A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of words[deep learning" and "fake"](_blank)) are synthetic media
Synthetic media (also known as AI-generated media, generative AI, personalized media, and colloquially as deepfakes) is a catch-all term for the artificial production, manipulation, and modification of data and media by automated means, especial ...
in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
to manipulate or generate visual and audio content that can more easily deceive. The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative neural network
A neural network is a network or neural circuit, circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up ...
architectures, such as autoencoder
An autoencoder is a type of artificial neural network used to learn efficient codings of unlabeled data (unsupervised learning). The encoding is validated and refined by attempting to regenerate the input from the encoding. The autoencoder lear ...
s, or generative adversarial network
A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is ...
s (GANs).
Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse
Child sexual abuse (CSA), also called child molestation, is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of child sexual abuse include engaging in sexual activities with a child (whet ...
material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news
Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.Schlesinger, Robert (April 14, 2017)"Fake news in realit ...
, hoax
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...
es, bullying
Bullying is the use of force, coercion, hurtful teasing or threat, to abuse, aggressively dominate or intimidate. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. One essential prerequisite is the perception (by the bully or by others) of an i ...
, and financial fraud
In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud or recover monetary compen ...
. This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.
From traditional entertainment
Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousan ...
to gaming, deepfake technology has evolved to be increasingly convincing and available to the public, allowing the disruption of the entertainment and media
Media may refer to:
Communication
* Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data
** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising
** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...
industries.
History
Photo manipulation
Photograph manipulation involves the transformation or alteration of a photograph using various methods and techniques to achieve desired results. Some photograph manipulations are considered to be skillful artwork, while others are consider ...
was developed in the 19th century and soon applied to motion pictures
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
. Technology steadily improved during the 20th century, and more quickly with the advent of digital video.
Deepfake technology has been developed by researchers at academic institutions beginning in the 1990s, and later by amateurs in online communities. More recently the methods have been adopted by industry.
Academic research
Academic research related to deepfakes is split between the field of computer vision
Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...
, a subfield of computer science, which develops techniques for creating and identifying deepfakes, and humanities and social science approaches that study the social, ethical and aesthetic implications of deepfakes.
Social science and humanities approaches to deepfakes
In cinema studies, deepfakes demonstrate how "the human face is emerging as a central object of ambivalence in the digital age". Video artists have used deepfakes to "playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers". Film scholar Christopher Holliday analyses how the switching out gender and race of performers in familiar movie scenes destabilise gender classifications and categories. The idea of " queering" deepfakes is also discussed in Oliver M. Gingrich's discussion of media artworks that use deepfakes to reframe gender, including British artist Jake Elwes' ''Zizi: Queering the Dataset'', an artwork that uses deepfakes of drag queens to intentionally play with gender. The aesthetic potentials of deepfakes are also beginning to be explored. Theatre historian John Fletcher notes that early demonstrations of deepfakes are presented as performances, and situates these in the context of theatre, discussing "some of the more troubling paradigm shifts" that deepfakes represent as a performance genre.
Philosophers and media scholars have discussed the ethics of deepfakes especially in relation to pornography. Media scholar Emily van der Nagel draws upon research in photography studies on manipulated images to discuss verification systems that allow women to consent to uses of their images.
Beyond pornography, deepfakes have been framed by philosophers as an "epistemic threat" to knowledge and thus to society. There are several other suggestions for how to deal with the risks deepfakes give rise beyond pornography, but also to corporations, politicians and others, of "exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage", and there are several scholarly discussions of potential legal and regulatory responses both in legal studies and media studies. In psychology and media studies, scholars discuss the effects of disinformation
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate.
The English word ''disinformation'' comes from the application of the ...
that uses deepfakes, and the social impact of deepfakes.
While most English-language academic studies of deepfakes focus on the Western anxieties about disinformation and pornography, digital anthropologist Gabriele de Seta
Gabriele de Seta (born 1986) is a digital anthropologist and sociologist specialising in everyday digital culture in the Chinese speaking world, and known for his contributions to digital ethnographic methodology. He works at the University of B ...
has analysed the Chinese reception of deepfakes, which are known as ''huanlian'', which translates to "changing faces". The Chinese term does not contain the "fake" of the English deepfake, and de Seta argues that this cultural context may explain why the Chinese response has been more about practical regulatory responses to "fraud risks, image rights, economic profit, and ethical imbalances".
Computer science research on deepfakes
An early landmark project was the Video Rewrite program, 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. It was the first system to fully automate this kind of facial reanimation, and it did so using machine learning techniques to make connections between the sounds produced by a video's subject and the shape of the subject's face.
Contemporary academic projects have focused on creating more realistic videos and on improving techniques. The "Synthesizing Obama" program, published in 2017, modifies video footage of former president Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...
to depict him mouthing the words contained in a separate audio track. The project lists as a main research contribution its photorealistic
Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another Medium (arts), medium. Although ...
technique for synthesizing mouth shapes from audio. The Face2Face program, published in 2016, modifies video footage of a person's face to depict them mimicking the facial expressions of another person in real time. The project lists as a main research contribution the first method for re-enacting facial expressions in real time using a camera that does not capture depth, making it possible for the technique to be performed using common consumer cameras.
In August 2018, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
published a paper introducing a fake dancing app that can create the impression of masterful dancing ability using AI. This project expands the application of deepfakes to the entire body; previous works focused on the head or parts of the face.
Researchers have also shown that deepfakes are expanding into other domains such as tampering with medical imagery. In this work, it was shown how an attacker can automatically inject or remove lung cancer in a patient's 3D CT scan. The result was so convincing that it fooled three radiologists and a state-of-the-art lung cancer detection AI. To demonstrate the threat, the authors successfully performed the attack on a hospital in a White hat penetration test.
A survey of deepfakes, published in May 2020, provides a timeline of how the creation and detection deepfakes have advanced over the last few years. The survey identifies that researchers have been focusing on resolving the following challenges of deepfake creation:
* Generalization. High-quality deepfakes are often achieved by training on hours of footage of the target. This challenge is to minimize the amount of training data and the time to train the model required to produce quality images and to enable the execution of trained models on ''new'' identities (unseen during training).
* Paired Training. Training a supervised model can produce high-quality results, but requires data pairing. This is the process of finding examples of inputs and their desired outputs for the model to learn from. Data pairing is laborious and impractical when training on multiple identities and facial behaviors. Some solutions include self-supervised training (using frames from the same video), the use of unpaired networks such as Cycle-GAN, or the manipulation of network embeddings.
* Identity leakage. This is where the identity of the driver (i.e., the actor controlling the face in a reenactment) is partially transferred to the generated face. Some solutions proposed include attention mechanisms, few-shot learning, disentanglement, boundary conversions, and skip connections.
* Occlusions. When part of the face is obstructed with a hand, hair, glasses, or any other item then artifacts can occur. A common occlusion is a closed mouth which hides the inside of the mouth and the teeth. Some solutions include image segmentation during training and in-painting.
* Temporal coherence. In videos containing deepfakes, artifacts such as flickering and jitter can occur because the network has no context of the preceding frames. Some researchers provide this context or use novel temporal coherence losses to help improve realism. As the technology improves, the interference is diminishing.
Overall, deepfakes are expected to have several implications in media and society, media production, media representations, media audiences, gender, law, and regulation, and politics.
Amateur development
The term deepfakes originated around the end of 2017 from a Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...
user named "deepfakes". He, as well as others in the Reddit community r/deepfakes, shared deepfakes they created; many videos involved celebrities' faces swapped onto the bodies of actresses in pornographic videos, while non-pornographic content included many videos with actor Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Kim Coppola (born January 7, 1964), known professionally as Nicolas Cage, is an American actor and film producer. Born into the Coppola family, he is the recipient of List of awards and nominations received by Nicolas Cage, various ac ...
's face swapped into various movies.
Other online communities remain, including Reddit communities that do not share pornography, such as r/SFWdeepfakes (short for "safe for work deepfakes"), in which community members share deepfakes depicting celebrities, politicians, and others in non-pornographic scenarios. Other online communities continue to share pornography on platforms that have not banned deepfake pornography.
Commercial development
In January 2018, a proprietary desktop application called FakeApp was launched. This app allows users to easily create and share videos with their faces swapped with each other. As of 2019, FakeApp has been superseded by open-source alternatives such as Faceswap, command line-based DeepFaceLab, and web-based apps such as DeepfakesWeb.com
Larger companies started to use deepfakes. Corporate training videos can be created using deepfaked avatars and their voices, for example Synthesia
''Synthesia'' is a piano keyboard trainer for Microsoft Windows, IOS, macOS, and Android which allows users to play a MIDI keyboard or use a computer keyboard in time to a MIDI file by following on-screen directions, much in the style of '' ...
, which uses deepfake technology with avatars to create personalized videos. The mobile app giant Momo created the application Zao which allows users to superimpose their face on television and movie clips with a single picture. As of 2019 the Japanese AI company DataGrid made a full body deepfake that could create a person from scratch. They intend to use these for fashion and apparel.
As of 2020 audio deepfake The audio deepfake is a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing speech sentences that sound like specific people saying things they did not say. This technology was initially developed for various applications to improve human life ...
s, and AI software capable of detecting deepfakes and cloning human voices after 5 seconds of listening time also exist. A mobile deepfake app, Impressions, was launched in March 2020. It was the first app for the creation of celebrity deepfake videos from mobile phones.
Resurrection
Deepfakes technology can not only be used to fabricate messages and actions of others, but it can also be used to revive deceased individuals. On 29 October 2020, Kim Kardashian posted a video of her late father Robert Kardashian
Robert George Kardashian (February 22, 1944 – September 30, 2003) was an American attorney and businessman. He gained recognition as O. J. Simpson's friend and defense attorney during Simpson's 1995 murder trial. He had four children with hi ...
; the face in the video of Robert Kardashian was created with deepfake technology. This hologram was created by the company Kaleida, where they use a combination of performance, motion tracking, SFX, VFX and DeepFake technologies in their hologram
Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other Holography#Applications, applic ...
creation.
In 2020, Joaquin Oliver, victim of the Parkland shooting was resurrected with deepfake technology. Oliver's parents teamed up on behalf of their organization Nonprofit Change the Ref, with McCann Health to produce this deepfake video advocating for gun-safety voting campaign. In this deepfake message, it shows Joaquin encouraging viewers to vote.
In 2022, Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977), or simply Elvis, was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the "Honorific nicknames in popular music, King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as Cultural impact of Elvis Presley, one ...
has been resurrected in America's Got Talent 17 using deepfake technology.
Techniques
Deepfakes rely on a type of neural network
A neural network is a network or neural circuit, circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up ...
called an autoencoder
An autoencoder is a type of artificial neural network used to learn efficient codings of unlabeled data (unsupervised learning). The encoding is validated and refined by attempting to regenerate the input from the encoding. The autoencoder lear ...
. These consist of an encoder, which reduces an image to a lower dimensional latent space
A latent space, also known as a latent feature space or embedding space, is an embedding of a set of items within a manifold in which items resembling each other are positioned closer to one another in the latent space. Position within the latent ...
, and a decoder, which reconstructs the image from the latent representation. Deepfakes utilize this architecture by having a universal encoder which encodes a person in to the latent space. The latent representation contains key features about their facial features and body posture. This can then be decoded with a model trained specifically for the target. This means the target's detailed information will be superimposed on the underlying facial and body features of the original video, represented in the latent space.
A popular upgrade to this architecture attaches a generative adversarial network
A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is ...
to the decoder. A GAN trains a generator, in this case the decoder, and a discriminator in an adversarial relationship. The generator creates new images from the latent representation of the source material, while the discriminator attempts to determine whether or not the image is generated. This causes the generator to create images that mimic reality extremely well as any defects would be caught by the discriminator. Both algorithms improve constantly in a zero sum game. This makes deepfakes difficult to combat as they are constantly evolving; any time a defect is determined, it can be corrected.
Applications
Blackmail
Deepfakes can be used to generate blackmail materials that falsely incriminate a victim. A report by the American Congressional Research Service
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. Operating within the Library of Congress, it works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on ...
warned that deepfakes could be used to blackmail elected officials or those with access to classified information
Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to k ...
for espionage
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tang ...
or influence
Influence or influencer may refer to:
*Social influence, in social psychology, influence in interpersonal relationships
** Minority influence, when the minority affect the behavior or beliefs of the majority
*Influencer marketing, through individ ...
purposes.
Alternatively, since the fakes cannot reliably be distinguished from genuine materials, victims of actual blackmail can now claim that the true artifacts are fakes, granting them plausible deniability. The effect is to void credibility of existing blackmail materials, which erases loyalty to blackmailers and destroys the blackmailer's control. This phenomenon can be termed "blackmail inflation", since it "devalues" real blackmail, rendering it worthless. It is possible to utilize commodity GPU hardware with a small software program to generate this blackmail content for any number of subjects in huge quantities, driving up the supply of fake blackmail content limitlessly and in highly scalable fashion.
Pornography
In 2017, Deepfake pornography prominently surfaced on the Internet, particularly on Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...
. As of 2019, many deepfakes on the internet feature pornography of female celebrities whose likeness is typically used without their consent. A report published in October 2019 by Dutch cybersecurity startup Deeptrace estimated that 96% of all deepfakes online were pornographic.
As of 2018, a Daisy Ridley
Daisy Jazz Isobel Ridley (born 10 April 1992) is an English actress. She rose to prominence for her role as Rey in the ''Star Wars'' sequel trilogy: ''The Force Awakens'' (2015), '' The Last Jedi'' (2017), and ''The Rise of Skywalker'' (2019) ...
deepfake first captured attention, among others. As of October 2019, most of the deepfake subjects on the internet were British and American actresses. However, around a quarter of the subjects are South Korean, the majority of which are K-pop stars.
In June 2019, a downloadable Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...
and Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
application called DeepNude was released that used neural networks, specifically generative adversarial networks
A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is a ...
, to remove clothing from images of women. The app had both a paid and unpaid version, the paid version costing $50. On 27 June the creators removed the application and refunded consumers.
Politics
Deepfakes have been used to misrepresent well-known politicians in videos.
* In April 2018, Jordan Peele
Jordan Haworth Peele (born February 21, 1979) is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is best known for his film and television work in the comedy and horror genres. Peele's breakout role came in 2003, when he was hired as a cast membe ...
collaborated with Buzzfeed
BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. ...
to create a deepfake of Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...
with Peele's voice; it served as a public service announcement
A public service announcement (PSA) is a message in the public interest disseminated by the media without charge to raise public awareness and change behavior. In the UK, they are generally called a public information film (PIF); in Hong Kong, ...
to increase awareness of deepfakes.
* In 2018, in separate videos, the face of the Argentine President Mauricio Macri
Mauricio Macri (; born 8 February 1959) is an Argentine businessman and politician who served as the President of Argentina from 2015 to 2019. He has been the leader of the Republican Proposal (PRO) party since its founding in 2005. He previ ...
had been replaced by the face of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
, and Angela Merkel
Angela Dorothea Merkel (; ; born 17 July 1954) is a German former politician and scientist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Op ...
's face has been replaced with Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of ...
's.
* In January 2019, Fox
Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush'').
Twelv ...
affiliate KCPQ
KCPQ (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Tacoma, Washington, United States, broadcasting the Fox network to the Seattle area. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside MyNetworkTV outlet K ...
aired a deepfake of Trump during his Oval Office address, mocking his appearance and skin color. The employee found responsible for the video was subsequently fired.
* In June 2019, the United States House Intelligence Committee
The United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), also known as the House Intelligence Committee, is a committee of the United States House of Representatives, currently chaired by Adam Schiff. It is the primary committ ...
held hearings on the potential malicious use of deepfakes to sway elections.
* In April 2020, the Belgian branch of Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a global environmental movement, with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk o ...
published a deepfake video of Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès on Facebook. The video promoted a possible link between deforestation
Deforestation or forest clearance is the removal of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then land conversion, converted to non-forest use. Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban area, urban ...
and COVID-19
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickl ...
. It had more than 100,000 views within 24 hours and received many comments. On the Facebook page where the video appeared, many users interpreted the deepfake video as genuine.
* During the 2020 US Presidential campaign, many deep fakes surfaced purporting Joe Biden in cognitive decline—falling asleep during an interview, getting lost, and misspeaking—all bolstering rumors of his decline.
* During the 2020 Delhi Legislative Assembly election
Legislative Assembly elections were held in Delhi on 8 February 2020 to elect 70 members of the Delhi Legislative Assembly. Voters turnout was recorded at 62.82%, a decline of 4.65% from the previous assembly election in Delhi but 2.2% more th ...
campaign, the Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party used similar technology to distribute a version of an English-language campaign advertisement by its leader, Manoj Tiwari, translated into Haryanvi
Haryanvi ( ' or '), also known as Bangru, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the state of Haryana in India, and to a lesser extent in Delhi. Haryanvi is considered to be part of the dialect group of Western Hindi, which also includes Kharib ...
to target Haryana
Haryana (; ) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 Nov 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% () of India's land ...
voters. A voiceover was provided by an actor, and AI trained using video of Tiwari speeches was used to lip-sync the video to the new voiceover. A party staff member described it as a "positive" use of deepfake technology, which allowed them to "convincingly approach the target audience even if the candidate didn't speak the language of the voter."
*In 2020, Bruno Sartori
Bruno Donizati Sartori (Iturama, May 16, 1989), also known as Bruxo dos Vídeos (Wizard of Videos),MARTINS, Júlia Laporte FrancoISSO É MUITO BLACK MIRROR: Correlações entre teoria, reportagens jornalísticas e episódios da série Black Mirror ...
produced deepfakes parodying politicians like Jair Bolsonaro
Jair Messias Bolsonaro (; born 21 March 1955) is a Brazilian politician and retired military officer who has been the 38th president of Brazil since 1 January 2019. He was elected in 2018 as a member of the Social Liberal Party, which he turn ...
and Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of ...
.
* In April 2021, politicians in a number of European countries were approached by pranksters Vovan and Lexus, who are accused by critics of working for the Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...
n state. They impersonated Leonid Volkov, a Russian opposition politician and chief of staff of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny
Alexei Anatolievich Navalny ( rus, links=no, Алексей Анатольевич Навальный, , ɐlʲɪkˈsʲej ɐnɐˈtolʲjɪvʲɪtɕ nɐˈvalʲnɨj; born 4 June 1976) is a Russian opposition leader, lawyer, and anti-corruption act ...
's campaign, allegedly through deepfake technology. However, the pair told ''The Verge
''The Verge'' is an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, consumer electronics news, and podcasts.
The website launched on November 1, 2011, and uses Vox Media' ...
'' that they did not use deepfakes, and just used a look-alike
A look-alike, double, or doppelgänger is a person who bears a strong physical resemblance to another person, excluding cases like twins and other instances of family resemblance.
Some look-alikes have been notable individuals in their own right ...
.
Art
In March 2018 the multidisciplinary artist Joseph Ayerle published the video art
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. ...
work ''Un'emozione per sempre 2.0'' (English title: ''The Italian Game''). The artist worked with Deepfake technology to create an ''AI actress'', a synthetic version of 80s movie star Ornella Muti
Ornella Muti (born Francesca Romana Rivelli; 9 March 1955) is an Italian actress. She made her film debut as Francesca Cimarosa in the 1970 film '' La moglie più bella.''
Early life
Muti was born in Rome to a Neapolitan journalist father and ...
, traveling in time from 1978 to 2018. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...
referred this artwork in the study "Collective Wisdom". The artist used Ornella Muti's time travel
Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a ...
to explore generational reflections, while also investigating questions about the role of provocation in the world of art. For the technical realization Ayerle used scenes of photo model Kendall Jenner
Kendall Nicole Jenner (born November 3, 1995) is an American model, media personality, and socialite. She is a daughter of Kris Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner, and rose to fame in the reality television show ''Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'' Je ...
. The program replaced Jenner's face by an AI calculated face of Ornella Muti. As a result, the AI actress has the face of the Italian actress Ornella Muti and the body of Kendall Jenner.
Deepfakes have been widely used in satire
Satire is a genre of the visual arts, visual, literature, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently Nonfiction, non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ...
or to parody celebrities and politicians. The 2020 webseries '' Sassy Justice'', created by Trey Parker
Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III (born October 19, 1969) is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and composer. He is known for co-creating ''South Park'' (since 1997) and ''The Book of Mormon'' (2011) with his creative partner Matt Stone. P ...
and Matt Stone
Matthew Richard Stone (born May 26, 1971) is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and composer. He is known for co-creating '' South Park'' (since 1997) and '' The Book of Mormon'' (2011) with his creative partner Trey Parker. Stone was inte ...
, heavily features the use of deepfaked public figures to satirize current events and raise awareness of deepfake technology.
Acting
There has been speculation about deepfakes being used for creating digital actors for future films. Digitally constructed/altered humans have already been used in films before, and deepfakes could contribute new developments in the near future. Deepfake technology has already been used by fans to insert faces into existing films, such as the insertion of Harrison Ford
Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an American actor. His films have grossed more than $5.4billion in North America and more than $9.3billion worldwide, making him the seventh-highest-grossing actor in North America. He is the recipient o ...
's young face onto Han Solo's face in '' Solo: A Star Wars Story'', and techniques similar to those used by deepfakes were used for the acting of Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin
Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin is a fictional character in the ''Star Wars'' franchise, introduced as the main antagonist of the original 1977 ''Star Wars'' film (played by Peter Cushing). In the film, Tarkin is depicted as a high-ranking officer o ...
in ''Rogue One
''Rogue One: A Star Wars Story'' (or simply ''Rogue One'') is a 2016 American epic space opera film directed by Gareth Edwards. The screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy is from a story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta. It was produced by Lu ...
.''
As deepfake technology increasingly advances, Disney
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
has improved their visual effects using high-resolution deepfake face swapping technology. Disney improved their technology through progressive training programmed to identify facial expressions, implementing a face-swapping feature, and iterating in order to stabilize and refine the output. This high-resolution deepfake technology saves significant operational and production costs. Disney's deepfake generation model can produce AI-generated media at a 1024 x 1024 resolution, as opposed to common models that produce media at a 256 x 256 resolution. The technology allows Disney to characters or revive deceased actors.
The 2020 documentary ''Welcome to Chechnya
''Welcome to Chechnya'' is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France.Mike Fleming, Jr"HBO Documentary Films Lands Sundance-Bound ‘Welcome To Chechnya’, About Harsh Plight Of LGBTQ Community In Russia ...
'' used deepfake technology to obscure the identity of the people interviewed, so as to protect them from retaliation.
Entertainment
On June 8, 2022, Daniel Emmet, a former AGT contestant, teamed up with the AI startup
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...
Metaphysic AI, to create a hyperrealistic deepfake to make it appear as Simon Cowell
Simon Phillip Cowell (; born 7 October 1959) is an English television personality, entrepreneur and record executive. He is the creator of '' The X Factor'' and '' Got Talent'' franchises which have been sold around the world. He has judged on ...
. Cowell, notoriously known for severely critiquing contestants, was on stage interpreting "You're The Inspiration
"You're the Inspiration" is a song written by Peter Cetera and David Foster for the group Chicago and recorded for their fourteenth studio album '' Chicago 17'' (1984), with Cetera singing lead vocals. The third single released from that album, i ...
" by Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...
. Emmet sang on stage as an image of Simon Cowell emerged on the screen behind him in flawless synchronicity.
On August 30, 2022, Metaphysic AI
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
had 'deep-fake' Simon Cowell
Simon Phillip Cowell (; born 7 October 1959) is an English television personality, entrepreneur and record executive. He is the creator of '' The X Factor'' and '' Got Talent'' franchises which have been sold around the world. He has judged on ...
, Howie Mandel
Howard Michael Mandel (born November 29, 1955) is a Canadian-American comedian, television personality, actor, and producer. Mandel voiced the character Gizmo in the 1984 film '' Gremlins'' and the 1990 sequel '' Gremlins 2: The New Batch''. ...
and Terry Crews
Terry Alan Crews (born July 30, 1968) is an American actor, television host, and former American footballer. He played Julius Rock in the UPN/ CW sitcom '' Everybody Hates Chris'', which aired from 2005 to 2009, and portrayed Terry Jefford ...
singing opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libre ...
on stage.
On September 13, 2022, Metaphysic AI performed with a synthetic Synthetic things are composed of multiple parts, often with the implication that they are artificial. In particular, 'synthetic' may refer to:
Science
* Synthetic chemical or compound, produced by the process of chemical synthesis
* Synthetic o ...
version of Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977), or simply Elvis, was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the "Honorific nicknames in popular music, King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as Cultural impact of Elvis Presley, one ...
for the finals of ''America's Got Talent''.
Internet meme
In 2020, an internet meme
An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...
emerged utilizing deepfakes to generate videos of people singing the chorus of , a song from the game ''Yakuza 0
''Yakuza 0'' is an action-adventure game developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and published by Sega. It is the sixth main entry in the '' Yakuza series'' and a prequel to the original game. It was released for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 in J ...
'' in the video game series ''Yakuza
, also known as , are members of transnational organized crime syndicates originating in Japan. The Japanese police and media, by request of the police, call them , while the ''yakuza'' call themselves . The English equivalent for the ter ...
''. In the series, the melancholic song is sung by the player in a karaoke
Karaoke (; ; , clipped compound of Japanese ''kara'' "empty" and ''ōkesutora'' "orchestra") is a type of interactive entertainment usually offered in clubs and bars, where people sing along to recorded music using a microphone. The music i ...
minigame
A minigame (also spelled mini game and mini-game, sometimes called a subgame or microgame) is a short game often contained within another video game. A minigame contains different gameplay elements, and is often smaller or more simplistic, than th ...
. Most iterations of this meme use a 2017 video uploaded by user Dobbsyrules, who lip sync
Lip sync or lip synch (pronounced , the same as the word ''sink'', short for lip synchronization) is a technical term for matching a speaking or singing person's lip movements with sung or spoken vocals.
Audio for lip syncing is generated th ...
s the song, as a template.
Social media
Deepfakes have begun to see use in popular social media platforms, notably through Zao, a Chinese deepfake app that allows users to substitute their own faces onto those of characters in scenes from films and television shows such as ''Romeo + Juliet
Romeo Montague () is the male protagonist of William Shakespeare's tragedy ''Romeo and Juliet''. The son of Lord Montague and his wife, Lady Montague, he secretly loves and marries Juliet, a member of the rival House of Capulet, through a pries ...
'' and ''Game of Thrones
''Game of Thrones'' is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO. It is an adaptation of ''A Song of Ice and Fire'', a series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, the firs ...
''. The app originally faced scrutiny over its invasive user data and privacy policy, after which the company put out a statement claiming it would revise the policy. In January 2020 Facebook announced that it was introducing new measures to counter this on its platforms.
The Congressional Research Service
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. Operating within the Library of Congress, it works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on ...
cited unspecified evidence as showing that foreign Intelligence officer, intelligence operatives used deepfakes to create social media accounts with the purposes of Recruitment of spies, recruiting individuals with access to classified information
Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to k ...
.[
In 2021, realistic deepfake videos of actor Tom Cruise were released on TikTok, which went viral and garnered more than tens of millions of views. The deepfake videos featured an "artificial intelligence-generated doppelganger" of Cruise doing various activities such as teeing off at the golf course, showing off a coin trick, and biting into a lollipop. The creator of the clips, Belgium, Belgian Visual effects, VFX Artist Chris Umé, said he first got interested in deepfakes in 2018 and saw the "creative potential" of them.
]
Sockpuppets
Deepfake photographs can be used to create sockpuppet (internet), sockpuppets, non-existent people, who are active both online and in traditional media. A deepfake photograph appears to have been generated together with a legend for an apparently non-existent person named Oliver Taylor, whose identity was described as a university student in the United Kingdom. The Oliver Taylor persona submitted opinion pieces in several newspapers and was active in online media attacking a British legal academic and his wife, as "terrorist sympathizers." The academic had drawn international attention in 2018 when he commenced a lawsuit in Israel against NSO, a surveillance company, on behalf of people in Mexico who alleged they were victims of NSO's phone hacking technology. ''Reuters'' could find only scant records for Oliver Taylor and "his" university had no records for him. Many experts agreed that the profile photo is a deepfake. Several newspapers have not retracted articles attributed to him or removed them from their websites. It is feared that such techniques are a new battleground in disinformation
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate.
The English word ''disinformation'' comes from the application of the ...
.
Collections of deepfake photographs of non-existent people on social networks have also been deployed as part of Israeli partisan (politics), partisan propaganda. The Facebook page "Zionist Spring" featured photos of non-existent persons along with their "testimonies" purporting to explain why they have abandoned their left-leaning politics to embrace the Right-wing politics, right-wing, and the page also contained large numbers of posts from Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and his son and from other Israeli right wing sources. The photographs appear to have been generated by "human image synthesis" technology, computer software that takes data from photos of real people to produce a realistic composite image of a non-existent person. In much of the "testimony," the reason given for embracing the political right was the shock of learning of alleged incitement to violence against the prime minister. Right wing Israeli television broadcasters then broadcast the "testimony" of these non-existent person based on the fact that they were being "shared" online. The broadcasters aired the story, even though the broadcasters could not find such people, explaining "Why does the origin matter?" Other Facebook fake profiles—profiles of fictitious individuals—contained material that allegedly contained such incitement against the right wing prime minister, in response to which the prime minister complained that there was a plot to murder him.
Concerns
Fraud
Audio deepfakes have been used as part of Social engineering (security), social engineering scams, fooling people into thinking they are receiving instructions from a trusted individual. In 2019, a U.K.-based energy firm's CEO was scammed over the phone when he was ordered to transfer €220,000 into a Hungarian bank account by an individual who used audio deepfake technology to impersonate the voice of the firm's parent company's chief executive.
Credibility and authenticity
Though fake photos have long been plentiful, faking motion pictures has been more difficult, and the presence of deepfakes increases the difficulty of classifying videos as genuine or not. AI researcher Alex Champandard has said people should know how fast things can be corrupted with deepfake technology, and that the problem is not a technical one, but rather one to be solved by trust in information and journalism. Deepfakes can be leveraged to defame, impersonate, and spread disinformation. The primary pitfall is that humanity could fall into an age in which it can no longer be determined whether a medium's content corresponds to the truth.
Similarly, computer science associate professor Hao Li of the University of Southern California states that deepfakes created for malicious use, such as fake news, will be even more harmful if nothing is done to spread awareness of deepfake technology. Li predicted that genuine videos and deepfakes would become indistinguishable in as soon as half a year, as of October 2019, due to rapid advancement in artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
and computer graphics.
Former Google fraud czar Shuman Ghosemajumder has called deepfakes an area of "societal concern" and said that they will inevitably evolve to a point at which they can be generated automatically, and an individual could use that technology to produce millions of deepfake videos.
The consequences of a deepfake are not significant enough to destabilize the entire government system; however, deepfakes possess the ability to damage individual entities tremendously. This is because deepfakes are often targeted at one individual, and/or their relations to others in hopes to create a narrative powerful enough to influence public opinion or beliefs. This can be done through deepfake voice phishing, which manipulates audio to create fake phone calls or conversations. Another method of deepfake use is fabricated private remarks, which manipulate media to convey individuals voicing damaging comments.
In September 2020 Microsoft made public that they are developing a Deepfake detection software tool.
Example events
Barack Obama
On April 17, 2018, American actor Jordan Peele
Jordan Haworth Peele (born February 21, 1979) is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is best known for his film and television work in the comedy and horror genres. Peele's breakout role came in 2003, when he was hired as a cast membe ...
, BuzzFeed, and Monkeypaw Productions posted a deepfake of Barack Obama to YouTube, which depicted Barack Obama cursing and calling Donald Trump names. In this deepfake Peele's voice and face were transformed and manipulated into those of Obama. The intent of this video was to portray the dangerous consequences and power of deepfakes, and how deepfakes can make anyone say anything.
Donald Trump
On May 5, 2019, Derpfakes posted a deepfake of Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of ...
to YouTube, based on a skit Jimmy Fallon performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, NBC's The Tonight Show. In the original skit (aired May 4, 2016), Jimmy Fallon dressed as Donald Trump and pretended to participate in a phone call with Barack Obama, conversing in a manner that presented him to be bragging about his primary win in Indiana. In the deepfake, Jimmy Fallon's face was transformed into Donald Trump's face, with the audio remaining the same. This deepfake video was produced by Derpfakes with a comedic intent.
Nancy Pelosi
In 2019, a clip from Nancy Pelosi's speech at the Center for American Progress (given on May 22, 2019) in which the video was slowed down, in addition to the pitch of the audio being altered, to make it seem as if she were drunk, was widely distributed on social media. Critics argue that this was not a deepfake, but a shallowfake; a less sophisticated form of video manipulation.
Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin
On September 29, 2020, deepfakes of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...
n President Vladimir Putin were uploaded to YouTube, created by a nonpartisan advocacy group RepresentUs.
The deepfakes of Kim and Putin were meant to air publicly as commercials to relay the notion that interference by these leaders in US elections would be detrimental to the United States' democracy. The commercials also aimed to shock Americans to realize how fragile democracy is, and how media and news can significantly influence the country's path regardless of credibility. However, while the commercials included an ending comment detailing that the footage was not real, they ultimately did not air due to fears and sensitivity regarding how Americans may react.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
On March 16, 2022, a one-minute long deepfake video depicting Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy seemingly telling his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was circulated on social media. Russian social media boosted it, but after it was debunked, Facebook and YouTube removed it. Twitter allowed the video in tweets where it was exposed as a fake, but said it would be taken down if posted to deceive people. Hackers inserted the disinformation into a live scrolling-text news crawl on TV station Ukraine 24, and the video appeared briefly on the station's website in addition to false claims that Zelenskyy had fled his country's capital, Kyiv. It was not immediately clear who created the deepfake, to which Zelenskyy responded with his own video, saying, "We don't plan to lay down any arms. Until our victory."
Responses
Social media platforms
Twitter
Twitter is taking active measures to handle synthetic and manipulated media on their platform. In order to prevent disinformation from spreading, Twitter is placing a notice on tweets that contain manipulated media and/or deepfakes that signal to viewers that the media is manipulated. There will also be a warning that appears to users who plan on retweeting, liking, or engaging with the tweet. Twitter will also work to provide users a link next to the tweet containing manipulated or synthetic media that links to a Twitter Moment or credible news article on the related topic—as a debunking action. Twitter also has the ability to remove any tweets containing deepfakes or manipulated media that may pose a harm to users' safety. In order to better improve Twitter's detection of deepfakes and manipulated media, Twitter has asked users who are interested in partnering with them to work on deepfake detection solutions to fill out a form (that is due 27 November 2020).
Facebook
Facebook has taken efforts towards encouraging the creation of deepfakes in order to develop state of the art deepfake detection software. Facebook was the prominent partner in hosting the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC), held December 2019, to 2114 participants who generated more than 35,000 models. The top performing models with the highest detection accuracy were analyzed for similarities and differences; these findings are areas of interest in further research to improve and refine deepfake detection models . Facebook has also detailed that the platform will be taking down media generated with artificial intelligence used to alter an individual's speech. However, media that has been edited to alter the order or context of words in one's message would remain on the site but be labeled as false, since it was not generated by artificial intelligence.
Detection
Most of the academic research surrounding deepfakes focuses on the detection deepfake videos. One approach to deepfake detection is to use algorithms to recognize patterns and pick up subtle inconsistencies that arise in deepfake videos. For example, researchers have developed automatic systems that examine videos for errors such as irregular blinking patterns of lighting. This approach has been criticized because deepfake detection is characterized by a "Zero-sum game, moving goal post" where the production of deepfakes continues to change and improve as algorithms to detect deepfakes improve. In order to assess the most effective algorithms for detecting deepfakes, a coalition of leading technology companies hosted the Deepfake Detection Challenge to accelerate the technology for identifying manipulated content. The winning model of the Deepfake Detection Challenge was 65% accurate on the holdout set of 4,000 videos. A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper in December 2021 demonstrating that ordinary humans are 69-72% accurate at identifying a random sample of 50 of these videos.
A team at the University of Buffalo published a paper in October 2020 outlining their technique of using reflections of light in the eyes of
those depicted to spot deepfakes with a high rate of success, even without the use of an AI detection tool, at least for the time being.
Another team led by Wael AbdAlmageed with Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory (VIMAL) of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, University Of Southern California developed two generations of deepfake detectors based on convolutional neural networks. The first generation used recurrent neural networks to spot spatio-temporal inconsistencies to identify visual artifacts left by the deepfake generation process. The algorithm archived 96% accuracy on FaceForensics++; the only large-scale deepfake benchmark available at that time. The second generation used end-to-end deep networks to differentiate between artifacts and high-level semantic facial information using two-branch networks. The first branch propagates color information while the other branch suppresses facial content and amplifies low-level frequencies using Blob detection#The Laplacian of Gaussian, Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG). Further, they included a new loss function that learns a compact representation of bona fide faces, while dispersing the representations (i.e. features) of deepfakes. VIMAL's approach showed state-of-the-art performance on FaceForensics++ and Celeb-DF benchmarks, and on #Volodymyr Zelenskyy, March 16th, 2022 (the same day of the release), was used to identify the deepfake of Volodymyr Zelensky out-of-the-box without any retraining or knowledge of the algorithm with which the deepfake was created.
Other techniques use blockchain to verify the source of the media. Videos will have to be verified through the ledger before they are shown on social media platforms. With this technology, only videos from trusted sources would be approved, decreasing the spread of possibly harmful deepfake media.
Digitally signing of all video and imagery by cameras and video cameras, including smartphone cameras, was suggested to fight deepfakes. That allows tracing every photograph or video back to its original owner that can be used to pursue dissidents.
One easy way to uncover deepfake video calls consists in asking the caller to turn sideways.
Internet reaction
Since 2017, Samantha Cole of Vice (magazine), Vice published a series of articles covering news surrounding deepfake pornography. On 31 January 2018, Gfycat began removing all deepfakes from its site. On Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...
, the r/deepfakes subreddit was banned on 7 February 2018, due to the policy violation of "involuntary pornography". In the same month, representatives from Twitter stated that they would suspend accounts suspected of posting non-consensual deepfake content. Chat site Discord (software), Discord has taken action against deepfakes in the past, and has taken a general stance against deepfakes. In September 2018, Google added "involuntary synthetic pornographic imagery" to its ban list, allowing anyone to request the block of results showing their fake nudes.
In February 2018, Pornhub said that it would ban deepfake videos on its website because it is considered "non consensual content" which violates their terms of service. They also stated previously to Mashable that they will take down content flagged as deepfakes. Writers from Motherboard from BuzzFeed News, Buzzfeed News reported that searching "deepfakes" on Pornhub still returned multiple recent deepfake videos.
Facebook has previously stated that they would not remove deepfakes from their platforms. The videos will instead be flagged as fake by third-parties and then have a lessened priority in user's feeds. This response was prompted in June 2019 after a deepfake featuring a 2016 video of Mark Zuckerberg circulated on Facebook and Instagram.
In May 2022, Google officially changed the terms of service for their Project Jupyter#Industry adoption, Jupyter Notebook colabs, banning the use of their colab service for the purpose of creating deepfakes. This came a few days after a VICE article had been published, claiming that "most deepfakes are non-consensual porn" and that the main use of popular deepfake software DeepFaceLab (DFL), "the most important technology powering the vast majority of this generation of deepfakes" which often was used in combination with Google colabs, would be to create non-consensual pornography, by pointing to the fact that among many other well-known examples of third-party DFL implementations such as deepfakes commissioned by The Walt Disney Company, official music videos, and web series '' Sassy Justice'' by the creators of ''South Park'', DFL's GitHub page also links to deepfake porn website ''Mr. Deepfake'' and participants of the DFL Discord server also participate on ''Mr. Deepfakes''.
Legal response
In the United States, there have been some responses to the problems posed by deepfakes. In 2018, the Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act was introduced to the United States Senate, US Senate, and in 2019 the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act was introduced in the United States House of Representatives, House of Representatives. Several states have also introduced legislation regarding deepfakes, including Virginia, Texas, California, and New York. On 3 October 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bills No. 602 and No. 730. Assembly Bill No. 602 provides individuals targeted by sexually explicit deepfake content made without their consent with a cause of action against the content's creator. Assembly Bill No. 730 prohibits the distribution of malicious deepfake audio or visual media targeting a candidate running for public office within 60 days of their election.
In November 2019 China announced that deepfakes and other synthetically faked footage should bear a clear notice about their fakeness starting in 2020. Failure to comply could be considered a crime the Cyberspace Administration of China stated on its website. The Chinese government seems to be reserving the right to prosecute both users and online video platforms failing to abide by the rules.
In the United Kingdom, producers of deepfake material can be prosecuted for harassment, but there are calls to make deepfake a specific crime; in the United States, where charges as varied as identity theft, cyberstalking, and revenge porn have been pursued, the notion of a more comprehensive statute has also been discussed.
In Canada, the Communications Security Establishment released a report which said that deepfakes could be used to interfere in Canadian politics, particularly to discredit politicians and influence voters. As a result, there are multiple ways for citizens in Canada to deal with deepfakes if they are targeted by them.
Response from DARPA
In 2018, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a project where individuals will compete to create AI-generated videos, audio, and images as well as automated tools to detect these deepfakes. In 2019, DARPA hosted a "proposers day" for a project affiliated with the Semantic Forensics Program where researchers were driven to prevent viral spread of AI-manipulated media. DARPA and the Semantic Forensics Program were also working together to detect AI-manipulated media through efforts in training computers to utilize common sense, logical reasoning. In 2020 DARPA created a Media Forensics (MediFor) program, to detect and mitigate the increasing harm that deepfakes and AI-generated media posed, to provide information regarding how the media was created and to address and emphasize the consequential role of deepfakes and their influence upon decision making.
In popular culture
* The 1986 Mid-December issue of ''Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Analog'' magazine published the novelette "Picaper" by Jack Wodhams. Its plot revolves around digitally enhanced or digitally generated videos produced by skilled hackers serving unscrupulous lawyers and political figures.
* The 1987 film ''The Running Man (1987 film), The Running Man'' starring Arnold Schwarzenegger depicts an autocratic government using computers to digitally replace the faces of actors with those of wanted fugitives to make it appear the fugitives had been neutralized.
* In the 1992 techno-thriller ''A Philosophical Investigation'' by Philip Kerr, "Wittgenstein", the main character and a serial killer, makes use of both a software similar to deepfake and a virtual reality suit for having sex with an avatar of Isadora "Jake" Jakowicz, the female police lieutenant assigned to catch him.
* The 1993 film ''Rising Sun (film), Rising Sun'' starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes depicts another character, Jingo Asakuma, who reveals that a computer disc has digitally altered personal identities to implicate a competitor.
* Deepfake technology is part of the plot of the 2019 BBC One drama ''The Capture (TV series), The Capture''. The series follows British ex-soldier Shaun Emery, who is accused of assaulting and abducting his barrister. Expertly doctored CCTV footage is used to set him up and mislead the police investigating him.
* ''Al Davis vs. the NFL'': The narrative structure of this 2021 documentary, part of ESPN's ''30 for 30'' documentary series, uses deepfake versions of the film's two central characters, both deceased—Al Davis, who owned the Las Vegas Raiders during the team's tenure in History of the Oakland Raiders, Oakland and History of the Los Angeles Raiders, Los Angeles, and Pete Rozelle, the National Football League, NFL commissioner who frequently clashed with Davis.
* Deepfake technology is featured in "Impawster Syndrome", the 57th episode of the Canadian police series ''Hudson & Rex'', first broadcast on 6 January 2022, in which a member of the St. John's police team is investigated on suspicion of robbery and assault due to doctored CCTV footage using his likeness.
* Using deepfake technology in his music video for his 2022 single, "The Heart Part 5", musician Kendrick Lamar transformed into figures resembling Nipsey Hussle, O. J. Simpson, O.J. Simpson, and Kanye West, among others. The deepfake technology in the video was created by Deep Voodoo, a studio led by Trey Parker
Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III (born October 19, 1969) is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and composer. He is known for co-creating ''South Park'' (since 1997) and ''The Book of Mormon'' (2011) with his creative partner Matt Stone. P ...
and Matt Stone
Matthew Richard Stone (born May 26, 1971) is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and composer. He is known for co-creating '' South Park'' (since 1997) and '' The Book of Mormon'' (2011) with his creative partner Trey Parker. Stone was inte ...
, who created ''South Park''.
* Aloe Blacc honored his long-time collaborator Avicii four years after his death by performing their song "Wake Me Up (Avicii song), Wake Me Up" in English language, English, Spanish language, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin, using deepfake technologies.
See also
* 15.ai
* Computer facial animation
* Digital cloning
* Facial motion capture
* Hyperreality
* Identity replacement technology
* Interactive online characters
* Regulation of artificial intelligence
* StyleGAN
* Synthetic media
* Uncanny valley
* Virtual actor
References
External links
*
Fake/Spoof Audio Detection Challenge (ASVspoof)
Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC)
Bibliography: Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes
Curated by Dr Joshua Glick.
{{Media manipulation
Applications of computer vision
Applications of artificial intelligence
Computer graphics
Deep learning
Identity theft
Special effects
2010s neologisms
Internet memes introduced in 2020
Articles containing video clips
Deepfakes,
Media studies
2018 neologisms