Internet Companies Prepare to Fight the ‘Deepfake’ Future - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/technology/tech-companies-deepfakes.html
Deepfakes — a term that generally describes videos doctored with cutting-edge artificial intelligence — have already challenged our assumptions about what is real and what is not.
In recent months, video evidence was at the center of prominent incidents in Brazil, Gabon in Central Africa and China. Each was colored by the same question: Is the video real? The Gabonese president, for example, was out of the country for medical care and his government released a so-called proof-of-life video. Opponents claimed it had been faked. Experts call that confusion “the liar’s dividend.”
Though activists and artists occasionally release deepfakes as a way of showing how these videos could shift the political discourse online, these techniques are not widely used to spread disinformation. They are mostly used to spread humor or fake pornography, according to Facebook, Google and others who track the progress of deepfakes.
Right now, deepfake videos have subtle imperfections that can be readily detected by automated systems, if not by the naked eye. But some researchers argue that the improved technology will be powerful enough to create fake images without these tiny defects. Companies like Google and Facebook hope they will have reliable detectors in place before that happens.
“In the short term, detection will be reasonably effective,” said Mr. Kambhampati, the Arizona State professor. “In the longer term, I think it will be impossible to distinguish between the real pictures and the fake pictures.”