Introduction
In the world of the internet and computers, one’s identity is the most important. Deepfake is a combination of “deep learning” and “fake”, deepfakes are hyper-realistic videos digitally manipulated to depict people saying and doing things that never actually happened (Taulli,2019). In other words, deepfakes use facial mapping technology and AI that swaps the face of a person on a video into the face of another person (Li 2019). It is not only limited to editing pictures and making it look like someone else, but deepfake can also and have been used in manipulating videos and audios.
History
Deepfakes’ history can be traced back to the 19th century when photo editing and manipulation was introduced. It soon went from still pictures to motion pictures and eventually into videos in the 20th century. The early program was a video rewrite program published in 1997 which replaced the audio track of the video. The synthesizing Obama program was published in 2017 which changed the audio track of former president Barack Obama. The term deepfakes were particularly famous because of a Reddit user named “deepfake”. There has been the development of many other apps and websites which easily allow users to change the voice and video/picture.
Importance
Although the idea of deepfakes seems to be a bad idea, it also has many positive uses in many industries, movies, and digital communications. Movie makers will be able to recreate classic scenes in movies, create new movies starring long-dead actors, make use of special effects and advanced face editing in post-production, and improve amateur videos to professional quality (FOX05; GRD07 The technology behind deepfakes enables multiplayer games and virtual chat worlds with increased telepresence (Solsman 2019), natural-sounding and -looking smart assistants (Li 2019) and digital doubles of people. This helps to develop better human relationships and interaction online (Evans). It can be used by an individual to remember them of the lost ones. Businesses are interested in the potential of brand-applicable deepfake technology, as it can transform e-commerce and advertising in significant ways. For example, brands can contract supermodels who are not really supermodels, and show fashion outfits on a variety of models with different skin tones, heights, and weights (Li 2019).
Risks and dangers
Deepfakes are a major threat to our society because they can be manipulated very easily. People largely depend on the internet to get their information and any misleading information can not only lead to misunderstanding but also can cause chaos and disbalance the political and social condition. It is highly probably that the journalism industry is going to have to face a massive consumer trust issue due to deepfakes (Andrews,2019). Deepfakes are likely to hamper digital literacy and citizens’ trust toward authority-provided information, as fake videos showing government officials saying things that never happened make people doubt authorities . Deepfakes pose a greater threat than “traditional” fake news because they are harder to spot and people are inclined to believe the fake is real (O’Brien 2018).
Producers
Anyone can produce deepfake if they have skills and knowledge about the technology being used. As there are increased numbers of apps that are easily available, it becomes easier as they can be produced locally. Some people may do it because of their hobby. Political players, activists, actors and television companies are the largest producers of deepfake. Deepfakes are also produced by the porn industry and this is one of the widest uses of deepfakes. Individuals are mostly interested in making pornographic content using deepfake and use AI videos to form online humor and help in the development of the deepfake. Meme producers also use deepfakes to make entertaining projects and memes. Using AI to make trolls and weaponizing them is also found in practice. There are also cases where deepfakes were produced by scammers to scam people and generate fake audios and pictures to conduct financial crimes. Technologies are emerging which can easily allow deepfake in real-time video calls too. App development and programmers are continuously working in making deepfake more efficient.
Examples
Many deepfakes focus on celebrities, politicians, and corporate leaders because the internet is packed with source photos and videos of them from which to build the large image stockpiles required to train an AI deepfake system (Li 2019). There has been the use of deepfake for porn revenge, political influences, and personal influence. It is easy to produce the deepfakes of celebrities because a wide variety of pictures and media sources are easily available for those people. Although most of those media files are used to make memes, pranks, and goofs, there are few which have been misused by deepfakes. You can easily find actors in movies or shows which they never performed because of deepfakes. A deepfake might show, for example, Nicolas Cage acting in movies in which he has never starred in, such as Indiana Jones or Terminator 2 (Dickson 2018).
Examples of harmful deepfakes, however, are also popping up increasingly. Deepfake technology enables celebrity and revenge porn, that is, involuntary pornography using images of celebrities and non-celebrities, which are shared on social networks without their consent (Solsman 2019). Thus, celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson have been featured on deepfaked adult movies, in which their faces have been superimposed over porn stars’ faces (Solsman 2019). There is also a video of former President Barack Obama discussing with president Donald trump which never actually happened.
In 2019, Nancy Pelosi went viral because of the altered video which was slowed down to make her sound intoxicated. Facebook refused to turn down this video and a new video of Mark Zuckerberg was developed in which he talks about the truth of Facebook and who owns the future. In a 2018 deepfake video, Donald Trump offered advice to the people of Belgium about climate change. The video was created by a Belgian political party “sp.a” to attract people to sign an online petition calling on the Belgian government to take more urgent climate action. The video provoked outrage about the American president meddling in a foreign country with Belgium’s climate policy (Li 2019).
Better Call Trump: Money Laundering 101 is a straight-up parody. It takes a scene from the hugely popular Breaking Bad series and introduces Donald Trump as James McGill – who later took on the pseudonym Saul Goodman in the spin-off series Better Call Saul
A video pasting the face of Yang Mi, one of China’s best-known contemporary actors, into 1983 Hong Kong television drama The Legend of The Condor Heroes went viral, racking up a reported 240 million views before it was removed by Chinese authorities.
Combating deepfake
There must be new corporate laws and policies to combat deepfake. Regulations and legislation are the most obvious means against it At present, deepfakes are not specifically addressed by civil or criminal laws, although legal experts have suggested adapting current laws to cover libel, defamation, identity fraud, or impersonating a government official using deepfakes (Waters 2019). Virginia state law against revenge porn recently made distributing “falsely created” images and videos a misdemeanor, and thus expanded the law to include deepfakes (Al-Heeti 2019). There must be new laws regarding copyright and privacy issues caused by deepfakes.
However, deepfakes can do better than harm, so an appropriate legal solution is to be created. For example, politicians can commit not to use illicit digital campaign tactics or spread disinformation such as deepfakes in their election campaigns (Li 2019). Social media plays a big role in all the deepfakes as most of the deepfakes are circulated via social networks. There must be a way to report deepfakes if it is not appropriate for society. While few social media firms have policies yet about deepfakes, they should collaborate to prevent their platforms from being weaponized for disinformation, and thus proactively enforce transparent, shared policies to block and remove deepfakes. Reddit and Pornhub have banned deepfake porn and other non-consensual pornography, and act upon users’ flagging of such material.
Education and training are crucial for combatting deepfakes. Despite considerable news coverage and concerns presented by authorities, the threat of deep fakes has not yet been reckoned with by the public (Li 2019). There is a need to raise general awareness about AI and its misuse. There is a whole new area of social engineering created because of the deepfake. Technology can be used against technology. The authenticity of a deepfake should be verified before making it public Finally, technology can prevent the creation of deepfakes by inserting “noise” into photos or videos. This noise is imperceptible to the human eye, but prevents the visual material from being used in automated deepfake software.
Conclusion
Deepfakes are hyper-realistic videos digitally manipulated to depict people saying and doing things that never happened. Deepfakes are created using AI, that is, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that pit discriminative and generative algorithms against one another to fine-tune performance with every repetition, and thereby produce a convincing fake (Fletcher, 2018; Spivak, 2019). They can quickly spread around the public through any social media platforms. Deepfakes are used not only in a bad way but has helped many industries and personnel. Proper rules and regulations are to be implemented to make sure that this technology is not misused. We need to be aware of cybercrimes that are possible because of deepfakes. Various cases connected to deepfakes have already been registered and those cases should be used to combat the misuse of deepfake.
References
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- Sara Ashley O’Brien, 2018. Deepfakes are coming. Is Big Tech ready? https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/08/technology/deepfakes-countermeasures-facebook-twitter-youtube/index.html
- Ben Dickson, 2018. When AI Blurs the Line Between Reality and Fiction. https://www.pcmag.com/news/when-ai-blurs-the-line-between-reality-and-fiction
- Richard Waters, 2019. Rising tide of online deepfakes bring opportunities as well as risk. https://www.ft.com/content/1dd069ba-8df7-11e9-a1c1-51bf8f989972
- Abrar Al-Heeti, Sharing deepfake revenge porn is now a crime in Virginia. https://www.cnet.com/news/sharing-deepfake-revenge-porn-is-now-a-misdemeanor-in-virginia/
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