Cyber crime is normally synonymous with identity fraud, hacking and data theft
But in the last few years, a completely new type of digital crime has taken over:
Deepfake- the process of replacing the face of an individual with another,
to produce a realistic video of events that never actually happened.
So what are the educational uses of deepfake?
How are deepfakes helping the entertainment industry?
And what are the malicious intentions behind some of the creators of this synthetic media.
Here’s How It Happened
The word Deepfake itself comes from Deep Learning,
a type of artificial intelligence used to mimic brain function
Applications like Photoshop have been around for over thirty years,
not to mention movie special effects, colourisation and CGI
But what makes deepfake so different is the way it can replace someone’s likeness in video format,
perfectly replicating the way their face moves for both speech and expressions.
The technology was first used in academia during the late 90’s in the Video Rewrite project which,
although not appearing 100 percent realistic, demonstrated how the practice could work.
A group of researchers from Germany and Stanford University later undertook a project
called Face2Face in 2016, posting a YouTube video explaining how their
technology worked and showing how realistic their deep fakes could be,
using Presidents George W Bush and Donald Trump as their targets.
A year later, another video went even more viral, this time starring an artificial Barack Obama,
making a speech in his own voice, but taken from a different image.
Many were excited by the technology on display, but there were fears that it could also be
misused and act as a catalyst for the fake news endemic that was starting to spread.
The term Deepfake then began to grow in popularity across Reddit, with amateur editors
posting comical content like Nicholas Cage’s face imposed on different scenes from various movies,
As well as darker clips, sometimes pornography but using the face of a famous celebrity
In 2018, researchers from the University of California Berkeley found they were
able to extend the technology to full body movements, publishing a paper that introduced
a fake dancing app that could seemingly give expert dancing ability to any individual.
As the technology continued to improve,
deepfake has been taken on by bigger and more prestigious companies,
such as in Channel 4’s alternative Queen’s Speech And Microsoft’s acquisition of Seeing AI,
an application that uses some of the features of deepfake to narrate surroundings to blind users.
Details could include text on signs and documents, recognising emotions of
others or identifying products on store shelves, all in a range of languages.
More recently, audio deepfakes have also been produced,
perfectly copying the target’s voice based on as little as five seconds of listening time
While the clumsy dubbing of Hollywood films could soon be a thing of the past,
as the latest technology allows the likes of Jack Nicholson and Tom Hanks to appear
completely fluent in foreign languages, their lips moving perfectly to match the new audio.
But sadly Deepfakes have been making headlines for as many of the wrong reasons as the right ones
Social media platforms Facebook and Twitter have said they are cracking
down on Deepfakes to stop the spread of disinformation
and are working on their own technology to improve their detection rate.
And as mentioned earlier, deepfake pornography is also a fast-growing social issue,
with Reddit deleting its deepfake subreddit and celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson speaking
out on the issue, identifying the potential for blackmail and abuse as a result of the technology
Authorities in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada have
described non-consensual deep fakes as harassment in the eyes of the law,
and are looking in to creating legislation that specifies the practice by name
Let us know your thoughts and whether you
think Deepfake will be for the better or worse for society.
And that’s how it happened.
Thanks for watching.