What are deepfakes and why are they a concern?

Things are not showing up as they seem in this year’s Channel 4 Christmas alternate message.

The broadcaster has decided to unveil the deepfake technology by 2020, showing a false representation of the Queen.

So what are deepfakes and why are they of concern?

Deepfakes use constantly improving artificial intelligence and machine learning, allowing people to combine and overlay existing images and videos of a person to make it appear that they have said something that they have not said.

While these can often be used as humor, they are also open to abuse by those who aim to mislead others, particularly in politics.

Despite renewed concern about misinformation in the past year due to the pandemic, there have been no notable cases of deepfakes used to spread fake news about the coronavirus thus far.

It is possible to tell if a video is deepfake since faces don’t always look good, but they are increasingly difficult to detect as technology evolves.

Facebook was the center of attention in 2018 for allowing an altered video of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to remain on its platform and go viral, making the congresswoman’s speech seem dragged. .

The head of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, later admitted that Facebook took too long to realize the edited video and ultimately decided to crack down on deepfake videos in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Google revealed in September 2019 that it had created thousands of actor-rigged deepfake videos in an attempt to help researchers build and train automated detection systems to detect clips.

According to research by Sensity.ai for a Channel 4 Deepfakes documentary on the subject, more than 60,000 deepfake videos were identified on the internet in the last 12 months.

“The UK is a very important target,” said Sensity’s Giorgio Patrini.

“If you look at world statistics, we actually estimate that around 10% of deep fake video, that we know of on the internet, would feature victims who are British citizens.

“Most of the targets, most of the victims that we see in the fakes come from the entertainment industry, the reason we see the UK being up in the stat is mainly due to the exposure of British culture in everyone, because they make it interesting to present those people in a video. “

Deepfakes: Can You Believe Your Eyes airs on Channel 4 on December 28.