The Star Wars clip helped to kickstart a community of meme-creating film fans around the world, who use deepfake technology to place actors in films in which they never appeared, often to comic or meaningful effect. A popular subgenre of deepfakes places Nicolas Cage into films such as Terminator 2 and The Sound Of Music, or recasts him as every character in Friends. One deepfake convincingly transposes Heath Ledger’s The Joker into the actor’s role in A Knight’s Tale. In February, a video grafting the face of one of China’s best-known actors, Yang Mi, into a 25-year-old Hong Kong television drama, The Legend Of The Condor Heroes, went viral, picking up an estimated 240m views before it was removed by Chinese authorities. Its creator wrote on the video-sharing platform Bilibili that he had made the video as a warning.

Since then, deepfake technology has continued to gain momentum. In May, researchers at Samsung’s AI lab in Moscow published “footage” of Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dalí and the Mona Lisa, each clip generated from one still image. While it is still fairly easy to discern a deepfake from genuine footage, foolproof fabrications appear to be disconcertingly close. Recent electoral upsets have demonstrated the unprecedented power of political entities to microtarget individuals with news and content that confirms their biases. The incentive to use deepfakes to injure political opponents is great.

Samsung Ai 1,000,000,000 'Footage' of Salvador Dalí and the Mona Lisa, each clip generated, from one still image, by Samsung’s AI lab in Moscow

There is only one confirmed attempt by a political party to use a deepfake video to influence an election (although a deepfake may also have played a role in a political crisis in Gabon in December). In May 2018, a Flemish socialist party called sp.a posted a deepfake video to its Twitter and Facebook pages showing Trump appearing to taunt Belgium for remaining in the Paris climate agreement. The video, which remains on the party’s social media, is a poor forgery: Trump’s hair is curiously soft-focus, while his mouth moves with a Muppet-like elasticity. Indeed, the video concludes with Trump saying: “We all know that climate change is fake, just like this video,” although this sentence alone is not subtitled in Flemish Dutch. (The party declined to comment, but a spokesperson previously told the site Politico that it commissioned the video to “draw attention to the necessity to act on climate change”.)

But James believes forgeries may have gone undetected. “The idea that deepfakes have already been used politically isn’t so farfetched,” he says. “It could be the case that deepfakes have already been widely used for propaganda.”

At a US Senate intelligence committee hearing in May last year, the Republican senator Marco Rubio warned that deepfakes would be used in “the next wave of attacks against America and western democracies”. Rubio imagined a scenario in which a provocative clip could go viral on the eve of an election, before analysts were able to determine it was a fake. A report in the Washington Times in December claimed that policy insiders and Democratic and Republican senators believe “the Russian president or other actors hostile to the US will rely on deepfakes to throw the 2020 presidential election cycle into chaos”.

Some question the scale of this threat. Russell Brandom, policy editor at the Verge, the US tech news site, argued recently that deepfake propaganda is “a crisis that doesn’t exist”, while the New York Times has called deepfakes “emerging, long-range threats” that “pale in comparison” with established peddlers of political falsity, such as Fox News. But many experts disagree. Eileen Donahoe, the director of the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity (TCEI) and an adjunct professor at Stanford University, has been studying the deepfake threat to democracy for the past year. “There is little to no doubt that Russia’s digital disinformation conglomerate has people working on deepfakes,” she says. So far, the TCEI has not seen evidence that the Russians have tried to deploy deepfakes in a political context. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming, or that Russia-generated deepfakes haven’t already been tried elsewhere.”