‘Deepfakes’ Trigger a Race to Fight Manipulated Photos and Videos
‘Deepfakes’ Trigger a Race to Fight
Manipulated Photos and Videos
Startups and government agencies are researching ways
to combat doctored images ahead of the 2020 election
Getting Real and That's a Problem
By Abigail Summerville July
27, 2019 7:00 am ET
Startup companies, government agencies and academics are
racing to combat so-called deepfakes, amid fears that doctored videos and
photographs will be used to sow discord ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential
election.
It is a difficult problem to solve because the technology
needed to manipulate images is advancing rapidly and
getting easier to use, according to experts. And the threat is spreading, as
smartphones have made cameras ubiquitous and social media has turned
individuals into broadcasters, leaving companies that run those platforms
unsure how to handle the issue.
“While synthetically generated videos are still easily
detectable by most humans, that window is closing rapidly. I’d predict we see
visually undetectable deepfakes in less than 12 months,” said Jeffrey McGregor,
chief executive officer of Truepic, a San Diego-based startup that is
developing image-verification technology. “Society is going to start
distrusting every piece of content they see.”
Truepic is working with Qualcomm Inc. —the
biggest supplier of chips for mobile phones—to add its technology to the
hardware of cellphones. The technology would automatically mark photos and
videos when they are taken with data such as time and location, so that they
can be verified later. Truepic also offers a free app consumers can use to take
verified pictures on their smartphones.
The goal is to create a system similar to Twitter’s method of verifying accounts, but
for photos and videos, said Roy Azoulay, the founder and CEO of Serelay, a
U.K.-based startup that is also developing ways to stamp images as authentic
when they are taken.
When a photo or video is taken, Serelay can capture data
such as where the camera was in relation to cellphone towers or GPS satellites.
The company says it has partnerships with insurance companies that use the
technology to help verify damage claims, though it declined to name the firms.
The U.S. Defense Department, meanwhile, is researching
forensic technology that can be used to detect whether a photo or video was
manipulated after it was made.Serelay, a U.K.-based startup led by Roy Azoulay, is
developing ways to stamp images as authentic when they are taken. PHO
The idea behind the forensic approach is to look for
inconsistencies in pictures and videos that serve as clues to whether the
images have been manipulated—for example, inconsistent lighting, shadows and
camera noise.
Sophisticated deepfakes call for other forensic
strategies. Experts have found evidence of deepfakes by looking at
inconsistencies in facial expressions and head movements. They then try to
automate the process so that a computer algorithm can detect such
inconsistencies in pictures or videos.
The forensic method can be applied to decades-old photos
and videos, as well as those taken more recently with smartphones or digital
cameras. The point-of-capture method, by comparison, only works with images
taken with the technology.
Both strategies are necessary to tackle the deepfake
problem, said Matt Turek, who runs the media forensics program in the Defense
Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.
“I don’t think there’s one silver bullet algorithm or even
technical solution. There probably needs to be a holistic approach,” he said.
Deepfakes are becoming more difficult to detect as the
technology used to create them advances, said Hany Farid, a computer science
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has a financial stake
in Truepic and whose research on media forensics has been funded by Darpa.
The stakes are high. In extreme cases, Mr. Farid said, a
deepfake could trigger a military conflict or other real-life turmoil. “A fake
video of Jeff Bezos secretly saying that Amazon’s profits are down leads to a
massive stock manipulation,” he said, citing one possible scenario.
Mr. Farid said it is worrying that
social-media companies aren’t doing more to combat deepfakes, particularly in
the wake of Russian interference in
the 2016 presidential election, which Moscow has denied.
“These platforms have been weaponized, and these aren’t
hypothetical threats,” he said.
The House Intelligence Committee held a hearing last month
focused on countering the threat from
deepfakes. Members of Congress and experts suggested, among other
things, holding social-media companies liable for harmful material disseminated
over their platforms and putting warning labels on videos that can’t be
verified.
Last month, an altered video of Facebook Inc. Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg surfaced in which he appeared to question the
company’s data practices. That followed Facebook’s refusal to remove
a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which she appeared to slur her words.
In the wake of those incidents, Mr. Zuckerberg told an
audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month that Facebook is considering a
policy on how to handle deepfakes.
“There is a good case that deepfakes are different from
traditional misinformation,” he said, “just like spam is different from
traditional misinformation and should be treated differently.”
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