Internet

Are you scared of deepfakes? Perhaps you should be. A few years old and continually growing more sophisticated, deepfakes are digital simulacra generated through machine learning that are barely distinguishable from the real thing. They’ve been used to fake celebrity porn videos, make Barack Obama seem to call Donald Trump a ‘dipshit,’ and most recently, superimpose Steve Buscemi’s face on to Jennifer Lawrence’s body in a video that was at once mesmerizing and scary (Buscemi/Lawrence bore a strange resemblance to Tilda Swinton).

As a young digital journalist in the late 2000s, my industry peers and I often reminisced about the era we felt we’d just missed: the glamorous, fin-de-siècle age of New York media, the time of seven-figure budgets for magazine launches and outsize editorial personalities that commanded celebrity attention in New York. We were the ones scrambling to keep our jobs afloat in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. As it turns out, we still had it pretty good. The other evening, right after the brutal layoffs at digital publications such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost were announced, I found myself in a dive bar (of course) with a handful of the aforementioned elder millennials of digital media.