Name: Deepfake technology will make you question what's real | CNBC Reports
Uploaded: 2020-05-08T19:20:33.000Z
Duration: 12 min 19 s
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So, if you have a bit of training in machine learning. There are open source packages available

online where somebody first year could go in to do that. It means that it's kind of

democratized it, in the sense that anybody can access it.

Hi guys, it's Grace here. Thanks for watching today.

This is an example of a deepfake, a word that

combines the terms “deep learning” and “fake.”

It's an advanced form of artificial intelligence,

which can be used to manipulate faces and voices,

fake identities and spreading false information much easier.

The technology is threatening to undermine the credibility of almost everything we see online.

From mobile apps that can seamlessly transpose people's faces into blockbuster movies,

to fake statements made by public figures like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg.

The technology makes things that never happened appear entirely real.

As a consumer, you're going to be watching something, you're not necessarily going

Deepfake technology leverages on a deep-learning

system to produce a persuasive counterfeit. This is done through studying photographs

and videos of a target person from multiple angles,

and then mimicking the subject's behavior and speech patterns.

Technology like this has the potential to

affect our elections and jeopardize our personal safety, which is why many companies are already

The challenge with this is that it is almost

impossible to regulate. This is something people can actually develop on their own.

To ban it seems to be a bit of a stretch because you want that to generate movies, to do animations.

You know you have a video of a stunt man and you want to change the face to some actor, right?

Malicious use are kind of difficult to discriminate in terms of the actual technology

that is used to generate them. With time we'll see more clearly what is the threat and then people can

That's Ori Sasson. He runs a company called

Blackscore, which has built a Machine Learning platform to identify abnormalities in web

The video you made for me, that was actually

open source software, which is available online.

What it is able to do is basically achieve

this outcome of taking a source video, with a new person

and superimpose it on the destination video,

And all the software needs is a video to manipulate

and a target. In this case, a video of me was uploaded to the software, which then extracted

my many facial expressions. The target was a video of Ori's colleague,

which he uploaded after the video of me. The software then was able to automatically match

her face to mine when we showed the same movements.

What we did is produce a new video with another

person. The sound is the same, but the face has been replaced. Now you can see that there

are some slight irregularities that the person can notice, however...

But it's crazy that even the eyebrow movements and the blinking is exactly the same as the

With deepfake videos becoming more and more

common, how can we tell what is real and what is fake?

I took to the streets of Singapore to find out.

Scary and risky also. Sometimes if it is properly designed,

then it can be used for some other purposes.

I don't know how to use anything to protect myself,

that's why the best option would be not to go on social media much.

I don't usually frequent Facebook or any social media.

They don't know how to be skeptical enough.

we kinda know when it's fake and when it's not?

We will crosscheck with other sources, of course.

Deepfakes first gained widespread attention in April 2018, when comedian Jordan Peele

created a video that pretended to show former President Barack Obama insulting

President Trump is total and complete !@#$.

Such videos are becoming increasingly prevalent.

And it's especially easy for high profile figures to be the targets of these attacks

because there are plenty of publicly available videos of them speaking at various events.

Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet.

Mike Beck is the Global Head of Threat Analysis at a cybersecurity company called Darktrace.

He says we are at the crossroads when it comes to regulation and access to the technology.

We're just at a very dangerous position where given the access to the

compute power, given developers' access to open AI systems, we're in a place where actually

deepfakes are genuine things, they're not farfetched anymore.

I think there is a big gap that governments need to fill, right. Governments tend to be

very, very, slow to this because this is a new emerging technology.

It's picked up by a much younger generation.

Social media giants are often the targets

for disinformation campaigns, which is likely why platforms like Facebook and Twitter are

Shuman Ghosemajumder is the Chief Technology Officer

of Shape Security, a California-based cybersecurity company.

We spoke via Skype to discuss the new policies.

Shuman can you tell me a bit more about Facebook's

Twitter and Facebook have employed slightly

different approaches to dealing with deepfakes.

When they detect that type of manipulated content,

they may place some type of notice on the tweets themselves and then people will

Facebook on the other hand, has specifically

But they also have an exception that they've made, specifically

for satire and parody videos, and that's going to be an interesting case in terms of

how they determine whether something is satire or parody.