Hany Farid, a leading expert on image and video manipulation, says that detecting deepfakes will take more than AI alone.
Several Fortune 500 businesses have started experimenting with technologies designed to identify deepfakes of genuine people during live video calls. This move comes after a wave of frauds wherein fraudulent job applicants abscond with signing bonuses. GetReal Labs, a recently established firm led by UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid, a recognized expert on deepfakes and image and video manipulation, is the source of the detecting algorithm.
A set of tools for identifying images, audio, and video that are created or altered by manual or artificial intelligence approaches has been developed by GetReal Labs.The software developed by the company can examine a video caller’s face and look for indicators that would suggest it was created artificially and then superimposed on a genuine person’s body. According to Farid, “We’ve been hearing about these attacks more and more; they’re not hypothetical.”
There are instances where it appears they are seeking to enter the company and obtain intellectual property. In other instances, it appears to be entirely financial—they simply keep the signing bonus. In 2022, the FBI released a warning on deepfake job seekers who pose as actual people over video talks.
Arup, a UK-based engineering and design firm, lost $25 Million to a deepfake scammer posing as the company’s CFO. Romance scammers have also adopted the technology, swindling unsuspecting victims out of their savings.
GetReal Labs also uses several AI models, trained to distinguish between real and fake images and video, to flag likely forgeries.
Other tools, a mix of AI and traditional forensics, help a user scrutinize an image for visual and physical discrepancies, for example highlighting shadows that point in different directions despite having the same light source, or that do not appear to match the object that cast them.
With significant potential to poison political discourse, Farid notes that media manipulation can be considered a more challenging problem. “I can reset my computer or buy a new one,” he says. “But the poisoning of the human mind is an existential threat to our democracy.”
