There’s been much media coverage in recent months about the rise in AI-assisted deepfake technology, which enables image and video manipulation and raises questions about the trustworthiness of the content.

However, the lesser covered counterpart of deepfakes are shallowfakes. The reference to ‘shallow’ doesn’t mean these pieces of content are any less effective than deepfake content, says Stephen Osler, co-founder and business development director at Nclose. “In reality, ‘shallow’ only refers to how the content is being compiled. Deepfake uses applications that adopt AI techniques to manipulate content, and shallowfakes use applications where the content creator manually controls the content.”