We are not ready for better deepfakes

Welcome to Decoder. I am Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host, deputy editor at The Verge, and author of the command line newsletter. If you're like me, lately you've scrolled past something on social media and thought, wait, was that real? Deep fakes are everywhere, and they're getting a lot more convincing. That brings me to my guest today, Gourav Misra, the CEO of Captions.

You may not have heard of Captions yet, but by now you've probably seen a video that was generated using its AI models. The company's Mirage Studio platform lets anyone generate AI versions of real people, and the results are alarmingly realistic. Captions just put out a blog post titled, We Build Synthetic Humans. Here's What's Keeping Us Up at Night. It's a good overview of the state of deepfakes and where they're headed.

As the CEO of a company building deep fake technology, I wanted to know what specifically keeps Garav up at night, which you'll hear us get into. I'm generally more optimistic about the long-term impacts of AI than a lot of people, but as you'll hear in this conversation, I'm a lot more nervous about this topic. Ultimately, I came away from this episode unsettled by the fact that the deep fakes of today are the least believable they'll ever be. We are not ready, and the companies building this tech, they're racing ahead anyway. Okay, here's my conversation with Garav Misra, the CEO of Captions.

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