I made this up.
So can anyone else.
A clearinghouse for academic, corporate, and personal defenses against synthetic media, built on peer-reviewed evidence, current standards, and the conviction that you should not have to take anything at face value.
Synthetic media,
defined precisely.
Synthetic media is any image, audio, or video artifact produced or materially altered by a generative model, including face-swap, voice-clone, full-frame synthesis, and parameter-level edits indistinguishable from authentic capture.
The term is broader than “deepfake.” It includes consensual, benign uses (film VFX, accessibility dubbing, research synthesis) and adversarial ones (impersonation, defamation, fraud, image-based abuse). The threat is not the technology; it is the asymmetry between generation cost and verification cost, the former approaching zero, the latter still measured in human hours per asset. In the fraud cases that have been documented, the failure was procedural rather than perceptual, see why deepfake executives fool people and what actually stops them.
Synthetic media reads as a research problem, a corporate risk, or a personal violation.
Pick the angle. The site reorganizes around it.
Architectures, datasets, forensic methodology. Annotated reading list of current quarter's peer-reviewed work.
Open the lab → 02 BUSINESS · THE WAR ROOM For executives, security, and comms.Risk frameworks, BEC defenses, voice/video authentication protocols, crisis-response templates.
Enter the war room → 03 PERSONAL · THE SAFETY SUITE For everyone else.How to spot it, how to report it, what your rights are. Calibration quiz, legal map, reporting workflows.
Open the safety suite →Quick answers on synthetic media, with longer ones a click away.
What is synthetic media?
Any image, audio, or video artifact produced or materially altered by a generative model, including face-swap, voice-clone, full-frame synthesis, and parameter-level edits indistinguishable from authentic capture. The term is broader than “deepfake” and includes both consensual uses (film VFX, accessibility dubbing, research) and adversarial ones (impersonation, fraud, image-based abuse). See the glossary for adjacent terms.
Is this site affiliated with any company?
imadethisup.org is a public-education project of Global Cyber Institute, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 84-2148770). It is anonymously run by thought leaders from across the cybersecurity, forensics, and policy industries. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, and no third-party tracking. See About.
Can I really not tell a deepfake apart from a real image?
Often, no. Peer-reviewed studies of human discrimination on current-generation synthetic media report accuracy close to chance for untrained observers, with a measurable but limited improvement for trained reviewers. The Safety Suite includes a calibration quiz so you can measure your own floor before relying on intuition.
What should I do if a deepfake of me is circulating?
Preserve evidence (archive URLs, screenshot with the system clock visible, save originals); submit to StopNCII.org and the NCMEC Take It Down service for proactive removal; report to the platform citing its synthetic-media policy explicitly; and, where applicable, file with law enforcement (tips.fbi.gov for sexual or minor-involving imagery). The Safety Suite walks through this end-to-end, and what the TAKE IT DOWN Act changes explains the 48-hour federal removal duty platforms now owe you.
How do I report a synthetic-media incident at my company?
Treat it as both a fraud incident and an information-security incident. Slow the wire (build a 30-minute soft hold above threshold), do an out-of-band callback on a known directory number, log the call, preserve any audio, and report to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) within 24 hours. The War Room provides a six-step authentication protocol, and building a deepfake incident-response plan for smaller firms turns it into a written plan you can run in the first hour.
Where do the citations come from?
Every claim on the site links to a primary source, peer-reviewed paper (preferring open-access publisher PDFs and arXiv preprints), official standard, or an originating institution (FBI/IC3, NIST, CISA, ENISA). The full bibliography is at References.
Can I reuse the content?
Yes, content is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 and the underlying code is released under the MIT License. Attribution to imadethisup.org / Global Cyber Institute is required for non-commercial reuse. For commercial reuse, write info@imadethisup.org.
More questions? See the full FAQ →