Washington Post – “We aren’t ready for what happens next. Realistic videos of people doing things that never really happened have become shockingly easy to create. Now is the time to put in some guardrails. The past few months have brought advances in this controversial technology that I knew were coming, but am still shocked to see. A few years ago, deepfake videos — named after the “deep learning” artificial intelligence used to generate faces — required a Hollywood studio or at least a crazy powerful computer. Then around 2020 came apps, like one called Reface, that let you map your own face onto a clip of a celebrity. Now with a single source photo and zero technical expertise, an iPhone app called Avatarify lets you actually control the face of another person like a puppet. Using your phone’s selfie camera, whatever you do with your own face happens on theirs. Avatarify doesn’t make videos as sophisticated as pro fakes of Tom Cruise that have been flying on social network TikTok — but it has been downloaded more than 6 million times since February alone. (See for yourself in the video I made on my phone to accompany this column.)  Another app for iPhone and Android devices called Wombo turns a straight-on photo into a funny lip-sync music video. It generated 100 million clips just in its first two weeks…”