Deepfakes

We talked about these in class awhile back and I have been hearing more and more about them recently, so I wanted to some more research!

Prior to looking it up just some of the things I knew were that these were pictures or videos that people can change and make pretty much anyone say whatever they want. The first thing that comes to mind is politics, someone could take someone’s face and make them say something that they didn’t say. Especially in today’s world with everything being online that could be a dangerous thing to happen and a lot of people would see it in no time. If there were to be a deepfake made of someone well known doing or saying something bad, that could possibly end someone’s career when they did nothing. There are a bunch of articles out on this topic but here is the one I used!

So the article was discussing what a deepfake is, basically what I said above, a video that is showing someone saying something that they didn’t really say! But when you think about it the technology behind this stuff is pretty cool, it’s just being used for bad things. A deep-learning system studies pictures and videos of someone and then from that it is able to create a fake video, that will mimic that persons behavior and speech. After the fake is made another program comes in called the GANs (generative adversarial network) and makes the whole thing seem much more believable. This process can happen multiple times to continue to make the video more and more believable.

The article went on talking about how to spot one of these fake videos! Since there is the technology out there to make these fake videos, there is also the technology out there to detect them!

The fact that there are programs that can make videos like this is kind of insane! As technology continues to advance I think we will be seeing more deepfakes!

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