Deepfake Technology and the risks it posses
Given that misinformation can be easily obtained and disseminated on social media platforms, it is increasingly difficult to know what to believe, which has a negative impact on informed decision-making, etc. Today, we live in what some people call the “post-truth” era, which is characterized by hostile entities trying to influence public opinion through disinformation campaigns, conducting digital deception and information warfare.
Recent technological breakthroughs have made it simple to generate what are now known as “deepfakes,” a hyper-realistic video with minimal evidence of manipulation. It is an Artificial intelligence (AI) application that merges, combines, replaces, and superimposes photos and video clips to produce fake videos that appear authentic, usually without the approval of the individual whose image and voice is involved.
Deepfake technology can create a hilarious, sexual, or political video of a person saying anything. Traditionally, vision-based programs like Adobe Photoshop were used to modify digital photographs and images that had been manually processed may be easily differentiated. However, synthetic images are becoming increasingly convincing due to the fast development of deep learning methods, which has led to the popularity of this technology. Its methods are gaining popularity since they can currently edit media in such a way that another person’s face can substitute an original face while maintaining the original facial expressions and activities.
The extent, scale, and sophistication of the technology involved in deepfakes are game-changing, as essentially anyone with a computer can create fake films that are virtually indistinguishable from legitimate material. While early examples of deep fakes included political leaders, actresses, comedians, and entertainers having their faces woven into porn videos, deep fakes will almost certainly be used for revenge porn, bullying, fake video evidence in courts, political sabotage, terrorist propaganda, blackmail, market manipulation, and fake news in the future.
Deepfaking audio can also be used to produce “voice skins” or “voice clones” of popular persons. After being contacted by a scammer who imitated the German CEO’s voice, the CEO of a UK division of a German energy corporation puts approximately £200,000 into a Hungarian bank account in March of 2019.
Videos of the movie star, Tom Cruise, playing around in an upscale men’s clothing store and showing off a coin trick started cropping up on TikTok earlier this year, and they were remarkably un-Tom Cruise-like. This phoney Tom Cruise was extremely popular on TikTok, with tens of millions of views and over 1.7 million followers. Chris Ume, a visual effects professional from Belgium, created the deepfakes by using deepfake technology to generate a captivating video that appears exactly like the celebrity.
Following that, artists, pranksters, and others have used these procedures to build an ever-growing collection of sound and film portraying world leaders like Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Vladimir Putin is making statements they won’t ever say. This pattern has brought worries up in the national security community that new leap forwards in machine learning would build the viability of destructive media manipulation attempts, for example, those attempted by Russia during the 2016 official political race in the United States.
Deepfakes can likewise be utilized for acceptable, for example, producing voices for individuals who have lost theirs or refreshing scenes of films without reshooting them. The number of malicious uses of deepfakes, then again, far dwarfs the valuable ones. The improvement of complex profound organizations, just as the accessibility of colossal measures of information, has delivered adulterated photos and recordings essentially undetectable to humans and even sophisticated computer algorithms. The way toward making those controlled pictures and recordings is likewise a lot easier today, as it just requires an objective person’s character photograph or a short video. Producing astonishingly convincing tempered footage requires less and less effort.
Thank you for sharing this informative article. It’s true that negative uses seem to dwarf deepfake and voice cloning’s positive applications, that’s why it’s saddening when the positive applications have a much richer, deeper, and valuable impact than the negative ones. Experts and tech giants should race to make sure this technology cannot be used maliciously so people can continuously utilize the technology for good.
Hi Sean, you are right that the technology meant for good is being used negatively. However, lets also have it in mind that the internet was also invented for positive use, but as of today we can see lots of scam being perpetuated by some uncanny individuals, despite that the internet has had lots of positive impact in the world today compared to when it was first developed. I do believe that deepfake technology will also achieve what it was created for.