Deepfakes Are Going To Wreak Havoc On Society. We Are Not Prepared.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/?fbclid=IwAR07D2eSgfv2jakhxnk-kLKlcOrqL7Pk6RkVJLsqpug1l4BlBRGrESZgqPc#23686bfa7494

Rob Toews May 25, 2020,11:54pm EDT

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Deepfake technology enables anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to create realistic-looking photos and videos of people saying and doing things that they did not actually say or do. A combination of the phrases “deep learning” and “fake”, deepfakes first emerged on the Internet in late 2017, powered by an innovative new deep learning method known as generative adversarial networks (GANs). Several deepfake videos have gone viral recently, giving millions around the world their first taste of this new technology:

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The amount of deepfake content online is growing at a rapid rate. At the beginning of 2019 there were 7,964 deepfake videos online, according to a report from startup Deeptrace; just nine months later, that figure had jumped to 14,678. It has no doubt continued to balloon since then. While impressive, today's deepfake technology is still not quite to parity with authentic video footage—by looking closely, it is typically possible to tell that a video is a deepfake. But the technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. Experts predict that deepfakes will be indistinguishable from real images before long.

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A handful of websites dedicated specifically to deepfake pornography have emerged, collectively garnering hundreds of millions of views over the past two years. Deepfake pornography is almost always non-consensual, involving the artificial synthesis of explicit videos that feature famous celebrities or personal contacts.

From these dark corners of the web, the use of deepfakes has begun to spread to the political sphere, where the potential for mayhem is even greater.

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Even more insidiously, the mere possibility that a video could be a deepfake can stir confusion and facilitate political deception regardless of whether deepfake technology has actually been used. The most dramatic example of this comes from Gabon, a small country in central Africa.

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“People are already using the fact that deepfakes exist to discredit genuine video evidence,” said USC professor Hao Li. “Even though there’s footage of you doing or saying something, you can say it was a deepfake and it's very hard to prove otherwise.”

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To give one example, in 2018 researchers at the University of Albany published analysis showing that blinking irregularities were often a telltale sign that a video was fake. It was a helpful breakthrough in the fight against deepfakes—until, within months, new deepfake videos began to emerge that corrected for this blinking imperfection.

“We are outgunned,” said Farid. “The number of people working on the video-synthesis side, as opposed to the detector side, is 100 to 1.”

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