?
Any media — video, audio, images, or text — that is generated or substantially modified by artificial intelligence, including deepfakes, AI-generated voices, and fabricated photographs.
Also known as: AI-Generated Media, Generative Media, Fake Media
Synthetic media is an umbrella term for all AI-generated content. While "deepfake" usually refers to video, synthetic media covers the entire spectrum of AI-fabricated content.
Types of Synthetic Media
- Deepfake video: Face-swapped or fully generated video of real people
- Voice clones: AI-replicated voices for calls, podcasts, or audio messages
- Generated images: Photorealistic people, scenes, and documents that never existed
- Synthetic text: AI-written articles, reviews, emails, and social media posts
- Generated code: AI-produced software that may contain hidden vulnerabilities
- Fabricated documents: AI-created invoices, IDs, legal documents
Privacy and Security Threats
Identity
- Your likeness used in content you never consented to
- Non-consensual intimate imagery (a growing crisis)
- Impersonation for fraud, scams, and reputation destruction
Trust
- Can't trust that a video or audio recording is real
- Evidence in legal proceedings becomes questionable
- Journalism faces a verification crisis
Information
- AI-generated disinformation at unprecedented scale
- Fake reviews and testimonials
- Fabricated "evidence" of events that never happened
Detection
Detection is an arms race — generators and detectors improve together.
- Visual artifacts: Inconsistent lighting, earring mismatches, hand anomalies (increasingly rare)
- Audio analysis: Unnatural prosody, breathing patterns, spectral artifacts
- Metadata: Missing or inconsistent image/video metadata
- AI detectors: Tools like Hive, Sensity, and Microsoft Video Authenticator
- Cryptographic provenance: C2PA standard embeds creation history in media files
How to Protect Yourself
- Minimize high-quality public media of yourself (video, audio, photos)
- Use watermarking tools like Glaze for images you do publish
- Verify suspicious media through reverse image search and detection tools
- Establish verification protocols for high-stakes communications
- Support provenance standards (C2PA) that track media authenticity
- Know your legal options — Deepfake laws are being enacted in many jurisdictions
Related Terms
AI Scraping
The large-scale collection of text, images, code, and personal data from the internet by AI companies to train machine learning models — often without consent or compensation.
AI Surveillance
The use of artificial intelligence to automate and scale surveillance activities including facial recognition, behavior prediction, and communications monitoring.
AI Voice Cloning
Technology that uses artificial intelligence to create a synthetic replica of someone's voice from just seconds of audio, enabling realistic fake phone calls and audio messages.
Deepfake
AI-generated synthetic media that convincingly replaces a person's likeness or voice in video or audio, enabling sophisticated impersonation and misinformation.
Have more questions?
Use our guided flow to get the right next privacy step for Synthetic Media.
Open Guided Flow