Deepfakes
Deepfakes
“Because they are so realistic, deep-fakes can scramble our understanding of truth in multiple ways... as we become more attuned to the existence of deep-fakes... they undermine our trust in all videos, including those that are genuine... We can no longer be sure of what is real and what is not.”
John Villasenor, Brookings Institution
Page Content
Deepfake is a technique for synthesising videos using artificial intelligence.[1] It involves combining and superimposing existing images and videos onto other images / videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network (GAN). The term is usually applied to:
- Face-swapping — where someone's face is superimposed on someone else’s (here Nicholas Cage for Sean Connery playing Bond); and
- Video Dialogue Replacement
— a technique that combines audio with manipulated video to make it look like the person is actually saying words they never said. However, it might also be used in relation to:
- Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) — special effects used in block busters. One of the most recent examples of this is the de-aging technology used in ‘The Irishman’.[2]
1 Origins
The term ‘deepfake’ originated towards the end of 2017 from a Reddit
user named ‘deepfakes’.
He and others in the Reddit
community r/deepfakes, were sharing their manipulated videos they had created — some involved the faces of famous actors (most notably Cage) introduced into commercial movies, and others, celebrities’ faces swapped onto the bodies of women in pornographic videos. A couple of months later, after concerns were raised,[3] Reddit
banned r/deepfakes, and other websites and social media platform like Twitter
soon followed suit for groups found to be sharing AI doctored pornography. This does not
include the infamous 4chan and 8chan websites.[4] The rest, as they say, is history.
Deepfake technology can and is being used increasingly by the film industry to create effects and save money (actors can be replaced even reinvented). However, there are growing concerns about deepfake being used for revenge porn, malicious hoaxes or for covertly political ends, perhaps to bring down a politician or even a government.
A workshop
of 26 top IT and artificial intelligence specialists held in Feb 2018 warned that the technology was “ripe for exploitation by rogue states, criminals and terrorists” as AI was now capable of producing "synthetic images that are nearly indistinguishable from photographs.”
In December 2018 NESTA predicted a geo-political incident involving deep-fakes in the next 12 months, and this may already have happened. President Ali Bongo’s stilted New Year’s address to the nation was labelled ‘deep-fake’ by the opposition in Gabon: political turmoil
followed sparking a (failed) military coup...
2 New Apps Released
Today deepfakes are being been used to satirise, misrepresent or demonise public figures and high-profile politicians on various video portals and chatrooms. In one video you can watch the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel's face morph into Donald Trump's; in another, we see Barack Obama appearing to make a public service announcement about the danger of deepfakes...
In January 2018, a proprietary desktop application called FaceApp
was launched. It was developed by Russian company Wireless Lab
and generates highly realistic transformations of faces in photographs and can alter a face to make it smile, look younger or older, even change gender. Many young people have been experimenting with the App and sharing the results on social media.[5]
The more recent release of the Chinese face-swapping app, Zao, has also highlighted just how easy creating deepfakes has become. Zao gives punters with smartphones the ability to seamlessly transplant themselves into the title roles in selected blockbuster movies. One viral clip showed a young Chinese man being transformed into Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Titanic. It is little wonder that Zao has become so popular.
Cheapfakes
In May 2019, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, was the subject of a tampered video
that went viral. In the video Pelosi appeared to be slurring her speech as if drunk and confused. This was not technically a deepfake, rather a ‘cheapfake’ or ‘dumbfake’, the result of someone mischievously slowing down the video and messing with the sound quality. However, the attendant coverage did help raise public awareness about deepfakes and concern about what technology had facilitated.
There was further ‘bad press’ in June 2019, when a downloadable App called DeepNude
was released — it used machine learning to remove clothing from images of women, however the public backlash was so strong that within a couple of weeks the creators had had second thoughts and withdrawn both the free and subscription versions of the App and refunded clients. Some argued
at the time that much of the motivation behind deepfakes and this kind of photo-shopping comes from men's desire "to control and humiliate women".
3 How Worried Should We Be About Deepfakes?
Whilst many people see FaceApp
and Zao
as harmless fun, the rise of these kind of App has triggered worrying headlines about deepfake technology. The concern is that the technology will be used to make increasingly realistic 'fake news', for instance, viral videos of politicians appearing to utter things they never actually said, perhaps even threatening neighbouring countries with war.
In Sept 2019 the BBC
broadcast a useful overview of the development of deepfake which went “deep into the world of deepfakes" to "meet some of the people who are trying to develop methods to detect them." And it looked into just how easy it is to make a convincing deepfake from scratch.
Do make time to listen; you'll find it here
[24 mins].
4 New Material
"The rise of deepfakes could enhance the effectiveness of disinformation efforts by states, political parties and adversarial actors. How rapidly is this technology advancing, and who in reality might adopt it for malicious ends? Why would a disinformation campaign choose deepfakes over more crudely made fake content that is sometimes equally as effective? What kinds of actors are likely to adopt these advances for malicious ends? How will they use them? This Center for Security & Emerging Technology
report
offers a "comprehensive deepfake threat assessment grounded in the latest machine learning research on generative models."
"Most deepfakes observed in the wilds of the internet are low quality and created for pornographic or entertainment purposes. So far, the best-documented malicious use of deepfakes is harassment of women. Corporate projects or media productions can create slicker output, including videos, on bigger budgets. [With this project] FireEye’s researchers wanted to show how someone could piggyback on sophisticated AI research with minimal resources or AI expertise... At the scale of a social network thumbnail, the AI-made images could easily pass as real. To make them, [the researcher] needed only to gather a few hundred images of Hanks online and spend less than $100 to tune open-source face-generation software to his chosen subject." [Source: Wired
— see here
for more details; Aug 2020]
5 What's To Be Done?
The Global Witness
website
has a useful list of things you can do to prepare for deepfakes. The table below is
taken from the site; visit the original to see the context and hyperlinks.
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Notes
1 Some of the material on this page has been taken from Wikipedia. This source also describes early landmark projects such as Video Rewrite
(published in 1997), which modified existing video footage of a person speaking to depict that person mouthing the words contained in a different audio track, and the Face2Face
program (published in 2016), which modified video footage of a person's face to depict them mimicking the facial expressions of another person in real time.
2 ‘The Irishman’, a biographical crime film starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who were digitally de-aged to portray younger versions of characters. The film, a NETFLIX Blockbuster released in Sept 2019, is just the latest to use de-aging technology — more than a dozen films
have used it, the first in 2006 [X-Men: The Last Stand] This video
shows clips from 10 films where technology has been used to turn back the clock on ageing actors and give us a glimpse of their younger selves. It includes clips of (amongst others) Peter Cushing, Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian Mckellen, Carrie Fisher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and Johnny Depp. In one [‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’] they even digitally resurrected
the late Peter Cushing as the Grand Moff Tarkin, a character who previously appeared in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope.
3 Samantha Cole’s article in Vice
in Dec. 2017 first drew attention to deepfakes being shared in online communities and warned of the dangers.
4 Other online communities remain, including Reddit’s r/SFWdeepfakes (short for ‘safe for work deepfakes’) in which community members share deepfakes depicting celebrities, politicians, and others in non-pornographic scenarios.
5 In 2019, FaceApp
attracted criticism in both the press and on social media over the privacy of user data. In response to questions, the company's founder, Yaroslav Goncharov, stated that user data and uploaded images were not being transferred to Russia but instead processed on servers running in the Google Cloud Platform
and Amazon Web Services. However, US senator Chuck Schumer expressed "serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it" and called for an FBI investigation into the app.” In August, FaceApp
once again faced criticism when it featured ‘ethnicity filters’ depicting ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Asian’, and ‘Indian. The filters were immediately removed from the app...
