Deepfakes Archives - Liwaiwai

Deepfakes and Cyber Espionage: Is That Really Your Boss on the Phone?

Imagine a finance officer receiving a frantic, late-night phone call from a CEO. The executive requests the transfer of $5 million to a specified account, and the finance officer complies. The problem? The call came from a cyber criminal using deepfake technology to impersonate the CEO. The vastness of the internet and the nefarious nature of the dark web have made the tools for cyber fraud more freely available and more convincing than ever. Two cyber threats — deepfake technology and insiders selling access to company information — are putting organizations at a greater risk of financial loss and much…

Artificial Intelligence

Characters For Good, Created By Artificial Intelligence

As it becomes easier to create hyper-realistic digital characters using artificial intelligence, much of the conversation around these tools has centered on misleading and potentially dangerous deepfake content. But the technology can also be used for positive purposes — to revive Albert Einstein to teach a physics class, talk through a career change with your older self, or anonymize people while preserving facial communication. To encourage the technology’s positive possibilities, MIT Media Lab researchers and their collaborators at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Osaka University have compiled an open-source, easy-to-use character generation pipeline that combines AI models…

Artificial Intelligence

A Neural Network Learns When It Should Not Be Trusted

Increasingly, artificial intelligence systems known as deep learning neural networks are used to inform decisions vital to human health and safety, such as in autonomous driving or medical diagnosis. These networks are good at recognizing patterns in large, complex datasets to aid in decision-making. But how do we know they’re correct? Alexander Amini and his colleagues at MIT and Harvard University wanted to find out. They’ve developed a quick way for a neural network to crunch data, and output not just a prediction but also the model’s confidence level based on the quality of the available data. The advance might…

In A Battle Of AI Versus AI, Researchers Are Preparing For The Coming Wave Of Deepfake Propaganda

An investigative journalist receives a video from an anonymous whistleblower. It shows a candidate for president admitting to illegal activity. But is this video real? If so, it would be huge news – the scoop of a lifetime – and could completely turn around the upcoming elections. But the journalist runs the video through a specialized tool, which tells her that the video isn’t what it seems. In fact, it’s a “deepfake,” a video made using artificial intelligence with deep learning. Journalists all over the world could soon be using a tool like this. In a few years, a tool…

Artificial Intelligence

The AI Foundation Raises $17 Million To Create Digital AI-powered Personas

The AI Foundation, which ambitiously hopes to develop “ethical” AI agents that can be trained to complete tasks, today closed a $17 million funding round. A spokesperson said the funds will be used to scale the company’s platform, which allows people to create a digital persona that mirrors their own. As the pandemic makes virtual meetups a regular occurrence, the concept of personal AI — tailored to your life or replicating your personality — is gaining steam. Startups creating virtual beings, or artificial people powered by AI, have raised more than $320 million in venture capital to date. As my colleague…

Rewriting History To Show The Danger Of Deepfakes

Can you recognize a digitally manipulated video when you see one? It’s harder than most people realize. As the technology to produce realistic “deepfakes” becomes more easily available, distinguishing fact from fiction will only get more challenging. A new digital storytelling project from CSAIL researcher D. Fox Harrell aims to educate the public about the world of deepfakes with “In Event of Moon Disaster.” This provocative website showcases a “complete” deepfake (manipulated audio and video) of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon delivering the real contingency speech written in 1969 for a scenario in which the Apollo 11 crew were unable to…

Artificial Intelligence

How To Spot A Deepfake

Just when you thought modern life couldn’t get any crazier, a video emerged during the run-up to the recent UK election, in which the Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to endorse his political opponent Jeremy Corbyn. “Appeared” is the important word here, because this was actually just one of the latest in a steady stream of deepfakes – video and audio clips in which artificial intelligence simulates real people doing unreal things. Of course, humans have been faking it for centuries. From tattoos and piercings to face paints and wigs, we love altering ourselves and indulging in a bit of make-believe. My…

Examining A Video’s Changes Over Time Helps Flag Deepfakes

It used to be that only Hollywood production companies with deep pockets and teams of skilled artists and technicians could make deepfake videos, realistic fabrications appearing to show people doing and saying things they never actually did or said. Not anymore – software freely available online lets anyone with a computer and some time on their hands create convincing fake videos. Whether used for personal revenge, to harass celebrities or to influence public opinion, deepfakes render untrue the age-old axiom that “seeing is believing.” My research team and I at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute are developing…

Detecting Deepfakes By Looking Closely Reveals A Way To Protect Against Them

Deepfake videos are hard for untrained eyes to detect because they can be quite realistic. Whether used as personal weapons of revenge, to manipulate financial markets or to destabilize international relations, videos depicting people doing and saying things they never did or said are a fundamental threat to the longstanding idea that “seeing is believing.” Not anymore. Most deepfakes are made by showing a computer algorithm many images of a person, and then having it use what it saw to generate new face images. At the same time, their voice is synthesized, so it both looks and sounds like the…

Data

Identifying A Fake Picture Online Is Harder Than You Might Think

It can be hard to tell whether a picture is real. Consider, as the participants in our recent research did, these two images and see whether you think neither, either or both of them has been doctored. You might have based your assessment of the images on the visual information alone, or perhaps factored in your evaluation of how reputable the source is, or the number of people who liked and shared the images. My collaborators and I recently studied how people evaluate the credibility of images that accompany online stories and what elements figure into that evaluation. We found…

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