Deepfakes Impact on News and Media
Have you seen the video of Tom Cruise dancing on a lawn in a bathrobe to the remix of Lady Gaga’s song “Bloody Mary”?
Have you seen Keanu Reeves dancing in the kitchen on TikTok? Then you’ve seen a deepfake.
A deepfake is a machine-learning algorithm that manipulates photos, audio, or video. One aspect of the algorithm is trained on the attributes of a face, expressions, and voice to create an artificial version of the person it is studying. With deepfake videos, these steps go further to swap the AI version of person A onto person B pretending to be person A, as seen in the Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves TikTok videos.
What’s terrifying about this technology is that it has become easier to deceive people and create false narratives that can spread like wildfire across social media and the news. For example, fake photos of Donald Trump resisting arrest went viral on social media last year in March. In May 2023, a generated AI image of an explosion at the Pentagon went viral. At the end of August of 2023, there were scam videos of Elon Musk encouraging an investment in a cryptocurrency that didn’t exist. This year, Russia’s NTV aired a deepfake video blaming Ukraine for the bombing of Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22.
Besides spreading false stories, there is another sinister problem. Deepfakes encourage pornography. According to Deeptrace, a cybersecurity company in Amsterdam, they discovered that 96% of deepfakes online were pornographic in 2019. Only 4% were non-pornographic. Despite the main targets of these videos being female entertainers, I stopped posting pictures of my nieces and nephews on Instagram when I heard of this research. If I ever post images of my family again, they won’t be recognizable. The photos will be similar to the one below:
Photo by K. M. Wisener
With these stories of falsifying someone and events, I wanted to try how easy it is to create a false image of a person. Below is a generated AI image created with the help of DreamStudio. It’s of President Joe Biden wearing a pink tutu and participating in a dance with middle-aged women on the White House lawn.
A generative AI image of Joe Biden wearing a pink tutu, created using DreamStudio
Although it’s easy to notice that the image I generated through DreamStudio above is fake, there are some images and videos that are more difficult to spot, such as this video of Barack Obama talking about deepfakes:
There are key ways to identify if something is a deepfake or not. MIT Media Lab made a list of what to look for in an image or video. Some of the elements on the list consisted of blinking duration, facial shadows, and lip movement. With these tools and awareness, we can protect ourselves against false narratives of events and people.