India, Dec. 29 -- Deepfakes became dramatically more realistic and widespread in 2025, fooling ordinary users and institutions alike

Advances in video generation, voice cloning and consumer AI tools have lowered the barrier to creating convincing synthetic media

Experts warn that real-time, interactive deepfakes could make detection even harder in 2026, shifting the fight from human judgement to technical safeguards

Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people.

For many everyday scenarios - esp...