00:00 Introduction to Digital Literacy and Deep Fakes
01:13 Understanding Deep Fakes: Definition and Technology
04:33 The Ethical Concerns of Deep Fakes
08:21 The Impact of Deep Fakes on Society
13:54 Navigating a World of Deep Fakes: Practical Solutions
A few episodes ago, we talked about how social media algorithms work. But here’s the thing: all of that assumes what you’re seeing is real. And increasingly? It’s not.”
Schnelle dives into deepfakes—AI-generated videos and images so convincing you cannot tell they’re fake. This isn’t future technology. This is happening now, and it’s getting scarier by the month.
What are deepfakes? Videos, images, or audio created using AI to make it look like someone said or did something they never actually did. The technology is now so sophisticated that even experts struggle to identify them.
Why this matters now: Your kids are seeing this content on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram right now. And unless we teach them to question what they see, they’re going to believe it.
The creepy celebrity deepfakes: Tools like Sora (from OpenAI) generate incredibly realistic video from text descriptions. People are creating videos of dead celebrities—Tupac, Robin Williams, Marilyn Monroe—in new content.
Schnelle finds this deeply unsettling. Not just ethically (these people can’t consent), but because it normalizes the idea that videos aren’t real. If everything can be fake, then nothing has to be real.
How convincing are they? Early deepfakes had tells—weird blinking, unnatural movements. Now? Indistinguishable from real footage.
Kids believe videos of their favorite influencers without question. Adults share content confirming their beliefs immediately. Elderly folks are especially vulnerable.
Nobody is immune. Schnelle admits she’s been fooled—and she teaches this for a living.
What makes deepfakes dangerous:
- Emotionally convincing (you react before thinking)
- Exploit confirmation bias
- Weaponized for political manipulation, scams, bullying, misinformation
What we can do:
Teach skepticism, not cynicism – Verify before believing vs. “nothing is real”
Introduce verification – Check multiple sources, find the original, look for reputable reporting
Talk explicitly about deepfakes – Show kids examples, discuss what makes them hard to spot
Teach the pause – Before sharing dramatic content, ask: “Do I know this is real?”
Understand vulnerability – If someone can deepfake a celebrity, they can deepfake you
Looking ahead: Next episode: Scams in 2026—deepfakes are just one tool scammers use. AI voice cloning, fake video calls, personalized manipulation.
Perfect for: Parents teaching media literacy, educators addressing misinformation, anyone needing to understand that seeing is no longer believing.
Welcome to Smart with Screens. I’m Schnelle Acevedo. For 14 years, I built digital marketing campaigns for Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and other major brands. My job was to get you to click, scroll, and engage. Now I teach families and schools across New York City how these systems actually work. The algorithms, the tricks, the psychology behind the screens.
I’m Schnelle Acevedo and let’s get smart with screens.
Okay friends, we need to talk about something that honestly keeps me up at night. A few episodes ago, we talked about how social media algorithms work, how they learn what gets your attention and gives you more of it. We talked about training your algorithm, being intentional about what you engage with.
But here’s the thing, all of that assumes that what you’re seeing is real and increasingly it’s not. I’m talking about deep fakes, AI generated videos and images that are so convincing. You cannot tell they’re fake, not by looking at them, not by listening carefully. They just, they look real. And this isn’t some distant future technology. This is happening right now, today, and it’s getting better and scarier by the month by the minute, to be honest. deep fakes. What they are, why they’re so convincing, and what we need to be teaching our kids about living in a world where you genuinely cannot trust what you see anymore. Let’s get into it.
So let me start with the basics. A deep fake is a video, image, or audio that has been created or manipulated using artificial intelligence to make it look like someone said or did something they never actually said or did. The term comes from deep learning, which is the AI technology used to create them and fake. So here’s how it works in simple terms. The AI is fed tons of footage of a person, their face, their voice, how they move, how they talk, then it learns to replicate that person so well that it can put their face on someone else’s body, making them say things they never said or create entirely new footage of them doing things they never did.
And when I say tons of footage, I don’t mean you need hours and hours anymore. Some of these AI tools can create a convincing deep fake just from a few photos or a short video clip. The technology has gotten that good. Let me give you some real examples that have already happened:
There have been deep fake videos of politicians saying things they never said shared during elections to influence voters. There have been deep fakes of CEOs used in business scams. Someone creates a fake video call that looks exactly like the company CEO asking an employee to transfer money. There have been deep fakes of regular people, often women and girls, where someone takes their photos from social media and puts their face on explicit content that they never created. This is harassment, this is abuse, and it is absolutely happening right now. Then there are the celebrity deepfakes, which brings me to something that’s been driving me crazy.
You’ve probably seen some of these, even if you didn’t realize they were deep fakes. There’s this AI tool called Sora. It was created by OpenAI, the same company that made ChatGPT that can make incredibly realistic video from text descriptions. And people are using it and tools like it to create videos of celebrities who have passed away. You’ll see videos of Tupac or Robin Williams or even Marilyn Monroe, people who died years or decades ago appearing in new content, talking, moving, interacting, sometimes with each other. And I have to be honest it creeps me out. Not because the technology isn’t impressive. It is. Not because I don’t understand the appeal of seeing beloved figures again. I do. But these people can’t consent to how their image is being used.
They’re not here to say, yes, you can make me say this or no, I don’t want to be in that. We’re essentially puppeteering the dead. And beyond the ethical weirdness of that, here’s what’s really concerning to me. It’s normalizing the idea that what we see in videos isn’t real. Think about it. If you could watch a video of a dead celebrity talking and you know it’s AI generated, you start to get comfortable with the idea that videos can be fake.
And that sounds good, right? We should be skeptical. But here’s the problem. If everything can be fake, then nothing has to be real. Someone gets caught doing something wrong, that’s a deep fake. There’s evidence of something happening that’s AI generated. You see something you don’t like, that can’t be real. And that’s been me lately, honestly. We’re entering a world where video evidence which we have relied on for decades as proof of truth doesn’t mean what it used to mean and that’s a big problem.
Now you might be thinking, Schnelle, I’d be able to tell if something was a deep fake. I am not that gullible. And I hate to break it to you, but you probably wouldn’t. I wouldn’t either. Early deep fakes had tells. They had weird blinking, unnatural mouth movements, lighting that didn’t quite match. Tech savvy people could spot them.
But the technology has improved exponentially.
Some of the deep fakes now are impossible to tell from real footage, even to experts. And this affects every single age group. Kids and teens see a video of their favorite influencer or a celebrity it without any question. Why wouldn’t they? It looks exactly like that person. Adults see a video of a politician or a news event and share it immediately because it confirms what they already believe.
They don’t stop to verify because it looks real. Elderly folks who didn’t grow up with this technology and are often more trusting of what they see are especially vulnerable. They see a video of someone they trust asking for help or money and they respond because they believe it’s real. Nobody is immune to this. I teach digital literacy for a living and I’ve been fooled by content that turned out to be AI generated many, many times.
Because these tools are designed by incredibly smart people to be as convincing as possible.
I saw a video of a celebrity chef I followed demonstrating a recipe. Something felt slightly off, but I could not put my finger on it. The lighting was good. The voice sounded right. The movements looked natural. I watched it. I almost reposted it. And then I noticed in the comments that people were saying it was
AI generated, this chef never made that video. And I realized that if I almost fell for it with all my training and awareness, what chance does the average person have?
What chance does a kid who has never been taught to question what they see have?
Here’s what makes deep fakes especially dangerous. They’re not just convincing to the eye and ear. They’re emotionally convincing. If you see a video of someone you care about in distress, your brain doesn’t stop to analyze the pixels. Your emotional response kicked in first and you react.
If you see a video that confirms something that you already believe about politics, about a celebrity, about a company, your brain wants to believe it. Confirmation bias is real. And these tools are being designed to exploit exactly those emotional and cognitive vulnerabilities.
You might be wondering, why are we talking about this now? Why does it matter for everyday families trying to navigate social media and screen time? And here’s why. Your kids are seeing this content right now. They’re on TikTok, they’re on YouTube, Instagram platforms where AI generated and deep fake content is being posted constantly. They don’t know, they don’t always know it’s fake.
They might see a video of a celebrity endorsing a product. They might see a friend or influencer saying something dramatic. They might see news footage that never actually happened. And unless we teach them to question what they see, they’re going to believe it. technology is being weaponized. Deepfakes are being used for political manipulation.
Fake videos of candidates saying things that they never said, released right before elections.
Financial scams, which we’re going to dive deep into in our next episode because scams in 2026 are a whole new level. Bullying and harassment, kids creating fake videos of classmates to humiliate them, and misinformation, fake news footage that spreads faster than fact checkers can debunk it. This isn’t theoretical. This is happening right now. And next, we are losing our shared sense of reality. This sounds dramatic, but hear me out. When we can’t agree on what’s real, when video evidence can be dismissed as deep fake and actual fake videos look completely real, we lose the ability to have a shared truth.
And without shared truth, how can we have productive conversations? How do we hold people accountable? How do we trust anything? This is bigger than just tech is confusing. This is a fundamental shift in how we process information and determine what’s true. And our kids are gonna grow up in this world, so they need some tools to navigate it.
Okay, so I spent the last 10 minutes freaking you out and I apologize for that, but I wouldn’t be talking about this if I didn’t think there were things that we could actually do. So let’s get practical. For parents and educators, let’s teach kids to be skeptical and not cynical. There’s a difference. Skeptical means that, let me verify this before I believe it. Cynical means nothing is real, truth doesn’t exist. We want skepticism. We want kids who ask, where did this come from? Who made it?
How do I know it’s real? Where can I verify?
Next, we’re going to introduce the concept of verification. Just like we taught an earlier generation, don’t believe everything you read. We need to teach this generation, don’t believe everything you see. If something seems too perfect, too dramatic, too convenient, verify it. Check multiple sources. Look for the original. see if reputable news outlets are reporting it.
The next thing is you have to talk about deep fakes explicitly. Show your kids examples. There are lots of obviously AI generated videos you can find that are clearly fake. Use those to start the conversation. Then show them more convincing ones and talk about what makes them hard to spot.
The goal is to make them aware that this technology exists and it’s being used right now. Teach the pause. Remember in our algorithm episode where I talked about pausing when scrolling to notice how content makes you feel? The same principle goes here.
Before you share something, especially something that’s dramatic or emotional, pause. Ask yourself, do I know this is real? Have I verified this? Model this for your kids. Let them see you fact checking, questioning, and verifying.
For kids and teens, if something seems too wild to be true, it might not be true. That celebrity saying something outrageous, that news footage of something unbelievable, that video of your friend doing something they would never do. Pause, question, verify before you share or react. Understand that people can manipulate your image as well.
If someone can create a deep fake of a celebrity, they can create one of you, especially if you post a lot of photos and videos online. I’m vulnerable myself. This doesn’t mean that you should never post anything, but it does mean that you should be thoughtful about what you share and understand that your digital footprint can be used in ways that you don’t control.
Learn to reverse image search. This is a simple tool that can help you verify if an image or video is original or if it has been taken from somewhere else. On Google, you can upload a image and see where it appears online. This can help you figure out if something is original or recycled or manipulated. And for all of us, we need to be extra careful with emotional content. The stuff that makes you really angry, really sad, really outraged, is the stuff that you’re most likely to share without verifying. And that’s exactly what bad actors are counting on. triggers a strong emotional response, that’s your signal to slow down and verify before you react. And of course, support media literacy education. If your school or library doesn’t have digital literacy programming, advocate for it. This stuff needs to be taught–not just assumed kids would figure it out. And shameless plug, this is exactly what I teach in my workshops. If you want to bring this content to your school or community organization, reach out, I’m here.
Here’s the thing about deep fakes. The technology is only going to get better. A year from now, two years from now, the deep fakes will be even more convincing. The tools will be easier to use. More people will have access to them. We can’t put this genie back in the bottle, but we can prepare ourselves and our kids to live in a world where seeing is no longer believing. We can teach critical thinking. We can teach verification. We can teach healthy skepticism.
And we can talk about the ethics of this, not just can we create this technology, but should we? What are the consequences? Who gets hurt? Because right now we’re building a future where you might get a video call from your boss that isn’t actually your boss. Your kid might see a video of themselves that they never made. Evidence can be fabricated perfectly. Truth becomes harder and harder to determine.
That’s not the future I want, but it’s the future we’re heading towards unless we start having these conversations right now. And speaking of scams in the next episodes, we’re diving into scams in 2026 because deep fakes are just one tool in the scammers toolkit. We’re going to talk about the new sophisticated scams targeting everyone from teens to elderly folks.
And how they’re using AI and deepfakes to make scams more convincing than ever. know to protect yourself and your family. Because the scams you learned about five years ago, they’re child’s play compared to what’s happening
Thanks for listening to Smart with Screens. I know this episode was heavy. Deep fakes are scary, but awareness is the first step to protection. If you found this helpful, share with someone that needs to hear it, especially if they have kids or elderly parents who might be vulnerable to this technology. You can find more resources at bamdigitalmedia.info. And if you want to bring any digital literacy workshops to your school, library, or community organization, reach out.
My email is contactus@bamdigitalmedia.info.
I’m Schnelle Acevedo. Until next time, let’s stay smart with screens and question what we see on them.