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Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes | Hany Farid | Keynote Spark + AI Summit 2020

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You Won’t Believe What Obama Says In This Video! 😉

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מוטי גרון

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Doctored Pelosi video highlights the threat of deepfake tech

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Deepfake Queen: 2020 Alternative Christmas Message

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It’s Getting Harder to Spot a Deep Fake Video

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Where Are The Deepfakes In This Presidential Election? 

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Despite people's fears, sophisticated, deceptive videos known as "deepfakes" haven't arrived this political season. But it's not because they aren't a threat, sources tell NPR. It's because simple deceptions like selective editing or outright lies have worked just fine.

"You can think of the deepfake as the bazooka and the video splicing as a slingshot. And it turns out the slingshot works," said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in visual misinformation.

The potential for deepfakes has been demonstrated: In 2018 a deepfake video created with artificial technology showed Barack Obama saying words he never uttered. And with such a potent tool of disinformation in the public realm, experts still believe it's just a matter of time before we see them appear more widely.

"This sort of technology is going to continue to advance, so these sorts of capabilities are going to become easier to use," said Matt Turek, who heads an office at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency focused on detecting manipulated media.

But amid protests over race relations in American cities, conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus crisis, tension over President Trump's Supreme Court pick, and a contentious presidential race, few deepfakes have been used this political season. One notable exception was a faked video showing former Vice President Joe Biden sticking his tongue out, which was tweeted out by the president himself.

"That actually was manipulated using deep learning-based technology," said Lindsay Gorman, the Emerging Technologies Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, about the Biden video. "And I would classify that as a deepfake."

Because of the way that deepfake audio and videos could alter the very sense of reality, the technology has been a source of alarm for years, especially following the foreign misinformation campaign employed by Russia during the 2016 election. And scientists in the field have been closely watching America's adversaries for signs these technologies might be employed.

"If you look at who the United States considered foreign entities [with] an interest in interfering with U.S. elections or just causing trouble in general... China, Russia, Iran and even North Korea falls into that category," said Brian Pierce, a visiting research scientist with the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland.

Effective deepfakes could create false intelligence that alters decisions at the Pentagon, could impact the public's view of law enforcement, could affect commercial industries like the insurance industry and the evidence they require after accidents, Turek told NPR, listing off a few potential examples of the technology's effects.

These fears have not come to fruition in the political sphere, scientists working in this space say, largely because more primitive misinformation techniques remain so effective. Misleading or false text, photoshopped or improperly contextualized images and selectively edited videos don't require sophisticated technology and aren't considered deepfakes.

Plus, deepfake technology can be resource-intensive and technically difficult.

"It's not like you can just download one app and... provide something like a script and create a deepfake format and make [an individual] say this," Turek said. "Perhaps we will [get to that point] over the next few years, then it's going to be very easy potentially to create compelling manipulations."

With all the attention paid to misinformation in politics, the most substantial ongoing damage caused by deepfakes is happening in the personal sphere.

"We are seeing it being weaponized, just not necessarily in [politics], but in the form of nonconsensual pornography," said Farid. "So this is a huge problem on the internet right now, where women's likenesses are being inserted into sexually explicit material and that material is being distributed."

And that is where experts say American vulnerability most lies - because fakes of national candidates will be quickly debunked. David Doermann, director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University at Buffalo, thinks that if deepfakes were used on a local level, targeting local election races, there could be substantial damage.

"The place that we saw these fakes hurt people, initially, was at a very grassroots level. They were using it for revenge on a spouse or a partner. And you know at that level, it can do a lot of damage," Doermann told NPR.

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Where Are The Deepfakes In This Presidential Election?

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Despite people's fears, sophisticated, deceptive videos known as "deepfakes" haven't arrived this political season. But it's not because they aren't a threat, sources tell NPR. It's because simple deceptions like selective editing or outright lies have worked just fine. "You can think of the deepfake as the bazooka and the video splicing as a slingshot.

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ג'ונסון השתגע? דיפ פייק ישראלי בבריטניה

אחרי שהכניס מילים לפה של מארק צוקרברג, הסטארט-אפ הישראלי Canny AI יצר סרטון שבו מכריז רה"מ הבריטי על תמיכה ביריבו. הפרויקט הוזמן על-ידי חברה שרוצה להעלות את המודעות לסכנות שטמונות בטכנולוגיית הדיפ פייק. "אנחנו לא מתערבים בתוכן", אמר ל-ynet מייסד Canny AI

"אני מבקש להביע תמיכה ביריבי, ג'רמי קורבין, לתפקיד ראש ממשלת בריטניה. רק הוא, ולא אני, יכול להחזיר את בריטניה לגדולתה" - זאת ההצהרה המפתיעה של בוריס ג'ונסון, ראש ממשלת בריטניה, בסרטון שמסעיר את הממלכה ביממה האחרונה. אלא שג'ונסון מעולם לא אמר את המילים האלה: בהמשך חושף בן דמותו שמדובר בלא יותר מסרטון דיפ פייק.

ג'ונסון תומך בקורבין. צפו בסרטון המפוברק

מאחורי הסרטון הזה עומדת חברת ייעוץ ומחקר בלתי-מפלגתית בשם Future Advocacy, שמבקשת להדגים לבריטים את הסכנות הכרוכות בטכנולוגיית הדיפ פייק, שמאפשרת לייצר סרטונים מזויפים בכיכובם של אנשים אמיתיים באמצעות בינה מלאכותית (AI). החשש הגדול הוא שהטכנולוגיה הזאת תסייע לגורמים זדוניים להטות מערכות בחירות, בין היתר באמצעות סרטונים מפוברקים של פוליטיקאים.

1 צפייה בגלריה

אל תאמינו למילה. ג'ונסון וקורבין

במסגרת הקמפיין הופץ גם סרטון מזויף של ג'רמי קורבין, מנהיג מפלגת הלייבור, שבו הוא "מצהיר" על תמיכה ביריבו ג'ונסון. בחודש הבא, על רקע משבר הברקזיט, יתמודדו השניים ראש בראש במסגרת הבחירות לפרלמנט הבריטי. בעיתון דיילי מייל ציינו כי מדובר בפעם הראשונה שבה מופצים סרטוני דיפ פייק של פוליטיקאים בריטים במהלך מערכת בחירות.

קורבין "תומך" בג'ונסון

מי שיצר את הסרטון - באמצעות הטכנולוגיה שמפניה הקמפיין מנסה להזהיר - הוא הסטארט-אפ הישראלי Canny AI שבעבר כבר יצר סרטוני דיפ פייק של דונלד טראמפ, מארק צוקרברג, קים קרדשיאן ואחרים. בשיחה עם ynet סיפר עומר בן-עמי, שייסד את החברה לצדו של יהונתן היימן: "אנחנו לא מתערבים בתוכן, אלא מספקים את השירות הטכנולוגי. קיבלנו את הסרטונים המקוריים של ג'ונסון וקורבין, ביחד עם סרטונים של החקיין שמחקה את שניהם, ולקח לנו בערך יום להחזיר להם את זה".

באמצעות אלגוריתם של למידה עמוקה (Deep Learning), המערכת של Canny AI שינתה את תנועות הפנים והשפתיים של ג'ונסון וקורבין בהתאם לתנועות של החקיין. לדברי בן-עמי, מאז שפורסם סרטון הדיפ פייק של צוקרברג בחודש יוני, החברה הצליחה לשפר את הסנכרון בין הקול לשפתיים וגם את הרזולוציה. גם הזמן שבו לוקח להם לייצר את הסרטונים התקצר.

הסרטון המפוברק של צוקרברג

אם צפיתם בשבוע שעבר בתוכנית הטלוויזיה "מועדון לילה" בקשת, נחשפתם לפרויקט נוסף שבו היו בן-עמי ושותפו מעורבים: ראיון "דיפ פייק" עם אביגדור ליברמן. הפרויקט הבא והמסקרן של Canny AI, בשיתוף MIT, הוא סרט שבו מוצג נשיא ארה"ב לשעבר ריצ'רד ניקסון כשהוא נושא נאום שנכתב למקרה שבו האסטרונאוטים של אפולו 11 לא יחזרו בשלום מהירח. נאום כזה אכן נכתב ב-1969, אך מעולם לא הוקרא כי לא היה בו צורך. בפרויקט זה הם משתפים פעולה עם חברה אוקראינית, שסינתזה את הקול של ניקסון בעזרת הקלטות אודיו אמיתיות שלו.

יש פרויקטים שלא תסכימו לעשות? בן-עמי: "אנחנו לא חושבים שאנחנו צריכים להיות אלה שמצנזרים, אבל אנחנו מאוד מקפידים לא להסכים לפרויקטים שמיועדים לשימוש זדוני. עד עכשיו לא ממש נתקלנו בהצעות כאלה. בכל מקרה, אנחנו אומרים לכל לקוח שלנו שיש לו אחריות להבהיר שההקשר של הסרטון אינו אמיתי".

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ג’ונסון השתגע? דיפ פייק ישראלי בבריטניה

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אחרי שהכניס מילים לפה של מארק צוקרברג, הסטארט-אפ הישראלי Canny AI יצר סרטון שבו מכריז רה”מ הבריטי על תמיכה ביריבו. הפרויקט הוזמן על-ידי חברה שרוצה להעלות את המודעות לסכנות שטמונות בטכנולוגיית הדיפ פייק. ”אנחנו לא מתערבים בתוכן”, אמר ל-ynet מייסד Canny AI

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How close are deepfakes to being used in big-budget films and TV shows? Pretty damn close, if a new demo from Disney is anything to go by. In a video and paper being presented at a computer graphics conference this week, researchers from the House of Mouse show off what they say is the first photo-realistic deepfake at a megapixel resolution.

And the results are... pretty good! They're not mind-blowing, certainly, and not good enough to be used in the next Marvel movie, but it's a solid step up from deepfakes we've seen in the past.

As the researchers suggest, what's new here is the megapixel resolution. Megapixels may no longer be the byword for high-quality images that they used to be. (The camera on your phone probably has a double-digit megapixel count for a start.) But so far, deepfake tech has focused on smooth facial transfers rather than amping up the pixel count.

The deepfakes you've probably seen to date may look impressive on your phone, but their flaws would be much more apparent on a larger screen. As an example, Disney's researchers note that the maximum-resolution videos they could create from popular open-source deepfake model DeepFakeLab were just 256 x 256 pixels in size. By comparison, their model can produce video with a 1024 x 1024 resolution - a sizable increase.

Apart from this, the functionality of Disney's deepfake model is fairly conventional: it's able to swap the appearances of two individuals while maintaining the target's facial expressions. If you watch the video, though, note how technically constrained the output seems to be. It only produces deepfakes of well-lit individuals looking more or less straight at the camera. Challenging angles and lighting are still not on the agenda for this tech.

As the researchers note, though, we are getting closer to creating deepfakes good enough for commercial projects. Right now, when a company like Disney wants to do some face-swapping, it will use traditional VFX, as the studio did when it created virtual models of deceased actors Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher for the Star Wars film Rogue One.

"While those results are impressive, they are expensive to produce and typically take many months of work to achieve mere seconds of footage," write the researchers. Deepfakes, by comparison, require far less oversight once the original model has been constructed, and can produce video in a matter of hours (given the right budget for computing power).

Sooner or later, deepfakes are going to stop being a research project and start being a viable option for big studios. Indeed, some would argue they're already there.

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Disney's deepfakes are getting closer to a big-screen debut

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Are deepfakes ready to be used on the big screen? Not quite yet, but new deepfake research from Disney shows they're getting pretty damn close. The company's researchers have debuted what they say is the first model capable of producing megapixel-resolution deepfakes.

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Last month (21 April), the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Dutch Parliament had an online call with Leonid Volkov, Alexi Navalny's chief of staff.

Or so the parliamentarians thought. It turned out that they may have been talking to a deepfake version of Volkov.

'Calm before the storm'? - experts only disagree on whether the deepfakes problem will take months or a few years to materialise

This could be a momentous event: The first time that deepfake technology is abused to interfere with high-level politics in the EU.

There appears to be a growing amount of political cheapfakes – videos that are manipulated in simple, less technically sophisticated ways. For example, videos may be shared out of context or simply slowed down. Although they are easy for experts to verify, cheapfakes may seem real to the average person.

The best-known example is the 2019 video of Nancy Pelosi appearing to be drunk. The video was slowed down, so her speech seemed slurred.

Deepfakes pose a different level of threat. They may be so skilfully produced that even experts cannot say with certainty if they are real or not.

Despite many fears, deepfakes did not cause any issues in the US presidential elections. But this is no reason for comfort, given the high level of sophistication and decreasing barriers to develop deepfakes.

At the Berlin-based Democracy Reporting International NGO, we talked to many industry experts, some of whom think it is a matter of months before the deepfake threat materialises, while other believe it will still take a few years.

All agree that the development of face swapping technology is advancing rapidly, most notably in film, gaming and apps. For example, the technology may allow actors speak convincingly in other languages or to allow gamers to take on different, possibly famous, personalities.

As we should know by now, any new technology with benign intentions may be abused for nefarious purposes.

Once deepfakes enter the market of political disinformation, the problems we had now, mostly text-based false news, may look like child's play. "It's the calm before the storm" is how an industry insider described it.

Videos speak to the human brain in a much more immediate manner than text - the 'I have seen it with my own eyes' phenomena.

And worse, the pure possibility to manipulate video, may cause anything to be questioned. A genuine video can be dismissed as deepfake or a manipulated one trumpeted as genuine.

Over time the public attitude may become "disbelief by default", as Sam Gregory of the NGO WITNESS noted.

What should be done? The most promising technical solution focuses on technologies that could mark content at the moment of production with something like a watermark. If it is manipulated afterwards, the watermark would be affected. Any user could easily see that a video is not authentic.

'Content Authenticity Initiative' may not be enough

Some major firms, as well as civil society and media organisations, have teamed up under the Content Authenticity Initiative to create a standard for digital content provenance.

This is a good start, but many more firms should get involved and civil society should to apply to join, making sure global perspectives are reflected. We need to be careful, for example, that provenance tools cannot be abused to detect brave citizen journalists who document human rights abuses.

We can do more in the EU as well. Positively, the European Commission addressed the threat in the recently-unveiled proposal for an AI Act proposed in April.

The draft obliges users of AI systems that generate or manipulate visual content to disclose when image, video or audio content has been manipulated through automated means.

This is a start, but most disinformation actors are unlikely to fall under the definitions of the act.

Ideally the problem would be addressed upstream, before AI systems start manipulating videos. The above-mentioned watermarking at the moment of production would offer that solution, especially if flanked by other measures like digital education.

In view of the geopolitical dimensions of tech regulation, the EU and the US should explore if there is room for a global initiative that would include a key tech producer like China. The point would be to agree on a system of watermarking of any video that is produced, so that subsequent manipulation can be detected.

Deepfakes can harm all societies and all governments equally, so hopefully all have an interest to prevent abuse. It is a problem that needs a global solution. If some companies do not play along and let unmarked deepfakes flourish, public confidence in online visual content will suffer, even if other companies work hard to prevent it.

The story in the Dutch parliament remains murky. Maybe Volkov was not imitated through a deepfake, but simply impersonated by a look-alike prankster.

But the mere possibility that it was a deepfake has already created much doubt and confusion. It was not a consequential story, but it may have been like the little breeze that announces a coming storm. It's time to act.

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Michael Meyer-Resende and Madeline Brady

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[Column] ‘Deepfakes’ - a political problem already hitting the EU

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Last month, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Dutch Parliament had an online call with Russian dissident Alexi Navalny’s chief of staff. Or so the parliamentarians thought. It turned out that they may have been talking to a deepfake.

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It's 2 November 2020, the eve of the US presidential election, and a secretly recorded video is all over the news. Donald Trump has been filmed saying that he's been "talking to the Russians. Believe me, I've been doing some incredible spying. Really incredible". Despite Trump's protests that he never said those words, it proves to have a major effect on voters, and the rival Democratic candidate wins the election.

But Trump was telling the truth - he didn't say those words. The footage of him was generated by 'deepfake' technology, which uses sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) to create video and audio that impersonates real people. The technology is in use already and, if left unchecked, could lead us to start doubting everything we watch and hear online.
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But it's not just on the internet that the effects of deepfake could be felt. Suppose a criminal 'deepfaked' your sister's voice and called you, asking you to transfer money because "I'm in trouble and desperately need your help". Would you fall for it?

Thankfully, experts are becoming increasingly aware of the dangers that deepfake poses. And they're beginning to fight back by harnessing the very techniques that make this technology so convincing.

Going deeper

Deepfake can be used for all kinds of trickery, but it's most commonly used for 'face swaps', where one person's face is superimposed onto another. In one demonstration, the filmmaker Jordan Peele's mouth is transferred onto Barack Obama's face, so Peele can get the former US president to say whatever he likes.

Deeptrace, an Amsterdam-based company that's been set up to tackle the threat of deepfake, estimates that there are around 10,000 deepfake videos circulating online. Over 8,000 of these are pornographic clips, where a celebrity's face is superimposed onto a porn star's body. Experts are predicting that it's only a matter of time before a fake video emerges of a politician purportedly saying or doing something that changes the course of an election.

The word 'deepfake' is a portmanteau of 'deep learning' and 'fake'. Deep learning is a form of AI where algorithms inspired by the human brain, known as neural networks, learn new skills by processing vast amounts of data. At the heart of a deepfake is a form of deep learning known as 'generative adversarial networks', or GANs. Here, two neural networks work against each other to create realistic video and sound. One network, the generator, is the creative bit. This is fed reams of data, such as images of a celebrity's face, and tasked with generating the same face artificially. Another network, the discriminator, is tasked with spotting whether the image it receives from the generator is fake, feeding back what's wrong with it. When the discriminator rejects a video, the generator tries again. This back and forth continues until the generator produces something that's almost indistinguishable from reality. A deepfake is born.

One of the reasons that this technique is so effective is because the discriminator is capable of something that the human mind is not: mathematically describing what's wrong with an image or sound. "I could notice that the generator gets shadows wrong in the images it creates, but I can't describe that mathematically," says Carter Huffman, chief technical officer at Modulate, a company using this technology to develop artificial voices. "I can't just write down a formula for that. But the discriminator can suggest corrections that we don't have the ability to write down a formula for."
Malaria No More UK created this video of David Beckham speaking nine languages
The technology behind deepfakes isn't just put to nefarious uses, however. The team at Modulate foresees its artificial voices being used as 'voice skins' in gaming, enabling gamers to take on new personas. Meanwhile, teams at universities around the world are developing these techniques for other positive purposes. But algorithms for creating deepfakes have found their way onto online repositories where computer code is shared and these can be exploited by amateur developers. All it takes is a laptop with a graphics processing unit and a little software knowhow, to create a believable fake. While some of the efforts have been innocent fun, the explosion of celebrity face-swap porn demonstrates the potential for misuse - and that misuse is predicted to spread into other realms soon.

"We've always been able to manipulate video," says Prof Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics at University of California, Berkeley. "Hollywood studios have done it, individuals acting covertly on behalf of governments have done it. Now imagine a landscape where the average Reddit user can make fake videos of Theresa May - that's a little worrisome."

Fighting back

Farid is so concerned about a world leader being deepfaked that he and his team are developing a system for recognising deepfakes of specific politicians. They're currently using automated software to analyse the head and face movements of a handful of leaders around the world, including Donald Trump, Theresa May and Angela Merkel, to identify unique patterns. A suspected fake video of one of these leaders can then be analysed to see whether it matches their real-life movements.

"World leaders tend to have distinct and predictable patterns of facial expressions and head movements," says Farid. "It's difficult for current deepfake systems to mimic these because they're focused on trying to make sure that each frame of the video looks believable."

When the individual frames come together, there's no guarantee that the person will move in their own nuanced way, and it's this peculiarity that Farid will use to spot deepfakes. He's hoping to have his system operational by the end of 2019 - ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections.

Deepfake tech enabled the BBC's Matthew Amroliwala to become a polyglot © BBC

Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, Deeptrace is developing a deepfake detection system that effectively turns the technology on itself. It uses a powerful discriminator algorithm (the aspect of deepfake technology that spots when a video or image has strayed from reality) to look for fakes. Whereas the discriminator algorithms used to generate deepfakes are designed to create videos that fool the average human, Deeptrace is aiming to create a discriminator that's sophisticated enough to spot incredibly subtle flaws in deepfakes, giving them a one-up on the people making them.

The Deeptrace team is currently feeding its discriminator thousands of fake videos to hone the system. In much the same way as the original technology is not programmed how to generate a realistic face, Deeptrace's discriminator learns how to spot the fakes from the data it's fed.

"Any algorithm that's used to manipulate images leaves behind geometric patterns on them," says Giorgio Patrini, chief executive officer of Deeptrace. "These artefacts would not appear in genuine images from a camera and are often not visible to the human eye."
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These patterns might not only reveal if a video is a deepfake, but also how it was created. "Families of algorithms will leave different traces, so sometimes we might get some information about the generator algorithm that was used," says Patrini. "Tracing the algorithm could help us to identify, for example, how a human face was manipulated - was it just the facial expression or the person's entire appearance and identity?"

Patrini and his business partner Francesco Cavalli see the main market for their technology initially being media companies. "Journalists would like proof of whether a video is real or fake," says Patrini. But they see lots more opportunities on the horizon. "As soon as people realise that they can deepfake things like phone calls and video conferencing technology, it opens up a world of misuse," says Patrini.

At Modulate, the team has recognised the risk of misinformation and are embedding sonic 'watermarks' in the sound files they create so their work can be traced back to them, hopefully acting as a disincentive to anyone thinking of misusing the technology. "The watermarks are slight tweaks to some of the sound frequencies, in ways that you won't be able to hear," says Huffman.

Modulate hopes to form a coalition with other AI speech-generation companies and establish a self-policing system where anyone will be able to upload sound files to a dedicated website to find out whether or not they carry a company watermark.

But even those fighting deepfakes recognise that their detection systems are only part of the solution. Even if a deepfake video can be spotted as a fake, it can still be spread across social networks in a matter of minutes before anyone has had the chance to verify it, potentially changing the course of elections or destroying careers. So perhaps the emergence of deepfake calls for a shift in our mindset, where we recognise that seeing is no longer always believing. "We really need to rewire ourselves to stop believing that a video is the truth," says Patrini. "But it will take effort in education, and potentially catastrophic events in the news, to finally get there."

This article was first published in June 2019

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Deepfakes: the fight against this dangerous use of AI

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It's 2 November 2020, the eve of the US presidential election, and a secretly recorded video is all over the news. Donald Trump has been filmed saying that he's been "talking to the Russians. Believe me, I've been doing some incredible spying. Really incredible".

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You might have missed it amid all the sound and fury of impeachment, but it's been a busy week for disinformation. Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reports, will start removing posts that it determines are "misleading about an election." Elizabeth Warren's campaign rolled out a plan on "Fighting Digital Disinformation," including a pledge not to "knowingly use or spread false or manipulated information." And the House Ethics Committee announced that members of the House of Representatives who share deepfakes on social media might face sanctions from the House itself. The ethics announcement attracted the least attention of all, but it's actually an important step in creating standards for how elected representatives should use social media.

This news might seem trivial compared to the drama of the impeachment trial going on just down the street. But as technology companies and governments alike grapple with how to address the spread of online falsehoods, the committee's memo is noteworthy. Four years after the shock to the system of 2016, everyone agrees that disinformation and misinformation are problems that need to be dealt with, but the question remains who is best positioned to accept responsibility. The House of Representatives appears to be, in some small way, beginning to take on the task.

The committee's " pink sheet "-an advisory memorandum on House rules-alerts members of the House to the dangers of posting deepfakes on social media, warning that "manipulation of images and videos that are intended to mislead the public can harm ... discourse and reflect discreditably on the House." For this reason, disseminating "deep fakes or other audio-visual distortions intended to mislead the public" could violate the House's Code of Official Conduct, which governs the behavior of the chamber's members and employees.

This might sound like the committee is addressing a problem that doesn't exist yet. As far as we know, there have not been any cases in which a member of Congress-or any other prominent American political figure-has tweeted a genuine deepfake, meaning doctored audio or video generated through machine learning than can produce extremely lifelike and misleading results. After all, deepfakes-though concerning-just aren't all that common in politics (yet).

Politicians have, however, published plenty of what the memorandum describes as "other audio-visual distortions"-that is, photos or video deceptively manipulated in a less sophisticated manner than a deepfake. Sometimes the manipulation is obvious: President Trump recently tweeted a picture altered to depict him putting a Medal of Honor around the neck of a dog that played a role in the raid on Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the original photo showed the president bestowing the medal to a Vietnam War medic). But U.S. political figures have published more deceptive images, too. Three days after the strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Rep. Paul Gosar tweeted a photo appearing to show President Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani; it took 40 minutes before he acknowledged that the picture was actually a fake, a doctored version of a shot from a 2011 meeting between Obama and then-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The world is a better place without these guys in power. pic.twitter.com/gDoXQu9vO5

- Paul Gosar (@DrPaulGosar) January 6, 2020

It's easy to see why the committee might be particularly concerned about these manipulations now. Quoting a Congressional Research Service article on deepfakes, the memo warns that when members of the House or their staff tweet or share deepfakes or other manipulated audio or video, they could "erode public trust, negatively affect public discourse, or even sway an election." Consider, for example, the misleadingly edited video tweeted out by President Trump in May 2019 that appeared to display Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi slurring her words at a news conference-or the wide circulation of a deceptive clip that seemed to show Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden make a racist remark. Now imagine such a clip, with sophisticated editing or not, circulated in the days or even hours before an election -and given the appearance of legitimacy by retweets from members of Congress and perhaps even the president himself.

The memo changes the calculation for members: Tweet misleading content, and you could be subject to House disciplinary rules. The Ethics Committee asks members and staff to think before they tweet: Before posting on social media, "[m]embers and staff are expected to take reasonable efforts to consider whether such representations are deep fakes or are intentionally distorted to mislead the public." Members who break this guidance could be subject to public admonition by the committee of the offending members. Technically, the full House could even censure members-or expel them for violation of House rules.

Censure is unlikely, though, and expulsion even less so. Only five members have ever met the latter fate, three of whom were expelled for fighting for the Confederacy. Tweeting a deepfake may be harmful to democracy, but it might not be quite the same as taking up arms against the republic.

More realistically, the committee may hope that the guideline itself will have a deterrent effect. The committee is often reluctant to discipline members, so the most realistic deterrent may come from members' desire to avoid scrutiny from the Office of Congressional Ethics, which investigates and produces public reports about ethics violations. As former senior counsel to the House Michael L. Stern, told us, "[T]he primary motivation for complying with this edict is not the formal sanction, but the embarrassment of getting called out for violations, as well as the desire to avoid an investigation" by either the committee or the independent Office of Congressional Ethics.

In this way, the pink sheet is a norm-setting exercise for the House-and a bipartisan one, as the committee is the only one in the House evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. When members tweet doctored pictures or share altered videos, they now do so as knowing violators of the House's position on this type of content.

So the guidelines set out in the memo might not have that much bite. Yet they still represent a shift from the current state of things-which is to say, an ad hoc system in which tech platforms are effectively building the content moderation plane in midair, setting out broad rules and then struggling to decide the extent to which politicians get special treatment. The result of these efforts has been that, by and large, citizens and users of the major platforms have come to think of the platforms themselves as the governing bodies to whom appeals should be addressed when a prominent political figure publishes misleading or objectionable content. Every time President Trump posts a threat on Twitter, for example, hundreds of other users will tweet at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other executives demanding to know why the platform won't remove content that appears to violate its terms of service.

Hey @Twitter, is threatening nuclear war not a violation of terms of service? https://t.co/Gwz2EZHKnu
- Kal Penn (@kalpenn) August 11, 2017

The situation has become so commonplace that it may no longer seem strange. But there is something bizarre about the notion that private platforms not only can regulate what and how politicians communicate with their constituents and the rest of the world, but that those platforms should. As any number of scholars and journalists have pointed out, the responsibility of deciding what speech is and is not within the bounds of acceptable discourse is, on its face, a task better suited to democratic governance than private enterprise. The Ethics Committee guidance is a small step toward governmental institutions accepting at least some of that burden.

That said, the House shouldering part of that weight means that the chamber will now have to grapple with some of the puzzling content moderation questions that only platforms have dealt with until now. Just as Twitter or Facebook users whose content is removed will appeal to the platforms to argue that their posts don't violate the terms of service, surely the Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics are going to be faced with the problem of assessing whether a member or staffer has actually violated the rule. Recall that the memo's prohibition includes an intent requirement-so a member who shares a deepfake could argue that he or she too was duped, or explain that the shared deepfake was not a deception, but merely a joke. In fact, after he published the fake image of Obama shaking hands with Rouhani, that's exactly what Gosar did: "[N]o one said this wasn't photoshopped. No one said the president of Iran was dead. No one said Obama met with Rouhani in person," Gosar wrote.

Then there are the new questions that emerge from two sets of overlapping rules between the House and the platforms, which will create headaches for both parties. Platforms are likely to face two situations: those in which a member spreads misleading content that appears to violate the terms of the memo and the House does nothing, and those in which the House issues some sort of sanction.

In the first case, where a member spreads misleading content but the committee takes no action, there will no doubt still be calls- as there are every time something similar happens -for platforms to do something. These calls are natural: Platforms have the greatest capacity to stop the spread of content on their services by using their content moderation infrastructure, and so it feels like they should exercise it. But, as noted above, it is jarring to ask a private company, with no democratic mandate or legitimacy, to take action against the speech of a public representative when the House Committee on Ethics itself has not done so. This situation appears to be a lose-lose for platforms: Take no action and they will continue to face charges of negligence in their roles at gatekeepers; do something and they will appear to be usurping the role of the committee to police the boundaries of acceptable conduct by elected representatives.

The second case isn't easy either. Where a particular post has resulted in sanction from the committee, what should platforms do to best facilitate democratic accountability? Continuing to allow false content to spread might allow it to continue to do harm. But removing a post by a representative could prevent constituents from holding their member of Congress accountable, because fewer people will be aware of the post in the first place.

This situation calls for thinking outside the binary of taking down content or leaving it up, which platforms are starting to show in other cases-like flagging content that has been rated false by fact-checkers, or Twitter's (as yet unused) policy of placing warning screens on content that breaks its rules but is in the public interest. When it comes to deepfakes and other "synthetic and manipulated media," for example, Twitter has proposed placing a notice next to such posts or adding some other kind of warning, which could mesh well with whatever action the committee takes. Similarly, platforms could reduce circulation of misleading content that is the subject of committee censure and add context noting the committee's action.

And, as ever, there's the little matter of what to do about the president. The Ethics Committee can pass whatever rules it likes for members, but that's not going to stop Trump from tweeting and retweeting. What happens if, for example, members of the House retweet a Trump tweet containing a misleadingly edited video? The members might be censured while the president would remain untouched.

Then again, perhaps this mirrors the struggles of Twitter itself: Puzzled by how to handle presidential tweets, the platform has written into its terms of service an exception for "newsworthiness," which essentially allows Trump to publish whatever he likes. (Other platforms have similar rules.) Of course, the House has no power over Trump's Twitter feed, and while the platform could limit his tweets if it wanted, it has decided not to.

The Ethics Committee is now going to get a taste of the absurdities and contradictions of regulating social media. We'll have to wait and see whether Twitter users start tweeting at the committee as well as @jack and asking that congressional tweets be taken down-or demanding to know why members have been unjustly punished.

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Members of the House Are on Notice: No Tweeting Deepfakes

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You might have missed it amid all the sound and fury of impeachment, but it's been a busy week for disinformation. Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reports, will start removing posts that it determines are "misleading about an election."

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By Daniel Thomas
Business reporter, BBC News, Davos

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WATCH: This deepfake software can map celebrity faces on to anyone

"We are already at the point where you can't tell the difference between deepfakes and the real thing," Professor Hao Li of the University of Southern California tells the BBC.

We are at the computer scientist's deepfake installation at the World Economic Forum in Davos which gives a hint of what he means.

Like other deepfake tools, his software creates computer-manipulated videos of people - often politicians or celebrities - that are designed to look real.

Most often this involves "face swapping", whereby the face of a celebrity is overlaid onto the likeness of someone else.

As I sit, a camera films my face and projects it onto a screen in front of me; my features are then digitally mapped.

Image caption,
Prof Hao Li says deepfakes are 'dangerous'

One after the other the faces of actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former UK Prime Minister Theresa May and footballer Lionel Messi are superimposed onto the image of my own face in real time - their features and expressions merging seamlessly with mine.

The effects, while impressive, are more comical than sinister but feasibly could confuse some viewers. However, when the professor shows me another deepfake video he has been working on which is yet to be unveiled to the public, I totally understand what he means.

It shows a famous world leader giving a speech and is impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

"Just think of the potential for misuse and disinformation we could see with this type of thing," says Prof Li.

Deepfakes only hit the headlines in 2017 after crudely produced videos began to surface on the internet, typically involving celebrity face swapping or manipulation.

Image source, Hao Li

Image caption,
Alec Baldwin impersonating President Trump: The real Alec Baldwin is on the left - could you tell?

Some were send-ups of well-known figures, voiced by impressionists or comedians. But in the vast majority of cases, famous people's faces were superimposed onto those of porn stars, much to the alarm of those targeted.

Since then the technology - which relies on complex machine learning algorithms - has evolved rapidly and deepfakes have become more common. Some have been used as "fake news". Others have been cited in cases of online fraud. Facebook has even banned them from its platform for fear they could be used to manipulate people.

Prof Li's own software was never designed to trick people and will be sold exclusively to businesses, he says. But he thinks a dangerous genie could be about to escape its bottle as deepfake technology falls into the wrong hands - and democracy is at threat.

"The first risk is that people are already using the fact deepfakes exist to discredit genuine video evidence. Even though there's footage of you doing or saying something you can say it was a deepfake and it's very hard to prove otherwise."

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,
Deepfake tech uses thousands of still images of the person

Politicians around the world have already been accused of using this ploy, one being Joao Doria, the governor of Sao Paulo in Brazil. In 2018 the married politician claimed a video allegedly showing him at an orgy was a deepfake - and no one has been able to prove conclusively that it wasn't.

However, the greater threat is the potential for deepfakes to be used in political disinformation campaigns, says Prof Li. "Elections are already being manipulated with fake news, so imagine what would happen if you added sophisticated deepfakes to the mix?"

So far clips such as the one of Ms Pelosi are not hard to spot as fakes. But done subtly, he says, people could put start to words into the mouths of politicians and no one would know - or at least by the time it was corrected it would be too late.

"It could be even more dangerous in developing countries where digital literacy is more limited. There you could really impact how society would react. You could even spread stuff that got people killed."

But some, like the Dutch cyber security firm Deeptrace, which tracks the technology, feel the panic over deepfakes has been overblown.

Director Giorgio Patrini says it is relatively easy to pull off a convincing deepfake when the person being mimicked is someone you don't know. But if they are a politician or celebrity familiar to millions it's much harder. "People are just too familiar with their voices and facial expressions," he tells the BBC.

"You would also need to be able to impersonate their voice and make them say things they would credibly say, which limits what you can do."

'Dark day'

In addition, while he accepts the most sophisticated - and dangerous - deepfake tools are freely available in open source on the internet, he says they still require expertise to use. "That's not to say they won't become more widely commodified and accessible, but I don't think it'll happen so quickly. I think it will take years."

Nevertheless, Mr Patrini thinks indistinguishable deepfakes will become commonplace eventually and could be used as a serious political weapon.

Offering a taste of what this might look like, Facebook in December removed a network of more than 900 fake accounts from its platforms that allegedly used deceptive practices to push right wing ideology online.

Notably, the accounts had used fake profile photos of fake faces generated using artificial intelligence.

Both Prof Li and Deeptrace have created deepfake detection tools, although they admit cyber criminals will work tirelessly try to get around them.

However, Mr Patrini is optimistic: "Even when deepfakes are so sophisticated humans cannot tell the difference, I believe we will be able to build more sophisticated tools to spot them. It's like anti-virus software - it will keep being updated and improved."

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Deepfakes: A threat to democracy or just a bit of fun?

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Deepfakes, or computer-generated images of people, can be dangerous for democracy, warn experts.

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Social media users have been sharing a post that claims a video in which outgoing president Donald Trump acknowledges President-elect Biden's victory in the wake of the chaos of the Capitol protests has been confirmed to be a deepfake. Despite speculation, this has not been confirmed by any credible source and the White House told Reuters the video is not a deepfake.

The post ( here) shows a video of Trump in which he can be heard saying, "The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay [...] Now congress has certified the results, a new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th , my focus now turns to ensuring a smooth orderly and seamless transition of power."

The video zooms into Trump's neck and a voice can be heard saying that the video is blurred out around the neckline, the background is fake and the flag is not real. The voice says, "That's not real. Look at this. That's not real guys. Something's wrong with this video. This is a deep fake." The caption on the post says, "BREAKING: Donald J. Trump Video CONFIRMED 'Deep Fake' - TRUST THE PLAN".

The video of Trump used in the post was released on the evening of Jan. 7, the day after hundreds of Trump supporters breached the US. Capitol. In his message, Trump came closer than ever before to a formal concession over the result of the presidential election ( here).

Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that National security adviser Robert O'Brien, senior advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, along with speechwriter Stephen Miller, counsel Pat Cipollone, chief of staff Mark Meadows and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had all pressed Trump to clearly state that he did not support the violence ( here).

The speech was shared by various news networks including Reuters ( here), CNN ( here) and Fox News ( here).

There has been speculation online as to whether the video posted by Trump is authentic ( here , here , here ). However, no credible source has "confirmed" that it is a deepfake.

It was officially released by the White House ( here) and tweeted by Trump's own account ( archive.vn/U36Z5). The White House told Reuters on Jan. 11 that this video was not a deepfake.

Giorgio Patrini, CEO of visual threat intelligence company Sensity, told Reuters: "We ran several filters and video analyses and we were not able to find any conclusive evidence of manipulation."

Trump's style of speech often varies when he is reading a teleprompter compared with when he is not, as seen in this video from the Washington Post here . President Trump's movement does not look too dissimilar from his pre-Christmas speech on coronavirus relief here and his speech patterns do not show any obvious signs of manipulation or recreation by an imposter.

VERDICT

False. No credible source has confirmed or provided evidence that the video of President Trump criticising Jan. 6 rioting and referring to an orderly transition of power is a deepfake.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here .

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Fact check: Donald Trump concession video not a 'confirmed deepfake'

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Social media users have been sharing a post that claims a video in which outgoing president Donald Trump acknowledges President-elect Biden's victory in the wake of the chaos of the Capitol protests has been confirmed to be a deepfake. Despite speculation, this has not been...

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החלפת פנים מל ברוקס ביבי נתניהו

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Robert Pattinson - The Batman (DeepFake)

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(Image credit: Ctrl Shift Face/Youtube)

The best deepfake examples continue to amaze us, whilst also raising concerns about whether we can be sure what's real. Over a few short years, technology like AI and deepfaking has advanced to the point where it's becoming really quite difficult to see the flaws in these creations. They used to all have that "uncanny valley" feel that made it obvious that what we were looking at isn't real, but we've seen increasingly convincing deepfake examples in the last year or so.

In this roundup, we've attempted to show a wide variation of deepfake examples - from the most realistic edits to ones that are purely for entertainment purposes. Deepfakes have been used for various purposes, mainly for entertainment and parody. But as the technology improves and becomes more accessible, we have also seen some misuse to try and spread misinformation by impersonating important public figures like politicians.

But what actually is a deepfake? Scroll down to the bottom for a briefing on how the technology works, but at the most basic level a deepfake is a video that uses impressive technology to replicate a subject's likeness to replace another's face - essentially shape-shifting one person into another The results can be impressive and very funny, but they can also raise concerns about privacy, manipulation and authenticity. For more on the wider phenomenon of AI-generated imagery, see our guide to how to use DALL-E 2 and how the best AI art generators compare. In the meantime here are the best deepfake examples we've seen so far.

The best deepfake examples

01. This is not Morgan Freeman

One of the most scarily convincing deepfakes is this Morgan Freeman deepfake. The video was first shared by Dutch deepfake YouTube Channel Diep Nep last year, crediting the concept to Bob de Jong and the (very good) voice acting to Boet Schouwink.

The video's still hugely impressive, and frightening, a year on, as we saw when it resurfaced on Twitter last month. "How can this tech NOT be deployed in the 2024 election?" one user commented. "Soon we'll see that even this is essentially child's play when it comes to the actual, ever-present (yet invisible) capabilities of identity manipulation and whole-cloth digital identity creation...the implications of which are far-reaching & bone chilling," someone added.

02. The Shining starring Jim Carrey

Bizarre film/actor crossovers are popular amongst deepfake creators; you can find plenty of them on YouTube (including the above Jerry Seinfield and Pulp Fiction mashup). This terrifyingly good edit sees Jim Carrey take on the role of Jack Torrence in a series of videos showing the most important moments from the 1980 film The Shining. It's scarily convincing, and makes us want to see Jim Carrey staring in a horror film. His exaggerated expressions would be perfect.

If you want to see a better comparison of the Deepfake edit versus the original, the creators Ctrl Shift Face have uploaded a before and after of the Jack to Jimmy transformation.

03. Spider-man: No Way Home but it's Tobey Maguire

Everyone has a favourite Spider-man actor, and if your favourite is Tobey Maguire you'll love this particular edit. Popular deepfake creator Shamook took the Spider-man: No Way Home trailer and replaced Tom Holland's face with the original spidey, Tobey Maguire. It's a subtle effect, but executed brilliantly so you can barely tell there's been a change at all.

This kind of edit makes us wonder what the future of film could look like using this technology. Imagine being able to choose your preferred actor to play the lead in the film you're watching. Wild.

04. Jerry Seinfeld in Pulp Fiction

This hilarious and perfectly executed creation sees DesiFakes puts Jerry Seinfeld into one of the most famous scenes from Pulp Fiction, and it works fantastically. The audio editing is as important as the visuals here, with perfect timing right down to the inappropriate canned laughter and the jingle and credit roll. The facial expressions could come straight out of a Seinfeld episode. This is the kind of things deepfakes were made for.

05. The deepfake Tom Cruise on TikTok

@deeptomcruise
Keep your hands clean.
♬ original sound - Tom

Deepfakes have come so far in recent years that there's now a TikTok account dedicated entirely to Tom Cruise deepfakes. There's still a hint of the uncanny valley about @deeptomcruise's videos, but his mastery of the actor's voice and mannerisms along with the use of rapidly advancing technology has resulted in some of the most convincing deepfake examples yet.

Videos show Cruise doing everything from golfing to demonstrating a magic trick, even in everyday situations like washing his hands. The description of the TikTok account simply reads, "Parody. Also younger."

06. The Mandalorian Luke Skywalker deepfake

Star Wars fandom exploded at the sight of Luke Skywalker in the season two finale of The Mandalorian. Once the space dust eventually settled though, viewers were quick to point out what they saw as flaws in the digital recreation of a younger Mark Hamill. Once again, YouTuber Shamook had a go at deepfaking a Return of the Jedi-era Luke Skywalker with very impressive results.

In fact, it was later confirmed that Shamook had been hired by none other than Industrial Light and Magic, the legendary visual effects company that help bring the Star Wars galaxy to life. Deepfake technology is now being used to shape the galaxy far far away.

07. The deepfake Keanu Reeves on TikTok

@unreal_keanu♬ original sound - Unreal Keanu Reeves

Cruise isn't the only phoney celeb with his own TikTok following. He's since been joined on the platform by a deepfake Keanu Reeves and many more. Unreal_Keanu has picked up an incredible 7.4 million followers, who seem to love the references to his movie rolls, his dancing (it is TikTok) and jokes about living with a partner.

As with Cruise above, this particular deepfake celeb is being used for laughs and isn't being passed off as real. But despite the humour, it shows the risks deepfakes pose for celebs. On the one hand, the tech could allow celebrities to sell their image to brands without having to go to the trouble of actually filming a spot or going to a photoshoot. But on the other side, there have already been reports of unscrupulous brands using deepfakes to push their products without the celebs' permission.

08. Korean newsreader Kim Joo-Ha

Many deepfake examples are fun parodies or experiments designed to test the limits of deep learning technology. However, perhaps the biggest indication that deepfakes could become part of everyday mainstream media came late last year when the Korean television channel MBN presented viewers with a deepfake of its own news anchor Kim Joo-Ha.

The channel warned viewers in advance that the newsreader would be faked, and Kim Joo-Ha still has her job. However, MBN said it planned to continue using the deepfake for some breaking news reports, and the company behind the deepfake, South Korea's DeepBrain AI (formerly known as Moneybrain), has said that it's looking for media buyers in China and the US, leading some to fear that newsreaders may become obsolete.

09. Wonder Woman

Remakes and reboots continue to be a massive part of the modern film landscape. Whenever new actors are cast in classic roles, comparisons are inevitably made between the different portrayals. Deepfake technology has allowed people to take those comparisons one step further, by putting one actor in the place of another for a sequence, highlighting similarities and differences that are incredibly interesting to observe.

This example, from DeepFaker, places actress Lynda Carter, from the classic '70s Wonder Woman TV show, into the reimagined world and costume of Gal Gadot's big-screen Wonder Woman - with breathtaking results.

10. The deepfake Snoop Dogg Doggy Dog tarot readings

Phoneline fortune telling used to dominate late night TV in many places, with viewers phoning in to have their future told to them by highly dubious psychics. It was a shady business, so it seems rather app for deepfake treatment, and who better to star in it than West Coast gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg. This hilarious deepfake is the work of Brian Monarch.

11. Deepfake Roundtable

The entertainment landscape is undergoing a seismic shift right now, as streaming services like Netflix battle with the big screen for attention. With this in mind, Collider put together this hilarious deepfake with the super recognisable faces of Tom Cruise, Robert Downey, Jr, George Lucas, Ewan McGregor and Jeff Goldblum discussing streaming and the future of cinema. This is a favourite of ours not only because it's incredibly convincing but also because it's a highly amusing video. As one commenter puts it, this is 'scary good'.

12. Donald Trump joins Breaking Bad

This video takes a scene from the mega-popular Breaking Bad series and introduces Donald Trump as crooked lawyer Saul Goodman. In the scene, Goodman explains the basics of money laundering to Jesse Pinkman, played in the show by Aaron Paul. To add a touch of realism, Donald Trump's deepfaked son-in-law Jared Kushner takes over from Paul, making the parody an almost personal heart-to-heart.

YouTube creators Ctrl Shift Face, the team behind the parody, used DeepFaceLab to create Trump and Kushner's faces frame by frame. The voices, which complete the scene, were provided by Stable Voices, a custom AI model that is trained on real speech samples.

Donald Trump must be one of the people who has most been subject to deepfakes, often with very amusing results. In fact, the creators of South Park originally planned to make an entire movie out of their Sassy Justice (see below). Deep Fake: The Movie appears to be currently on hold, but this is a taster of what it might look like.

13. Obama's public service announcement

Many of the most convincing deepfake examples have been created with the help of impersonators that mimick the source's voice and gestures, just like this video produced by BuzzFeed and comedian Jordan Peele using After Effects CC and FakeApp. Peele's mouth was pasted over Obama's, replacing the former president's jawline with one that followed Peele's mouth movements. FakeApp was then used to refine the footage through more than 50 hours of automatic processing.

Politicians and celebrities are often the subjects of deepfakes. Less than a year before the above video, University of Washington computer scientists used neural network AI to model the shape of Obama's mouth and make it lip sync to audio input.

High-profile figures make for such perfect sources in deepfaking because their public profiles provide plenty of source material for an AI to learn from, but with the number of selfies the average person takes in a lifetime and rapid technological advances, perhaps soon anyone could be used as a source.

14. Zuckerberg speaks frankly

In response to Facebook's refusal to remove a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi, artist Bill Posters posted this deepfake on Facebook-owned Instagram, showing Mark Zuckerberg boasting of how the platform "owns" its users. Would Facebook react differently when its own founder was being manipulated?

The film originally formed part of Posters' and Daniel Howe's Spectre piece, which was commissioned for Sheffield Doc Fest to draw attention to how people can be manipulated by social media. It was made using Israeli startup Canny AI's VDR (video dialogue replacement) software, which it's promoted with a deepfake singalong starring various world leaders.

Instagram didn't take the Zuckerberg video down, but said it would, "treat this content the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram. If third-party fact checkers mark it as false, we will filter it." The posters had flagged it using the hashtag #deepfake. While the video is reasonably convincing on mute, the voice gives it away, showing that a good actor is still needed to make plausible deepfake examples (although AI voice synthesis has been advancing by leaps and bounds, so perhaps not for long).

15. Donald Trump lectures Belgium

Trump again! This one's an old one, but it's notable for having been the first example of a political party using a deepfake, Belgium's Socialistische Partij Anders (sp.a) posted this video on Facebook back in May 2018 showing Trump taunting Belgium for remaining in the Paris climate agreement. With Trump's hair looking even stranger than usual and the crude movement of the mouth, it's very clearly fake, and the voiceover says as much, though the final line "We all know that climate change is fake, just like this video," isn't subtitled in Flemish, but it was still enough to provoke one user to comment "Trumpy needs to look at his own country with its crazy child killers," and for sp.a to have to clarify it was fake.

A more convincing Trump (below) was later created by YouTuber Derpfakes, who trained DeepFaceLab to map a composite of Trump's face over Alec Baldwin's Saturday Night Live impersonation of him, showing how far the technology has come in a year. The video has been blocked in the US and Canada.

16. Dove's Toxic Advice deepfake

Here's an example of deepfakes being used by a major brand, and for a marketing campaign with a positive mission. Dove used deepfake technology to put very unlikely advice into the mouths of the mothers of teenage girls, the aim being to raise awareness of the negative impact of a lot of the dangerous 'beauty' advice shared by influencers on social media apps. In the campaign video, the participants sit mouths wide, clearly horrified by the distorted advice being given by their mums. Entitled Toxic Influence, the ad was created by Ogilvy.

17. Bill Hader morphs into Pacino and Schwarzenegger

If a great impersonation is the basis of a convincing deepfake then this video of actor and comedian Bill Hader morphing into Hollywood legends Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't fail. Although the team at Ctrl Shift Face aren't trying to trick anyone with this video, they do demonstrate how crucial it is to have an actor that can capture the mannerisms of your source. The subtle morphing of Hader's face into that of Pacino and then Schwarzenegger is slightly terrifying and completely hilarious.

18. Salvador Dalí comes back to life

Agency GS&P pulled off the kind of headline-grabbing stunt that the publicity-loving Dalí would have appreciated when they resurrected the Catalan artist as a charismatic host at the Dalí Museum in Florida. Billed as "art meets artificial intelligence", Dalí Lives was created by pulling more than 6,000 frames from old video interviews and processing them through 1,000 hours of machine learning before overlaying the source onto an actor's face. The text was comprised of quotes from interviews and letters with new commentary designed to help visitors empathise with the artist and relate to his work.

The novelty of this deepfake example is its interactivity. A total 45 minutes of footage split over 125 videos allows for more than 190,000 possible combinations depending on visitor responses and even includes comments on the weather. It finishes with Dalí turning around and snapping a selfie with his audience. Dalí claimed it was unlikely he would ever die, and maybe he was right, because he was brought to life a second time recently by Samsung's AI lab in Moscow, this time by training AI on landmark facial features from just a handful of images rather than the usual thousands.

19. The Volodymyr Zelensky deepfake

A deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons was reportedly uploaded to a hacked Ukrainian news website today, per @Shayan86 pic.twitter.com/tXLrYECGY4 March 16, 2022

Fortunately, most known deepfake examples online are clearly flagged as fake and are not intended to fool anyone. They're usually being played for laughs, for example, putting Nicolas Cage in every film ever produced, or at worst for sordid fantasy (deepfake celebrity porn through which the tech first took root has been banned). But there have been cases of people using deepfakes for nefarious ends and trying to pass them off as real.

This frightening example was broadcast on a hacked Ukrainian TV station barely a month into the Russian invasion of the country. It shows the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky ordering the country's troops to surrender to Russia. Although the quality is poor and it doesn't look very convincing, it's an example of why people are so concerned that deepfakes could be used to spread fake news.

20. Yang Mi travels in time

Back in 2019, a video pasting the face of Yang Mi, one of China's best-known contemporary actors into the 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.

Its creator, a fan of Yang Mi, issued an apology on microblogging site Weibo and said he'd made the video as a warning to raise awareness of the technology. We can actually see lots of possible uses of deepfakes for the film and television industry. It's also possible to see how the industry could eventually embrace the technology and turn it to profit by allowing viewers to play director on home releases, manipulating dialogue, incorporating alternative scenes or even inserting themselves as characters. We won't be surprised if we see a lot of video games with celebrity appearances too.
Read more:

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20 of the best deepfake examples that terrified and amused the internet

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These examples of the best deepfake examples prove how far technology has come, for better or for worse.

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יאיר לפיד והערבים - הסרטון שמסעיר את הרשת

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סרטון שנוצר בטכנולוגיה המכונה ”דיפ פייק”, בו נראה יאיר לפיד מבטיח למנות שני שרים ערבים בכירים, מסעיר את הרשת. הסרטון נחתם בקריאה לשיתוף פעולה יהודי ערבי, וגם: מי עומד מאחוריו?

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Spot on Al Pacino impression by Bill Hader [DeepFake]

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ערוצי תוכן

N12

פלילים+

סלבס

תרבות

TVbee

מוזיקה

ספורט

NEXTER

אוכל

נשים

LIVING

הורים

פז"ם

חופש

מגזין m

בריאות

הורוסקופ

כסף

Fashion Forward

HIX

גאווה

גרין

קנאביס רפואי

טק12

תכניות קשת 12

לוח שידורים

צפייה ישירה

+12

חדשות הבוקר

ארץ נהדרת

המטבח המנצח

נינג'ה ישראל 2022

אופירה וברקוביץ'

סברי מרנן

ערב טוב עם גיא פינס

הכוכב הבא

מונית הכסף

ארץ נהדרת

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חי בלילה

ערוץ 12 בשידור ישיר

שימושון

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שמות לבנים

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easy - חיפוש עסקים

מבצעים

פרסמו אצלנו

רואים רחוק

יוקר המחיה

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ליברמן מגיע לפגוש את המועדון - mako

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מתוך "מועדון לילה"

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האם ראית את האופק לאחרונה?

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Very realistic Tom Cruise Deepfake | AI Tom Cruise

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Jimmy Fallon as Donald Trump - The Tonight Show  (DeepFake)

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This is not Morgan Freeman  -  A Deepfake Singularity

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ThinkAutomation | Business Process Automation Software

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ThinkAutomation is a business process automation (BPA) solution designed to automate on-premises and cloud-based business processes that are triggered from incoming messages. Messages can be received by email, database records, webhooks, web forms, SMS messages, Teams messages, documents, local file…

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Il video deepfake di Zelensky che ordina agli ucraini di arrendersi

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Esther Yeshil

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This video shows deepfakes and rumors about the war between Russia and Ukraine one of the deepfakes shows that the shelves empty in the markit and there is lack of food ,but it's actually not , because ther is guy film the markit and it was full thats mean they try to deepfake a news to feel that they are in a bad stuatins onther deepfake shows that the prisdend of Ukranine talk to people that they will give up in the war but the prisdend immdetly share a video and said that us fake the reason of uasing deepfake its uaully on this station to disapoend people and to feel that the will lose the war and this is so helpful for enemy it is a bad phenomenon.  and its should be over .

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Deepfake of Zelenskyy Tells Ukrainian Troops to ‘Surrender’

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ספי ריבלין וציפי שביט בפרסומת שנעשתה תוך שימוש בטכנולוגיית דיפ פייק

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פורום מיכל סלה | Michal Sela Forum - הערוץ הרשמי  

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אני הייתי מיכל סלה - "הקשיבי בקולי"

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It’s Getting Harder to Spot a Deep Fake Video