By Matt Binders @ Mashable.com, Aug. 7

The U.S. Defense Department is already preparing itself for the fight against deepfakes, fake audio and video created by artificial intelligence that burst into the mainstream last year thanks to sites like Reddit.

According to MIT Technology Review, the development of tech to catch deepfakes is currently underway. Through the Media Forensics program run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers have already built some of the tools to expose these fake AI creations. The Media Forensics program was actually originally set up to automate existing forensic tools, however its mission changed due to the concern over the rise of deepfakes. The project’s deepfake mission was announced earlier this year.

In 2017, users on Reddit started utilizing what amounts to extremely convincing face-swap technology to add actor Nicolas Cage into random movies he wasn’t already in. The technology was also being used to insert some female Hollywood celebrities into pornographic video clips. After deepfakes found its way into the daily news cycle and the outrage grew online, some websites banned deepfakes from being posted on their platforms. However, deepfake creators kept perfecting the technology, continuously making the fake AI-generated imagery even more realistic [.....]