Items tagged with deepfakes
While there may be funny and impressive deepfakes out there, the technology poses a risk to trustworthy media and public figures. However, companies are working to prevent this sort of thing by developing robust deep fake detection tools. Facebook is the latest to join the group through reverse engineering generative models from a single deepfake. As time goes on, figuring out whether an image is real or fake has become increasingly difficult as new deepfake generative models are created. For example, things could end poorly if the U.S. President were deepfaked into a video where he says something defamatory about another country, which could spark hostilities or even war if not identified. To...
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Deepfakes are beginning to grow in popularity and quality, such as the recent Tom Cruise deepfakes posted to TikTok. Deepfakes raise concerns over what is and isn't real when it comes to various media formats. Subsequently, researchers at the University of Buffalo have developed an AI system that can detect whether an image is real or not with some clever tricks. One of the most popular ways of generating human faces is using a generative adversary network (GAN) model. As the researcher's paper explains, these models can "synthesize highly realistic human faces that are difficult to discern from real ones visually." In fact, the images you see above are what the researchers used, and they came...
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Deepfakes have been around for a few years now, and with each passing day, it seems as though the technology keeps getting better and more lifelike. We saw this last year with a Back To The Future deepfake starring Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland, rather than real Doc and Marty. Now, deepfaker and visual effects artist Chris Ume has taken Tom Cruise’s face and put it on an actor to make a deepfake TikTok series, and it is wild. For those who do not know, deepfakes are AI-generated images or video which can be made to look like a specific person. The way they work, in essence, is by training AI with millions of images of the targeted person. The trained AI is then paired with an...
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Recently, Microsoft patented the creation of an AI chatbot for a specific person, whether they were alive or not. Now, a genealogy company called MyHeritage has partnered with deep learning and image processing company D-ID to create something called “Deep Nostalgia.” This technology can bring a person's ancestors back to life by running a process that upscales, sharpens, and animates any image uploaded. Announced at RootsTech Connect 2021, the world’s largest genealogy conference, “Deep Nostalgia” is a licensed technology that uses D-ID’s AI Face Platform in the backend. Essentially, MyHeritage filmed people for a basic set of motions which could then be paired...
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Deepfakes have risen in prominence in a few short years. What first started off in the deep, seedy underbelly of the internet for erotica purposes has burgeoned into a vast operation with tinkerers swapping faces of celebrities and politicians, or manipulating video and audio to actually “put words” into a person’s mouths. The latest deepfake to take the internet by storm comes from EZRyderX47 on YouTube. He took an iconic film scene and replaced two of the main characters with “updated” actors that are very popular today. The movie is the 80’s classic Back to the Future, which stars Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. But in...
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Artificial intelligence has frequently been used to better identify people and objects. But can AI also be used to mask someone’s identity? Facebook recently announced that it has created video de-identification technology that can hide people from facial recognition. Facebook has combined an “adversarial autoencoder” and a “trained-face classifier”. An autoencoder is an artificial neural network that learns a representation for a set of data unsupervised. Adversarial autoencoders were introduced in 2016 and are able to “match the aggregated posterior of the hidden code vector of the autoencoder with an arbitrary prior.” Classifiers typically use an algorithm...
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How do you defeat “deepfakes”? According to Google, you develop more of them. Google just released a large, free database of deepfake videos to help research develop detection tools. Google collaborated with “Jigsaw”, a tech “incubator” founded by Google, and the FaceForesenics Benchmark Program at the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples. They worked with several paid actors to create hundreds of real videos and then used popular deepfake technologies to generate thousands of fake videos. Researchers will be able to freely access both the fake and real videos to develop “synthetic video detection methods”....
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If a new report is to be believed, deepfake technology is about to ramp up the realism factor while making it increasingly more accessible to the general public. While this is an interesting development for people that like to do this sort of digital trickery for fun; in the age of "fake news" it has the potential for creating more upheaval considering how quickly videos can go viral on social media. According Hao Li, a University of Southern California (USC) associate professor of computer science, deepfake videos have the potential to look "perfectly real" within six to 12 months from now. In many cases with current technology, you can often tell that videos have been altered. This...
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