By JAMES BROOKS

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — In 2021, Danish video game live-streamer Marie Watson received an image of herself from an unknown Instagram account.

She instantly recognized the holiday snap from her Instagram account, but something was different: Her clothing had been digitally removed to make her appear naked. It was a deepfake .

“It overwhelmed me so much,” Watson recalled. “I just started bursting out in tears, because suddenly, I was there naked.”

In the four years since her experience, deepfakes — highly realistic artificial intelligence-generated images, videos or audio of real people or events — have become not only easier to make worldwide but also look or sound exponentially more realistic. That’s thanks to technological advances and the proliferation of gener

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