Deepfakes are videos in which a person's face is swapped onto another body using machine-learning algorithms, a practice named after the Reddit user who popularized it in late 2017.

Where did Deepfakes come from?

A Redditor using the handle deepfakes launched the /r/deepfakes subreddit on November 2, 2017 as a home for his AI face-swap edits.

What does Deepfakes mean?

Inside the community the word quickly shifted from one person's handle to a common noun for any neural-network face-swap video.

How do you use Deepfakes?

Early creators used open-source libraries TensorFlow and Keras to train a model on a target person's photos, then applied that model to existing video, with FakeApp later wrapping the process for non-coders.

Is Deepfakes still popular?

The original subreddit was banned in February 2018 and historical Reddit traffic dried up with it, though the term stayed in mainstream use after the BuzzFeed/Peele Obama PSA brought it into misinformation coverage.

Who created the first deepfake?

The anonymous Redditor behind the deepfakes account produced the earliest viral examples on a home computer, by his own account working alone.

FakeApp is a free desktop program released in January 2018 by a separate Redditor, deepfakeapp, built on the original deepfakes algorithm and designed for users without a technical background.

Why did Reddit ban r/deepfakes?

On February 7, 2018 Reddit expanded its involuntary-pornography rule to cover faked depictions and shut down the subreddit along with r/CelebFakes and r/YouTubefakes.

Which celebrities appeared in early deepfakes?

The Redditor posted edits featuring the faces of Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza and Gal Gadot.

What was the Jordan Peele Obama deepfake?

A 2018 BuzzFeed PSA directed by Jordan Peele that used the technique to put words into Barack Obama's mouth as a warning about online misinformation, made with BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti.

Deepfakes

2017viral videoclassic

Published November 12, 2026

Deepfakes started as a November 2017 Reddit community where one user swapped celebrities' faces onto porn performers using open-source machine-learning code. Vice/Motherboard broke the story in December 2017, and within three months the technique drove a Reddit site-wide rule change on faked involuntary pornography. By April 2018, BuzzFeed and Jordan Peele used the same method for a fake Obama PSA warning viewers about AI-era misinformation.

ai video memes face swap memes misinformation memes subreddit origin memes 2017 memes

Overview

The Deepfakes technique trains a machine-learning model on photos of a target person, then swaps that trained face onto existing video footage frame by frame1. The original Redditor said his pipeline relied on the open-source libraries TensorFlow and Keras, fed with publicly available celebrity images and clips3. Results were uneven in those first months, with tracking that slipped during fast head turns and a soft uncanny-valley look in close-up, though a quick glance could read as real1.

Most of the edits posted to /r/deepfakes placed actors like Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza and Gal Gadot onto porn performers' bodies1. A smaller current ran alongside the pornographic work, best known for dropping Nicolas Cage into movies he had nothing to do with6. That split shaped the fallout later, when Reddit's February 2018 purge wiped the main subreddit but left the SFW Cage-edit community and the FakeApp forum online5.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Creator

Redditor 'deepfakes'

Date

2017

On November 2, 2017, a Redditor using the handle deepfakes started the subreddit /r/deepfakes to collect his face-swap edits, most of them pornographic3. Motherboard reporter Samantha Cole surfaced the work in December 2017 after finding his Gal Gadot clip, a video stitched together from publicly available photos, open libraries and TensorFlow code on a home computer1. The Redditor told Motherboard that no studio was involved and that one person with a working knowledge of deep learning could assemble the same setup1.

Within weeks the word 'deepfake' shifted from a Reddit handle to a common noun for neural-network face-swap video, as the subreddit grew and copycats followed the same recipe2.

How It Spread

By January 2018, another Redditor going by deepfakeapp released FakeApp, a free desktop program that let non-coders build the same kind of edits from their own photo sets2. The /r/deepfakes subreddit passed 15,000 subscribers inside two months of the Motherboard piece2 and was nearing 90,000 subscribers by the time Reddit shut it down7. Image host Gfycat, where many of the GIFs lived, started purging deepfakes uploads in late January 2018 after calling the content 'objectionable' under its terms of service4.

On February 7, 2018, Reddit updated its involuntary-pornography rule to cover 'depictions that have been faked' and banned /r/deepfakes along with r/CelebFakes and r/YouTubefakes5. Admin u/landoflobsters described the change as a wider policy split that happened to catch the subreddit6. r/SFWdeepfakes and the FakeApp subreddit, both non-pornographic, stayed online5. The same week, Discord, Pornhub and Twitter each announced their own bans on non-consensual AI porn7.

In 2018, BuzzFeed News published a Jordan Peele PSA that used the technique to put a fake Barack Obama on camera warning viewers about digital misinformation, a project the Oscar-winning filmmaker developed with his brother-in-law, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti8. Peele said the idea came out of talks about new tools and the erosion of a shared sense of reality online8.

Timeline

2017-11-02

Redditor deepfakes starts the /r/deepfakes subreddit to host AI face-swap videos of celebrities.

2017-12

Motherboard's Samantha Cole publishes the first story on the Redditor's Gal Gadot edit.

2018-01

Redditor deepfakeapp releases FakeApp, bringing the technique to users without a coding background.

2018-01-30

Gfycat begins deleting deepfakes uploads, calling them 'objectionable'.

2018-02-07

Reddit bans /r/deepfakes, r/CelebFakes and r/YouTubefakes under a new rule covering faked involuntary pornography.

2018-04-17