What is deepfake? (Mcafee.com/activate)

Deepfakes majorly involve the use of image processing to produce video of celebrities, politicians, or others portraying the things that they have actually never said and done. Such content is enhanced by Artificial Intelligence as it pastes some other material on another video using a technique known as generative adversarial networks. With the rapid increase in the rate of AIs, the cases of deepfakes are increasing too. Gradually, deepfakes are likely to cause all sorts of consumer frauds and other problems. We have already seen the deepfakes of Trump, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, and other US politicians being shared to create political manipulation. The dissemination of misinformation is a big threat to cybersecurity; however, many analysts are pointing out the problems created by deepfakes and are working on its solutions.

FB, Microsoft, and Amazon fight against deepfake

The big companies like Facebook and Microsoft have been fighting the problem of deepfakes. These companies are running the Deepfake Detection Challenge which invites people to build innovative technologies to detect deepfakes. People can come together and build better detection tools to resolve the problem of deepfakes. Recently, Amazon Web Services has taken an initiative to back Facebook and Microsoft in their efforts to discover the manipulated content.

AWS is looking forward to adding$1 million in the funds over the next two years to help the teams that need cloud services to complete their detection work. It is also hosting complicated datasets for deepfake detection on the cloud service, using Amazon Simple Storage Service, i.e. Amazon S3 scalable infrastructure. According to Amazon, the researchers would need to apply for a minimum grant of USD 1,000 and a maximum of USD 10,000 for the same.

The DFDC has three other big names behind it too; these include – the New York Times and the University of Oxford. They together have pledged $10 million to help in the creation of detection tools.

DFDC is likely to release the entire dataset in December. Out of 1,00,00 plus example videos, 5,000 videos will be released by the Facebook. These will work as samples for the researchers to spot more such deepfakes.

It is a great sign that big giants are coming together to fight the challenge of deepfake. While detecting fake videos could be of great use, increasing media literacy among the population could also help people to spot fake news when they see it.

Can you think of any solution to the problem of deepfakes? Comment.