Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced by the computer-generated or substituted likeness of someone else.

Deepfakes are a source of curiosity and anxiety for many, with some wondering what the potential for danger could be with such powerfully deceptive technology.

And now, Apple has won a patent for some frightening technology. The US Patent Office granted Apple a patent for “deepfake creations or synthetic creations,” with the patent titled “Face Image Generation with Pose and Expression Control.”

The image generator technology that Apple has been working on for a while may be part of a “generative adversarial network is trained by concurrently training the technology” (via PatentlyApple) to create images but also train a discriminator to determine whether images are authentic or not accurate.

It’s hard to say what they’ll do with such powerful technology, but it could simply be that they want to ensure they can weed out what’s real from what’s fake – there are a million applications for such a skill.