ATLANTA – Election Day is just one week away, and experts warn voters to be on the lookout for deepfakes here in Georgia. They’re computer-generated images, video or audio that sound or look like someone, but they are not. 

Voters like Sage Bernard say it can be tough to tell fact from fiction. “It’s definitely worrying when the election is coming up,” Bernard said. “You never really know the truth. You never really know who’s real and who’s not.”

When asked if she could tell what’s real and what’s fake, Bernard answered, “Probably not. Just based on what I’ve seen online, they’re pretty close to what someone actually looks like.”

Bogus content has infiltrated the world of politics. A video recently circulated of a man claiming to be a former high school student of Tim Walz. The man in the video accuses the Democratic vice-presidential nominee of sexual assault when Walz was a teacher. The video is fake.

“In the hands of bad actors, they can be a real problem,” said David Schweidel, a marketing professor at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. “You could be getting those last-minute pushes when you think it’s coming from a candidate, but it’s actually coming from one of those bad actors.”

Schweidel hasn’t seen any cases of deepfakes here in Georgia so far. “Putting out a video where it claims to be Kamala Harris, saying something she didn’t actually say, or you could have someone pretending to be Donald Trump or J.D. Vance. The closer we get to election day, the harder it is going to do that real-time fact checking,” Schweidel said.

“That is really hard. And that technology is getting better and better each and every day,” said Anthony DeMattee, a data scientist with the Carter Center’s Democracy Program. DeMattee says always check your sources. “Doing some fact-checking on our own, doing some lateral; reading to verify our sources and really just making sure the information that we’re hearing are actual facts instead of just believing what we see when we first see it.”

The experts also recommend that you look to see if a picture or video seems odd or somehow off. Check for misspellings. Look for attribution. Cross-check with credible sources. You can also run the video through the detection tool truemedia.org.