Synthetic Media.

Any audio, image, video, or text content produced or substantially modified by generative AI rather than captured directly from the physical world. It belongs to the AI & ML Security category of cybersecurity.

Any audio, image, video, or text content produced or substantially modified by generative AI rather than captured directly from the physical world.

Synthetic media is the umbrella category that includes deepfakes, AI-generated voices, text-to-image art, AI-written news articles, and AI-generated avatars. Not all synthetic media is malicious — creative, accessibility, and localization uses are widespread — but the same tools enable disinformation, fraud, harassment, and identity attacks. Standards bodies promote provenance and transparency: C2PA Content Credentials, JPEG Trust, IPTC photo metadata, and watermarking schemes such as Google SynthID. The EU AI Act and several national laws require clear disclosure when users interact with synthetic media. Security teams treat synthetic media as both a threat vector (deepfakes, fraud) and an asset class (AI-generated marketing, support, training data) that needs provenance, labelling, and governance.

Defences for Synthetic Media typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: AI-generated media, Generative media.