Deepfaking it: America's 2024 election collides with AI boom (Reuters)

"I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot," Hillary Clinton reveals in a surprise online endorsement video. "He's just the kind of guy this country needs, and I really mean that."

Joe Biden finally lets the mask slip, unleashing a cruel rant at a transgender person. "You will never be a real woman," the president snarls. Welcome to America's 2024 presidential race, where reality is up for grabs.

The Clinton and Biden deepfakes - realistic yet fabricated videos created by AI algorithms trained on copious online footage - are among thousands surfacing on social media, blurring fact and fiction in the polarized world of U.S. politics.

While such synthetic media has been around for several years, it's been turbocharged over the past year by of a slew of new "generative AI" tools such as Midjourney that make it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes, according to Reuters interviews with about two dozen specialists in fields including AI, online misinformation and political activism.