Commoditisation of AI, digital forgery and the end of trust: how we can fix it · giorgio patrini

Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy

<p>Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection. Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors.</p><p>While deep-fake technology will bring certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace of ideas already suffers from truth decay as our networked information environment interacts in toxic ways with our cognitive biases. Deep fakes will exacerbate this problem significantly. Individuals and businesses will face novel forms of exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage. The risks to our democracy and to national security are profound as well.</p><p>Our aim is to provide the first in-depth assessment of the causes and consequences of this disruptive technological change, and to explore the existing and potential tools for responding to it. We survey a broad array of responses, including: the role of technological solutions; criminal penalties, civil liability, and regulatory action; military and covert-action responses; economic sanctions; and market developments. We cover the waterfront from immunities to immutable authentication trails, offering recommendations to improve law and policy and anticipating the pitfalls embedded in various solutions.</p>

Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy

<p>Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection. Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors.</p><p>While deep-fake technology will bring certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace of ideas already suffers from truth decay as our networked information environment interacts in toxic ways with our cognitive biases. Deep fakes will exacerbate this problem significantly. Individuals and businesses will face novel forms of exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage. The risks to our democracy and to national security are profound as well.</p><p>Our aim is to provide the first in-depth assessment of the causes and consequences of this disruptive technological change, and to explore the existing and potential tools for responding to it. We survey a broad array of responses, including: the role of technological solutions; criminal penalties, civil liability, and regulatory action; military and covert-action responses; economic sanctions; and market developments. We cover the waterfront from immunities to immutable authentication trails, offering recommendations to improve law and policy and anticipating the pitfalls embedded in various solutions.</p>

Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security — California Law Review

Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating th

AI Fakes Spread Disinformation. Is the Distrust They Create Even Worse?

Manipulated images undermine our shared reality—and the democracy built upon it.

Deepfake detection by human crowds, machines, and machine-informed crowds

Significance The recent emergence of deepfake videos raises theoretical and practical questions. Are humans or the leading machine learning model more capable of detecting algorithmic visual manipulations of videos? How should content moderation systems be designed to detect and flag video-based misinformation? We present data showing that ordinary humans perform in the range of the leading machine learning model on a large set of minimal context videos. While we find that a system integrating human and model predictions is more accurate than either humans or the model alone, we show inaccurate model predictions often lead humans to incorrectly update their responses. Finally, we demonstrate that specialized face processing and the ability to consider context may specially equip humans for deepfake detection. , The recent emergence of machine-manipulated media raises an important societal question: How can we know whether a video that we watch is real or fake? In two online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary human observers with the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find them similarly accurate, while making different kinds of mistakes. Together, participants with access to the model’s prediction are more accurate than either alone, but inaccurate model predictions often decrease participants’ accuracy. To probe the relative strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines as detectors of deepfakes, we examine human and machine performance across video-level features, and we evaluate the impact of preregistered randomized interventions on deepfake detection. We find that manipulations designed to disrupt visual processing of faces hinder human participants’ performance while mostly not affecting the model’s performance, suggesting a role for specialized cognitive capacities in explaining human deepfake detection performance.

Deepfake detection by human crowds, machines, and machine-informed crowds

Significance The recent emergence of deepfake videos raises theoretical and practical questions. Are humans or the leading machine learning model more capable of detecting algorithmic visual manipulations of videos? How should content moderation systems be designed to detect and flag video-based misinformation? We present data showing that ordinary humans perform in the range of the leading machine learning model on a large set of minimal context videos. While we find that a system integrating human and model predictions is more accurate than either humans or the model alone, we show inaccurate model predictions often lead humans to incorrectly update their responses. Finally, we demonstrate that specialized face processing and the ability to consider context may specially equip humans for deepfake detection. , The recent emergence of machine-manipulated media raises an important societal question: How can we know whether a video that we watch is real or fake? In two online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary human observers with the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find them similarly accurate, while making different kinds of mistakes. Together, participants with access to the model’s prediction are more accurate than either alone, but inaccurate model predictions often decrease participants’ accuracy. To probe the relative strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines as detectors of deepfakes, we examine human and machine performance across video-level features, and we evaluate the impact of preregistered randomized interventions on deepfake detection. We find that manipulations designed to disrupt visual processing of faces hinder human participants’ performance while mostly not affecting the model’s performance, suggesting a role for specialized cognitive capacities in explaining human deepfake detection performance.

Exploring Frequency Adversarial Attacks for Face Forgery Detection

Various facial manipulation techniques have drawn seri-ous public concerns in morality, security, and privacy. Al- though existing face forgery classifiers achieve promising performance on detecting fake images, these methods are vulnerable to adversarial examples with injected impercep- tible perturbations on the pixels. Meanwhile, many face forgery detectors always utilize the frequency diversity be-tween real and fake faces as a crucial clue. In this paper, in- stead of injecting adversarial perturbations into the spatial domain, we propose a frequency adversarial attack method against face forgery detectors. Concretely, we apply dis-crete cosine transform (DCT) on the input images and in-troduce a fusion module to capture the salient region of ad-versary in the frequency domain. Compared with existing adversarial attacks (e.g. FGSM, PGD) in the spatial do-main, our method is more imperceptible to human observers and does not degrade the visual quality of the original images. Moreover, inspired by the idea of meta-learning, we also propose a hybrid adversarial attack that performs at-tacks in both the spatial and frequency domains. Exten-sive experiments indicate that the proposed method fools not only the spatial-based detectors but also the state-of- the-art frequency-based detectors effectively. In addition, the proposed frequency attack enhances the transferability across face forgery detectors as black-box attacks.

Exploring Frequency Adversarial Attacks for Face Forgery Detection

Various facial manipulation techniques have drawn seri-ous public concerns in morality, security, and privacy. Al- though existing face forgery classifiers achieve promising performance on detecting fake images, these methods are vulnerable to adversarial examples with injected impercep- tible perturbations on the pixels. Meanwhile, many face forgery detectors always utilize the frequency diversity be-tween real and fake faces as a crucial clue. In this paper, in- stead of injecting adversarial perturbations into the spatial domain, we propose a frequency adversarial attack method against face forgery detectors. Concretely, we apply dis-crete cosine transform (DCT) on the input images and in-troduce a fusion module to capture the salient region of ad-versary in the frequency domain. Compared with existing adversarial attacks (e.g. FGSM, PGD) in the spatial do-main, our method is more imperceptible to human observers and does not degrade the visual quality of the original images. Moreover, inspired by the idea of meta-learning, we also propose a hybrid adversarial attack that performs at-tacks in both the spatial and frequency domains. Exten-sive experiments indicate that the proposed method fools not only the spatial-based detectors but also the state-of- the-art frequency-based detectors effectively. In addition, the proposed frequency attack enhances the transferability across face forgery detectors as black-box attacks.

AI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of War

Online AI image detecting tools that may or may not work are labeling real photographs from the war in Israel and Palestine as fake, creating what a world leading expert called a “second level of disinformation.”

People are trying to claim real videos are deepfakes. The courts are not amused

The unleashing of powerful, generative AI on the public is raising concerns that as the technology becomes more prevalent, it will become easier to claim that anything is fake.

Identifying AI-generated images with SynthID

Today, in partnership with Google Cloud, we’re beta launching SynthID, a new tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. It’s being released to a limited number of Vertex AI customers using Imagen, one of our latest text-to-image models that uses input text to create photorealistic images. This technology embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification. While generative AI can unlock huge creative potential, it also presents new risks, like creators spreading false information — both intentionally or unintentionally. Being able to identify AI-generated content is critical to empowering people with knowledge of when they’re interacting with generated media, and for helping prevent the spread of misinformation.

How to tell if an image is AI-generated

Scammers are using AI-generated images to make fake stories more convincing. Here's how to separate real from fake.

Deepfakes, Scams, and the Age of Paranoia

As AI-driven fraud becomes increasingly common, more people feel the need to verify every interaction they have online.

AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy

Artificial intelligence (AI)–synthesized text, audio, image, and video are being weaponized for the purposes of nonconsensual intimate imagery, financial fraud, and disinformation campaigns. Our evaluation of the photorealism of AI-synthesized faces indicates that synthesis engines have passed through the uncanny valley and are capable of creating faces that are indistinguishable—and more trustworthy—than real faces.

AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy

Artificial intelligence (AI)–synthesized text, audio, image, and video are being weaponized for the purposes of nonconsensual intimate imagery, financial fraud, and disinformation campaigns. Our evaluation of the photorealism of AI-synthesized faces indicates that synthesis engines have passed through the uncanny valley and are capable of creating faces that are indistinguishable—and more trustworthy—than real faces.