Deepfakes - a Weapon for good or bad

As technology continues to advance, it becomes increasingly important to develop strategies to detect and mitigate the negative impacts of deepfakes while also leveraging AI for positive applications. These AI-generated forgeries can make people appear to say or do things they never did, posing a significant threat in several areas:

Deepfakes have raised significant concerns regarding their potential for misuse, including spreading misinformation, fabricating evidence, and violating privacy rights. While they can be used for harmless entertainment purposes, their ability to convincingly manipulate media has prompted calls for increased regulation and awareness of their implications.

Deepfakes represent a form of manipulated media, combining ‘deep learning’ with ‘fake.’ Utilizing artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques, deepfakes involve altering or superimposing content onto existing images, videos, or audio recordings to create convincing yet entirely fabricated scenes.

These manipulations often employ auto-encoder convolutional neural networks, which compress input images before reconstruction, or Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), an unsupervised deep learning algorithm. GANs consist of a generator, which reproduces a specific person’s face, and a discriminator, which identifies flaws in the generated image, leading to iterative improvement until flaws are minimal.

Recently, Cadbury used hyper-personalization as an initiative to make the famous Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan a brand ambassador for small businesses. Videos were created by mixing a deepfake version of the actor along with some shots recorded for the campaign. Now companies like ‘True Fans’ are using hyper-personalization to send customized messages on special occasions at a cost.

Technology is advancing every day and moment, while there are several deepfake detectors which are available for checking the authenticity of videos such as DeepWare, DeepIdentify, Sensity, FakeBuster by Intel, Kroop AI’s detector, Sensity is recommended as it has a high level of accuracy.

Going forward, Deepfakes are a powerful tool, and like any tool, they can be used for good or bad. By being aware of the dangers and taking steps to mitigate them, we can ensure that deepfakes don't become a weapon that undermines democracy and trust in information.