DEEP-FAKES! A New Trend?
“These deepfakes are getting worryingly good. How the heck can we trust what we see on TV and camera is who we think?” decried a social media user as a deepfake video of Tom Cruise became viral online.
What is a DeepFake?
A deepfake is an AI generated synthetic content where a person’s face is switched with another. Its main goal is to trick people into believe that the interswitched face performed a certain action or said something they probably never did.
For still images, Photoshop has been the vogue to changes faces or change backgrounds. Deepfakes are used to create videos and make a person seem to be performing a particular action. For example: in 2018, a Belgian political party released a video of Donald Trump giving a speech calling Belgium to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. However, that was a deepfake as Trump never gave that speech. Realistic audio deepfakes are also been made using deep learning algorithm with a few hours (or minutes) of audio from the person whose voice is been cloned. Once this is done, this voice can be made to say anything such as when a deepfake audio of a CEO was used to commit a fraud sometime in 2020.
The deepfake technology became popular when a Reddit user named “Deepfakes” posted that he developed a Machine Learning algorithm that could transpose celebrity faces into porn videos. These soon became popular and people soon began recreating videos of politicians using same technology.
A deepfake video exploits two Machine Learning models: one creates the forgeries from a data set of sample videos, while the other tries to detect if the video is a fraud. They model tries to ensure the produced video would be hard to detect as a counterfeit. This technique is called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).
Shallowfakes
These are not as extreme as a Deepfake but still produce similar effects. They are manipulated using basic editing tools e.g. Speed effects. A sample results was a video of CNN reporter Jim Acosta that made him look more aggressive while talking to an Intern. It is also called a “dumbfake”.
Some examples of editing tools used for this includes:
- Zao: oops! only used in China or at least can only be registered with a chinese number.
- MyHeritage: this turns your still image and turns it into a moving image.
- Deepfakes web
- FaceApp: You’ve probably used this on Facebook to convert your current picture to what you might look like at 90.
We just need to scrutinize every video and image we come across as they may not be as authentic as we think.
Ciao!!
