what if seeing is no longer the same thing as believing
what if the lines between what's real and what's fake
has become so blurred that we can no longer trust ourselves
anyone or anything let me play you something
imagine this for a second one man with total control of billions of people's
stolen data all their secrets their lives their
futures i feel really blessed because i
genuinely love the process of manipulating people online
for money i too am nobody i am a fake bear you ever wonder why i'm
so popular because of my big brain maybe president
trump is a total and complete dipshit now you see i would never say these
things at least not in a public address but
someone else would someone like jordan peel
all right so what if i told you that obama never called
trump a complete dipshit what if boris johnson never
called himself a fake well you wouldn't believe your eyes
your ears or even your judgment right recent advancements
in artificial intelligence as well as video manipulation technologies
have come to a point where we can do we can put anything into anyone's mouth
we can make people do whatever we want and the second thing is also
these kind of technologies can actually generate content that appears so real
that they become indistinguishable from reality
and the third thing and probably the thing that is the most scary
is that these kind of technologies become accessible to anyone
so you may have heard of a technology called
deep fakes right so it's a open source software that
emerged from the dark corners of the internet you know since 2017
and what the software allows you to do is actually to swap
someone's face with another person and this technology is actually really
really easy to do anyone can actually produce these
kind of films so let me show you how it works all you
need is a gamer pc something quite sophisticated
with gpus that you can get uh in any store
so two you know a few powerful gpus and you need internet connection you can
download one of your favorite deep fake solutions and the last thing you need is
a lot of data right and the data that we're looking at
are basically photographs videos where people's faces are present
so let me walk through the process of creating a
defect so first let's start with an uh snl video of alec baldwin
impersonating president trump then the second thing you do is you use
this software to analyze where the faces and
you collect as many many phase data as you can
in addition to that you also collect more images of donald trump roughly 10
000 and then you do the same thing for the
actual donald trump right once you're done with that uh you
throw these data into the software and what you can
do is you can actually train a deep model for both of these subjects
right so this can take a few hours or you can do
this also overnight and then what you do next is that the
software actually replaces the identity automatically by
synthesizing a face onto the original video so let me
play this video real quick i want to talk about what is really
important which is jobs okay because i am going to bring back a
thick stream of jobs back into the structure
the biggest strongest steadiest stream we've ever seen
this country will be literally showered with jobs
because i have a major whiz at jobs but this would be a golden opportunity for
me so the scary thing about this is that
you don't need any computer science knowledge
and even if this is too complicated for you all you need to do is download an
app there is a chinese app where you can
actually download and there's another one that just got released from ukraine
all you need to do is actually take a selfie of yourself and the
software uploads this to a cloud and automatically
inserts your face into one of your favorite hollywood clips
so as tech companies artists hobbyists are embracing themselves to get access
to these kind of new technologies a pandora's box
is opening so let me ask you where do you think this type of
technology is mostly used for well as it turned out 96
of all the deep fakes you know are for non-consensual pornography right so they
were um you know a-list celebrities like gal
gadot scholar johansen emma watson they have
all been inserted into hardcore pornography
that are you know spreading like crazy on the internet
as of july 2019 there were 134 million views at least right of these
content and not only celebrities are being affected
any one of us could be a victim here's the story
of noel martin she's she was an 18 years old
law student where she discovered that her face was inserted in
and photoshopped into um you know hardcore pornography
when she started you know demanded the webmasters to actually remove
um you know these content what happened was
the perpetrators actually created even more defects
of herself and inserted them into video now it's not hard to imagine how these
kind of technologies could be misused in a political sphere
as well as against corporations for politicians for example
you don't even need to go as far as you know
having some dictator launch you know announce that they're going to
launch a nuclear bomb what you can simply do is you can just
ruin their reputation right create some new scandals
swing political elections or exacerbate societal division
against ceos you can make them you know do
certain fraud you can make them announce their retirement
and instantly you'll have the ability to cause
a stock dive right okay how did i get involved in 2d face well
you know this is from a while ago so i'm an associate
professor at the university of southern california
and i've been doing research on how do we develop
technologies for digitizing humans specifically for
democratizing this technology for over a decade one of my fascinations
since my phd was how can we actually how can we
develop technologies that are accessible to people
at that time you know people we could actually
capture performance of subjects we can create virtual
actors but then the process was inaccessible to people
you needed a film studio behind to create those and i was fascinated by
the question on how can we democratize this technology
this is an old video of myself where we developed you know one of the first
performance capture solutions where in real time you can actually puppeteer
someone's face a couple of years later i was invited to
weta digital so that's a company in new zealand that is you know famous for
a lord of the rings or avatar and i was working on a really
interesting project which is paul walker an actor
from the movie fear fast and furious he died in the car extent and for
furious 7 you know we still needed a lot of shots of him
so the solution was actually to reenact him digitally
right so we developed new performance capture techniques to capture his
brother and to recreate that the main issue here was that in some
ways it appears like a high-end version of
deep fakes but you needed an entire team and a lot of hardware solutions to
make this possible for example if you wanted uh to capture
you know celebrated space if you want to use this for stunts or you want to
bring someone back to life you would use a high-end capture system to digitize
their face so the problem is this is not something
that's consumer accessible this is a technology that you know costs
a million dollars no one will have that at home so we started recently to
develop ai technologies that would automate this process and democratize
this here's an example as we have the ability to capture a lot
of these data we can actually train models
to predict these things so here's a recent research where you just have
a single input image of a person and what you can do is you can automatically
generate a 3d scan and predict this without requiring the
whole sophistication of the hardware at the same around the same time when
deep fakes emerged from the internet my startup
company pinscreen there we were developing avatars that
are consumer accessible we wanted to build a solution where all
you needed is a single image of someone but have the ability to create
photorealistic faces let me show you the technology behind this so on the upper
right you can see photographs of people where we have
never seen anything else from from them on the left we have a driver and on the
bottom right we actually have expressions new viewpoints of these
people that are generated from the single input
image not only are these generations
you know plausible they also happen in real time
so here's a more extreme example but we basically can show that in real time we
can actually drive a person's face from a single input image this is kind
of scary because it makes the technology more accessible
to people you don't need to collect a lot of data and you can live
stream broadcast a message and stealing
someone's identity and impersonating that person
so you know not surprisingly you know um one day our one of our investors got
worried and you know got a call from them and
they're like how was this you right so it was all over the news there
was a defect technology that's you know spreading
on the internet used for pornography and you know very quickly we have to told
him like we have nothing to do with it but one thing that was important is that
there was a new ethical concern about these type of technologies where we
really had to be worried about right and we had to take
we have to be responsible about like what kind of applications
come from these technologies and we're not the only people looking at this
both google and facebook started their efforts in you know detecting you know
technologies like technologies like deep fakes facebook
for example invested 10 million for a uh deep fake detection challenge um
google ceo suna pichai even mentioned detecting deep fakes is one of the most
important challenges ahead of us right so these are new
efforts that came from it and you know we also
started in our research community organizing workshops and on this topic
inviting experts in alfie and that's where i met
you know media forensics experts honey fareed
from uc berkeley and we teamed up and worked on
how do we combat team fakes right so this is the approach we took it's a cat
and mouse game so our team was responsible in
generating as many as possible defects and they
have to be as realistic as possible his team on the other hand focus on the
detection part right and one thing that is interesting
about the detection part is that we made the assumption that the
detection that's the content that we were generating were
perfect so the only thing that is left to detect is basically the
behavior the expressions of the person and the only thing that is unnatural in
deep fakes is the driver so we're looking at this
so for these kind of algorithms we could reach something like a 94
accuracy but only for known people for these people where we have
enough footages hours of footages but still we still think that
there will be a point where you can actually create defects that are not
going to become detectable and you know this kind of you
know detection is will always be behind that's one of the issues and this is to
give you an idea of where we're at now so on the left you have a ground truth
image this is these are defects from six
months ago and here we have defects nowadays
and i can assure you that very soon there's gonna be
even more realistic ones to a point where to the naked eye is going to be
nearly undetectable here at davos we're also
showing a real-time defect capability so that's
a new technology that's i invite you to actually try it
out it's there at the exhibition if you haven't done so
and you can basically turn yourself into you know your favorite celebrity
but here the key message is really that you can detect
you can actually have defects in real time already
right all right media manipulation is not something new right image
manipulation has been done for years for propaganda and you don't need very
sophisticated tools all you need is photoshop
here's an example from the la times where you know back in 2003
journalist called brand walsh he was confronted by the la times for
you know creating fabricating an image that appeared on the front page
using two compositions of images right just to make it
appear more dramatic here's another example with paris hilton
which clearly shows that you know all you need to do is change the wording
uh what's on her t-shirt in order to catalyze
hate on social media right and this is something that is
very very easy to produce the other thing that's really
important is that you know the main issue is necessarily defects
right it's only part of the problem the other big problem here is social
media itself there's something that's really unique
to human history which is anyone can create any kind of content
content spreads like crazy and uh you know anyone can share
information and there's almost zero fact-checking
so then there's a question of whether this is a direct threat to
democracy because if there is no way to actually verify
if your source is real or not well how can you have democracy if there is
no way to share facts here's an example of nancy pelosi
house representative nancy pelosi where the perpetrator basically only
you know slowed down by 75 in order to make her appear drunk
this video was shared three and a half million times
on twitter including a president's retweet
and this is an example that shows that you know this information can be very
very dangerous the other thing is not just this
information is dangerous but just the fact that you can
manipulate anything you want this is what we call a liar's dividend
the lies dividend basically says the following
if there is a scandal of someone uh if there is a
video that person can always blame it on well it was manipulated video
here's a real world case governor candidate
from sao paulo called doria in brazil there was a orgy video of him
that leaked on the internet and of course his
lawyers um you know in their technical report
basically blame this on a deep fake right so the danger really
is you know and even you know even if something
turned out to be true or you know a fake um the damage has
already been done so how can you protect yourself against
fakes right so the first thing and that's the thing that we're doing here
we want we have to educate we have to we have to educate people about
technological capabilities two days to what's possible today and what's
possible in the future and the second thing
is we are we also have to build tools that have the capability
to analyze the spread of deep fix as well
as what their intentions are right and the last thing
is we have to work with lawmakers on regulations
on how these kind of video manipulations are being deployed right we have to make
sure that they're not used for
harmful purposes or you know any purpose that
could actually mislead what we want to do
right so then there's also you know people who would argue that you know
maybe we should ban the entire research in this domain maybe
we should prohibit researchers we even work on them i think it's a bad idea
because there's actually a lot of positive applications let me show you a
few of them here's one example from facebook reality
labs where telepresence is enabled using a
technology that's very related to deep fakes right it allows you to
actually build a photorealistic presence of yourself characters that
don't look like avatars from from video games here's another
example where you can imagine how could a next generation
virtual fitting room look like if you have the ability to you
know generate your face on top of a you know
you know try how can you look like with different
clothing without actually going to the physical store
also i believe that in the near future we're going to
you know interact with virtual beings virtual assistants in a regular way
going beyond siri and alexa but then you know one of the issues here
is that building these avatars is very very
expensive so having the ability to democratize this
you know could mean that these kind of defect technologies can be useful
so not all the applications of defect technologies are bad
bill gates once mentioned technology is just a tool
in terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them
the teacher is the most important thing so
to conclude deep fakes are by design a form of manipulation
but so is communication as well and our abilities to trust strangers is at
the core of society but then on the other hand you know we
also have tendencies to want to manipulate other people
so one thing that i find the most fascinating about deep fakes is that
they reveal something about humanity thank you so much thanks for listening
you