60 minutes overtime
this week on 60 minutes we report on synthetic media better known as
deep fakes deep fakes are audio and videos created by artificial intelligence
they manipulate faces and voices to make it look like someone said or did something they didn't do
the result is videos of things that never happened often they look so real people watching can't tell
we wondered what long-term impact this synthetic media will have on trust when
people won't be able to believe their own eyes we spoke with nina shikh who wrote the book
deep fakes video evidence is always so compelling in a court of law we see it as an extension of our
own perception as people become aware that deep fakes exist right that even videos can be faked
people start to lose trust in all authentic media and this is a concept known as the liar's dividend
if everything can be faked then nothing is real if everything can be faked then anything can be
denied what you're describing that anything can be manipulated this sounds terrifying
it absolutely is terrifying and one of the most important challenges i think in society going
forward is finding ways in which we can actually have some safeguards in our information ecosystem
we really have to think about how do we in build some kind of security so that we can
ha ensure that there is some degree of trust with all the digital content that we interact with on
a day-to-day basis because if we don't then any idea of a shared reality or a shared objective
reality is absolutely going to disappear and anything any content we interact with will become
subject to anybody's uh perception as to what how they want to interpret that piece
of content or video or photo the liar's dividend the liar's dividend nina shikh told us that in
the not so distant future deep fakes will have a profound impact on journalism on social media
on the legal community any scenario where everyone needs to agree on what actually happened
we wanted to know when any video can be faked how do you know when one is real well there is
no silver bullet solution you can think of this in two broad ways one is building the detection
technology so you have an ai detector that can show you this piece of content is a deep fake or
it's highly likely to be synthetic however this is always going to be a game of cat and mass because
just as soon as you build a detection model that can detect one kind of deep fake there will be a
generator that will be able to beat that detector so it's just like cyber security there is no
one anti-virus that can find all the viruses and you constantly have to do the virus updates the
second way to think about it from a technical perspective is to actually think rather than
trying to detect what is fake you authenticate what is real and this is an approach known as
media providence so for all kind of good actors whether you are a media organization or a activist
you basically have the technology embedded into the hardware and software of your devices
that proves if it's a video where it was filmed how it's been manipulated throughout the life
so there's always this chain of provenance showing that this is an authentic piece of media and if it
has been manipulated this is how so everyone can see when it comes to the bigger societal solutions
and this is really where it gets much more tricky there are there's no single solution again you
have to take a networked approach you have to have policy makers working with technologists
working with civil society and you're really talking about trying to figure out a way to build
safeguards and resilience up to this rapidly changing information ecosystem which has become
increasingly corrupt in which deep fakes are just really the latest emerging and evolving threat