Board directors and CEO’s need to increase their knowledge of Deep Fakes and develop risk management strategies to protect their companies. Deepfakes are videos or images that often feature people who have been digitally altered, whether it be their voice, face or body, so that they appear to be “saying” something else or are someone else entirely.
You may recall the trickery of the video in 2019 showing Tesla cars crashing into a robot at tech convention causing havoc or of Wayfair false information involved in child sex trafficking through the sale of industrial cabinets. Even Mark Zuckerberg has been inflicted by deep fakes from a video where he was allegedly thanking U.S. legislators for their inaction on antitrust issues.
Unfortunately, deep fakes are incredibly easy to produce having gone mainstream and with AI, there are even more accelerated risks to plan for.
PWC has gone of record that there are specific times companies are particularly vulnerable to deep fakes or often referred to as disinformation campaigns during public offerings, merger and acquisition transactions, major organizational announcements – all create opportunities where fraudsters to cause havoc and impact a company’s reputation.
Social engineering using deep fake methods can carry out targeted phishing attacks (spear phishing) to gain information and data. An attacker can also use this technology to carry out fraud and siphon off financial resources.
MIT bas built an amazing Detect Fakes website which is a research project designed to identify techniques to counteract AI-generated misinformation and to advise commpanies on what to look out for in identifying deep fakes.
- Pay attention to the face. High-end DeepFake manipulations are almost always facial transformations.
- Pay attention to the cheeks and forehead. Does the skin appear too smooth or too wrinkly? Is the agedness of the skin similar to the agedness of the hair and eyes? DeepFakes may be incongruent on some dimensions.
- Pay attention to the eyes and eyebrows. Do shadows appear in places that you would expect? DeepFakes may fail to fully represent the natural physics of a scene.
- Pay attention to the glasses. Is there any glare? Is there too much glare? Does the angle of the glare change when the person moves? Once again, DeepFakes may fail to fully represent the natural physics of lighting.
- Pay attention to the facial hair or lack thereof. Does this facial hair look real? DeepFakes might add or remove a mustache, sideburns, or beard. But, DeepFakes may fail to make facial hair transformations fully natural.
- Pay attention to facial moles. Does the mole look real?
- Pay attention to blinking. Does the person blink enough or too much?
- Pay attention to the lip movements. Some deepfakes are based on lip syncing. Do the lip movements look natural?
These eight questions are intended to help guide people looking through DeepFakes. High-quality DeepFakes are not easy to discern, but with practice, people can build intuition for identifying what is fake and what is real.
You can also practice trying to detect DeepFakes at Detect Fakes.
Note:
CNN has an excellent summary of deepfakes and explains how they are made.
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Eugen Boglaru is an AI aficionado covering the fascinating and rapidly advancing field of Artificial Intelligence. From machine learning breakthroughs to ethical considerations, Eugen provides readers with a deep dive into the world of AI, demystifying complex concepts and exploring the transformative impact of intelligent technologies.
