As the world gets more digital, the divide between the real and unreal are getting blurry. This is in large part due to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, both on the data science and physical hardware science level, see the recent Veritasium video on the push for analog computers for AI computations:
To illustrate what this means, the following images are of people that do not exist:
That is right, those are real images of people that are not real. What amounted to a giant scientific achievement in AI technology, is now available to be recreated by anyone at anytime by simply refreshing the following website: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Blurring the lines further, let's add some animations to images. In particular, to images of people that are no longer alive. This is the pitch for the company MyHeritage's "Deep Nostalgia" service, which recreates the seconds before people had their pictures taken. You can read more here: https://gizmodo.com/deep-nostalgia-can-turn-old-photos-of-your-relatives-1846363190
Note that I used the following website to convert the videos from MP4 to GIF animations: https://cloudconvert.com/mp4-to-gif
While this is some pretty amazing technology, just imagine what the "Classified" version of this technology is capable of. Especially when as far back as 1999, The Washington Post spoke about real-time voice manipulation or "morphing", and 3D large-scale image projection technology as being part of the United States PSYOPS classified military programs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm
The average person may be using it to recreate nostalgic moments from their family, but governments have entire populations to manipulate, and wars to orchestrate....