“Airbrushing and Photoshop long ago opened photos to easy manipulation. Now, videos are becoming just as vulnerable to fakes that look deceptively real. Supercharged by powerful and widely available artificial-intelligence software developed by Google, these lifelike 'deepfake' videos have quickly multiplied across the Internet, blurring the line between truth and lie. But the videos have also been weaponized disproportionately against women, representing a new and degrading means of humiliation, harassment and abuse. The fakes are explicitly detailed, posted on popular porn sites and increasingly challenging to detect. Google representatives said the company takes its ethical responsibility seriously, but that restrictions on its AI tools could end up limiting developers pushing the technology in a positive way. But Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College computer-science professor who specializes in examining manipulated photos and videos, said Google and other tech giants need 'to get more serious about how weaponized this technology can be.' 'If a biologist said, "Here’s a really cool virus; let’s see what happens when the public gets their hands on it," that would not be acceptable. And yet it’s what Silicon Valley does all the time,' he said. 'It’s indicative of a very immature industry. We have to understand the harm and slow down on how we deploy technology like this.'"