Deepfakes have started to appear everywhere.
From viral celebrity face swaps to impersonations of political leaders, it
can be hard to spot the difference now between real and fake.
We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is
saying anything at any point in time.
And the digital impressions are starting to have real financial
repercussions. In the U.S.,
an audio deepfake of a CEO reportedly scammed one company out of 10
million dollars. In the UK, an energy firm was tricked into a fraudulent
transfer of 220,000 euros.
And with the 2020 election not far off, there is huge potential for
weaponize deepfakes on social media.
Now tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft are stepping
up. With Facebook spending more than 10 million dollars to fight
deepfakes, what's at stake for businesses and what's being done to detect
and regulate them? One of the most well known deepfake creators is
Dr. Fakenstein, or Jeff White.
He walked us through the process.
So let's say we've got source footage of Trump.
I am concerned I wouldn't want to see a violent crackdown.
And I have my destination footage: The Little Rascals.
This column here is Trump's face over the Little Rascals.
Essentially a deepfake is an A.I.
generated video or audio clip of a real person doing and saying fictional
things. A computer uses its deep neural network, hence the term deepfake
to learn the movements or sounds of two different recordings and combine
them in a realistic way.
And there is an emerging market for creators of deepfakes.
I've had hundreds of work requests since I put out some of my videos.
Most people just want to have a laugh and be entertained by it.
White creates videos for Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Ladies and gentlemen, all rise for Brooklyn Heights. And next month, he's
quitting his day job at a dairy farm to create deepfakes full time.
A handful of well known creators like him use it solely for satire.
It can be used for more publicly available fun, too.
Like with Berkeley's Everybody Dance Now project.
The technology is nothing new.
It's part of how major Hollywood studios include actors in critical roles
after they've died. Lord Vader will handle the fleet.
It helps gaming companies let players control their favorite athletes.
What is new: the process has become cheaper and easier.
Towards the beginning of 2018 then a couple of important projects, one of
them was known as FakeApp, the other was known as Faceswap, became readily
available. And in the last year, year and a half, the pace of innovation
around the creation of deepfakes has accelerated quite a bit.
And you can just go online and you can find tools, download them.
All I have to do to create a deepfake at this point in time is to click 10
times. Whoa!
It's so easy that Symantec made a deepfake of me without much notice
before our interview. The amount of material that you need to create these
things is 10 to 20 seconds of video and maybe a minute of audio.
This wouldn't even be happening.
This is something that takes about, you know, not a lot of source
material. But just imagine if you had hours and hours and hours of video
at hand, we could create a really good likeness of you from different
angles, saying different things.
So what's at stake for companies or individuals when seeing or hearing is
no longer believing? The fact that people can see something like this,
believe that it's true and collectively the markets can react to it are a
huge concern for people.
The newest attack that we are seeing, which people had not anticipated, in
some sense is the use of the audio deepfakes to cause financial scams.
I would like to transfer five thousand dollars to Adam.
In the last few months, security firm Symantec says it's seen three
attempted scams at companies involving audio deepfakes of top executives.
In one case, the company lost 10 million dollars after a phone call where
a deepfake audio of the CEO requested a transfer of the money.
The perpetrators still hasn't been caught.
Here's a station you might like.
It's no different than what you would see for like what powers like Alexa
or some other products like that.
And the CEO will answer whatever question you have because they can be
created on the fly. But deepfakes also offer profit opportunities to some
companies. You'd have an actor that would license their likeness and then
at a very low cost, the studio could produce all kinds of marketing
materials with their likeness without having to go through the same level
of production that they do today, you know.
And so I can imagine lots and lots of audio being produced using the voice
of an actor, the voice of someone other VIP and all of that being
monetized. Just like we practiced.
Ready? Now Amazon is doing just that.
Today in Los Angeles, it's 85 degrees.
Say my name. Woohoo. It announced in September 2019 that Alexa devices can
speak with the voice of celebrities like Samuel L.
Jackson. On Instagram, A.I.
generated influencers like lilmiquela are backed by Silicon Valley money.
The deepfake videos of these virtual influencers bring in millions of
followers, which means a lot of potential revenue without having to pay
talent to perform. And in China, a government backed media outlet
introduced a virtual news anchor who can work 24 hours a day.
I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as texts will be typed into my
system uninterrupted.
But the potential for misuse is high.
So one of the most insidious uses of deepfakes is in what we call revenge
porn or pornography that somebody puts out to get back at somebody who
they believe wronged them. This also happens with celebrities.
But certainly things like this that would ruin the reputation of a
celebrity or somebody else in the public eye are going to be top of mind
for these social media companies.
Also top of mind for social media companies: the 2020 elections.
Researchers expect that in the 2020 election, deep fakes will probably be
deployed. Will it be deployed by a foreign nation looking to cause
instability? That's possible.
And that could be significant.
In that case, you would have a candidate saying something totally
outrageous.
I own one pair of underwear.
Or something that enflames the markets or something that puts their
chances of being elected in question.
There is also a concern about faking words from leaders of countries, from
leaders of organizations like the IMF that would have a significant
consequence, even if it was short term, on markets and even on global
stability in terms of conflict.
That he was engaged in a cover up.
In May, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Facebook of allowing
disinformation to spread when the company refused to take down a
manipulated video of her.
In response, Facebook updated its content review policies, doubling down
on its refusal to remove deepfakes.
Two British artists tested Facebook resolve by posting a deepfake of CEO
Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram.
Whoever controls the data controls the future.
Facebook held its ground, refusing to remove it along with other deepfakes
like those featuring Kim Kardashian and President Trump.
I pulled off the biggest heist of the century and people just have no
idea. Now there's a question, though, about whether misinformation,
whether these deepfakes are actually just a completely different category
of thing from normal kind of false statements overall.
And I think that there's a very good case that they are.
Now Facebook is trying to get ahead of deepfakes before they make it on
its platforms. It's spending more than 10 million dollars and partnering
with Microsoft to launch a Deepfake Detection Challenge at the end of the
year. Facebook itself will create deepfakes with paid actors to be used in
the challenge. Then pre-screened participants will compete for financial
prizes to create new open source tools for detecting which videos are
fake.
Twitter told CNBC it challenges eight to 10 million accounts per week for
policy violations, which includes the use of Twitter to mislead others.
As a uniquely open service, Twitter enables the clarification of
falsehoods in real time.
We proactively enforce policies and use technology to halt the spread of
content propagated through manipulated tactics.
And it recently acquired a London-based startup called Fabula A.I.,
which has a patented A.I.
system it calls geometric deep learning that uses algorithms to detect the
spread of misinformation online.
At YouTube, which is owned by Google, community guidelines prohibit
deceptive practices and videos are regularly removed for violating these
guidelines. Google launched a program last year to advance detection of
fake audio specifically, including its own automatic speaker verification
spoof challenge, inviting researchers to submit countermeasures against
fake speech. One small cybersecurity company has already launched an open
source tool that's helping create algorithms to detect deepfakes.
The way our platform works is we're pulling in billions of pieces of
content on a monthly basis.
Text, images, video, all kinds of stuff.
And so in this case, as the video flows through our platform, we'll now
route it through deepfake detection that says like, deepfake, not
deepfake, and if it is a deepfake, alert our customers.
Baltimore based ZeroFOX intends to be the first to have customers pay to
be alerted of deepfakes.
Meanwhile, academic institutions and the government are working on other
solutions. Another approach is to put a registry out there where people
can register their authentic content and then other people can check with
the registry to see if that content is in fact, authentic or not.
The Pentagon's research enterprise, called Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or DARPA, is fighting deep fakes by first creating its
own and then developing technology that can spot it.
The people who are defending us against deepfakes are using A.I.
just as much as the people who are creating them are using A.I.
It's just that those who are creating deepfakes seem to have a running
start on this. I don't think that there's a silver bullet yet developed.
The technology is really only one or two years old.
And so we're at an early stage.
And at least until Facebook announced monetary prizes, the business
potential on the detection side was small.
There's not really a market segment for deepfake protection that's mature
yet. The tech is new.
The threat landscape is just beginning to emerge or whatever.
So we're the first or amongst the first in terms of companies to develop
and ship the technology around this.
One of the best things about the Facebook challenge is that it brings in a
lot of people who probably weren't interested in this technology to try
and work on it, and I think what we really need in the space with
deepfakes is finding something that is novel that we haven't thought of
before that works for detecting these.
Even if you can detect deepfakes, there is currently little legal recourse
that can be taken to stop them.
For the most part, they are legal to research and create at this point.
Can you do an impression of him? It's going to be great.
For the most part, if you're a public person, you really don't own the
rights to your public appearances or even videos taken without your
consent in public. I genuinely love the process of manipulating people
online for money. There are some things that are unclear about the law,
but for the most part, this also applies to just regular people who post
videos of themselves on Facebook and YouTube.
But if your image is used in adult content, it's likely illegal in states
like California, where revenge porn is punishable by up to six months in
jail and a $1,000 fine.
So a lot of porn websites, for example, have declared that they are not
going to allow hosting of deepfake or uploading of deep fake-based porn.
You can call me Sam. In China, a deepfake app that allowed users to graft
their faces onto popular movie clips went viral.
But it was shut down earlier this month over privacy concerns because the
app maintained the rights to users' images.
In June, New York Congresswoman Yvette Clarke introduced the DEEPFAKES
Accountability Act in the House.
It would require creators to disclose when a video was altered or
generated and allow victims to sue.
There is no way that a law like this will enforce a lawsuit against
somebody who is sitting in a country in Eastern Europe or anywhere else
across the globe that has already proven to be hostile to the U.S.
when it comes to enforcing our laws around cybersecurity.
I don't like people passing off videos as real.
My stuff's clearly satire.
I don't think anyone is mistaking my stuff for real.
Satirical deepfake creators like Dr.
Fakenstein take ownership of their work and are even monetizing it.
But that's different for those with malicious intent.
If you're intent on publishing a deepfake and not having it traced back to
you, there are plenty of ways that you can remain anonymous.
For better or worse, deepfakes are only getting more refined.
The challenge will be whether the technology to detect and prevent them
can keep up. I think that the people who are creating deepfakes for
nefarious reasons are way ahead of us.
I think that they have access to A.I.
that is more advanced than what we have working on the solution side and
certainly access to more resources than we have so far given people to
fight against the problem.
Hopefully that will change with what's taking place now.
May sound basic, but how we move forward in the age of information, is
going to be the difference between whether we survive or whether we become
some kind of dystopia.
God bless you, your families, our children, and God bless the United
States of America.