AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos

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Facebook and Twitter earlier this week took down social media accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that interfered in the U.S. presidential election four years ago, that had been spreading misinformation to up to 126 million Facebook users. Today, Facebook rolled out measures aimed at curbing disinformation ahead of Election Day in November. Deepfakes can make epic memes or put Nicholas Cage in every movie, but they can also undermine elections. As threats of election interference mount, two teams of AI researchers have recently introduced novel approaches to identifying deepfakes by watching for evidence of heartbeats.

Existing deepfake detection models focus on traditional media forensics methods, like tracking unnatural eyelid movements or distortions at the edge of the face. The first study for detection of unique GAN fingerprints was introduced in 2018. But photoplethysmography (PPG) translates visual cues such as how blood flow causes slight changes in skin color into a human heartbeat. Remote PPG applications are being explored in areas like health care, but PPG is also being used to identify deepfakes because generative models are not currently known to be able to mimic human blood movements.

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Online dating in a world of deepfakes

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Facebook has teamed up with the Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from Cornell Tech, MIT, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, College Park, and University at Albany–SUNY to build the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC).

Deepfake detection is an enduring arms race that will never end. In case you are wondering… no, this technology will not protect the 2020 election from deepfakes. No science is up to that task.

Facebook’s goal is to commission a realistic data set that will use paid actors, with the required consent obtained, to contribute to the challenge. This “benchmark data” will be used to help developers build better tools to detect deepfakes. Everyone should applaud this effort! As I’ve written about recently, deepfakes will be used extensively by both good and bad people.

Facebook also announced it was bringing its dating service to the U.S. after testing it in roughly 20 countries since its launch last year. These two stories may not seem to have much correlation at first glance. But when combined, they present a potential reality as sinister as it is deceitful. Imagine online dating in a world replete with deepfakes.

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Facebook is challenging researchers to build a deep fakes detector

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Why it makes sense to fight deepfakes with deepfakes.

Deepfakes are becoming so convincing that it’s hard to tell them from real videos. And that could soon spell disaster, eroding trust in what we see online.

That’s why Facebook is teaming up with a consortium of researchers from Microsoft and several prominent research universities for a “Deepfake Detection Challenge.”

The idea is to build a data set, with the help of human user input, that’ll help neural networks detect what is and isn’t a deepfake. The end result, if all goes well, will be a system that can reliably fake videos online.

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Thieves are now using AI deepfakes to trick companies into sending them money

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So AI crimes are a thing now

It seems like every few days there’s another example of a convincing deepfake going viral or another free, easy-to-use piece of software (some even made for mobile) that can generate convincing video or audio that’s designed to trick someone into believing a piece of virtual artifice is real. But according to The Wall Street Journal, there may soon be serious financial and legal ramifications to the proliferation of deepfake technology.

The publication reported last week that a UK energy company’s chief executive was tricked into wiring €200,000 (or about $220,000 USD) to a Hungarian supplier because he believed his boss was instructing him to do so. But the energy company’s insurance firm, Euler Hermes Group SA, told the WSJ that a clever AI-equipped fraudster was using deepfake software to mimic the voice of the executive and demand his underling pay him within the hour.

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New deepfake tech turns a single photo and audio file into a singing video portrait

 

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Another day, another deepfake: but this time they can sing.

 Finally, technology that can make Rasputin sing like Beyoncé

New research from Imperial College in London and Samsung’s AI research center in the UK shows how a single photo and audio file can be used to generate a singing or talking video portrait. Like previous deepfake programs we’ve seen, the researchers uses machine learning to generate their output. And although the fakes are far from 100 percent realistic, the results are amazing considering how little data is needed.

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Adobe’s prototype AI tool automatically spots Photoshopped faces

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An example of a manipulated photo, the defects spotted by the algorithm, and the original image. Credit: Adobe

 

Though it’s just a research project for the moment.

The world is becoming increasingly anxious about the spread of fake videos and pictures, and Adobe — a name synonymous with edited imagery — says it shares those concerns. Today, it’s sharing new research in collaboration with scientists from UC Berkeley that uses machine learning to automatically detect when images of faces have been manipulated.

It’s the latest sign the company is committing more resources to this problem. Last year its engineers created an AI tool that detects edited media created by splicing, cloning, and removing objects.

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‘Deepfakes’ called new election threat, with no easy fix

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WASHINGTON (AP) — “Deepfake” videos pose a clear and growing threat to America’s national security, lawmakers and experts say. The question is what to do about it, and that’s not easily answered.

A House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday served up a public warning about the deceptive powers of artificial intelligence software and offered a sobering assessment of how fast the technology is outpacing efforts to stop it.

With a crudely altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., fresh on everyone’s minds, lawmakers heard from experts how difficult it will be to combat these fakes and prevent them from being used to interfere in the 2020 election.

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This animated Mona Lisa was created by AI, and it’s terrifying

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A new type of artificial intelligence can generate a “living portrait” from just one image. Original Image

The enigmatic, painted smile of the “Mona Lisa” is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI).

In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as she moves her lips and turns her head. She was created by a convolutional neural network — a type of AI that processes information much as a human brain does, to analyze and process images.

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Carnegie Mellon researchers create the most convincing deepfakes yet

Ever heard of “deepfakes”? Videos generated with artificial intelligence (AI) that learn to superimpose the face of one person onto the body of another have been used to swap Harrison Ford for Nicolas Cage in countless movie clips, and for far more nefarious purposes, like fake celebrity porn and propaganda. Now, for better or worse, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new AI system that’s more powerful — and versatile — than previous attempts.

It’s called “Recycle-GAN,” and the team described it as an “unsupervised, data-driven approach” for transferring the content of one video or photo to another. “Such a content translation and style preservation task has numerous applications, including human motion and face translation from one person to other, teaching robots from human demonstration,” the researchers wrote, “or converting black-and-white videos to color.”

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