HOW FAKE VIDEOS ARE MADE – AND HOW TO SPOT THEM

Credit: TED

Manipulated videos, audio and images have been around for years, but the rise of artificial intelligence and advanced editing software have made them much, much harder to spot. It’s a dangerous new world, where our very sense of reality can be thrown into doubt.

The problem with deepfakes

Most people know that you can’t believe everything you see. Over the last couple of decades, people have gotten used to seeing images manipulated with photo-editing software. Videos, though, are another story. Hollywood directors can spend millions of dollars on special effects to make up a realistic scene. But using deepfakes, amateurs with a few thousand dollars of computer equipment and a few weeks to spend could make something almost as true to life.

Deepfakes make it possible to put people into movie scenes they were never in – think Tom Cruise playing Iron Man – which makes for entertaining videos. Unfortunately, it also makes it possible to create pornography without the consent of the people depicted. So far, those people, nearly all women, are the biggest victims when deepfake technology is misused.

Deepfakes can also be used to create videos of political leaders saying things they never said.

Fake videos generated with sophisticated AI tools are a looming threat. Researchers are racing to build tools that can detect them, tools that are crucial for journalists to counter disinformation.

Spotting fakes

Deepfake detection as a field of research was begun a little over three years ago. Early work focused on detecting visible problems in the videos, such as deepfakes that didn’t blink. With time, however, the fakes have gotten better at mimicking real videos and become harder to spot for both people and detection tools.