- Microsoft has released a new software tool that detects deepfakes ahead of the 2020 Presidential election.
- “Microsoft Video Authenticator” provides confidence scores that show how likely it is a third party has manipulated a given piece of media.
- Microsoft is partnering with a coalition of news organizations to pilot the new tech.
With two months to go until the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, Microsoft has introduced a new tool to help spot deepfakes, or media that has been manipulated with artificial intelligence. These kinds of photos, videos, and audio recordings appear in disinformation campaigns, making them a hindrance for politicians, regulators, and the public.
➡ Don’t let tech trick you. Master your digital world with best-in-class explainers and unlimited access to Pop Mech, starting NOW.
In a blog post this week, Microsoft said “in the short run, such as the upcoming U.S. election, advanced detection technologies can be a useful tool to help discerning users identify deepfakes.”
Microsoft Video Authenticator searches for tiny discrepancies in the images, videos, or audio in question, which only computers can “see.” In visual deepfakes, for example, the system detects “blending boundaries,” or grayscale elements and subtle fading that are usually invisible to the human eye.
With each deepfake, someone has engineered a piece of media to take the image or video out of context, making it look or sound like a person has said things they haven’t said, or appeared in places they haven’t been.
In 2014, Ian Goodfellow, a Ph.D. student who now works at Apple, invented the deepfake, which is based on generative adversarial networks, or GANs. These can help algorithms move beyond the simple task of classifying data into the arena of creating data—in this case, images. This happens when two GANs try to fool each other into thinking an image is real. Using as little as one image, a tried-and-tested GAN can create a video clip of, say, Richard Nixon.
This content is imported from Third party. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
It’s easy to see how bad actors can use the technology to sway political opinion. Last year, for example, a viral video of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, circulated around social media. In it, she appeared to be slurring in some sort of a nonsensical, drunken soliloquy. President Donald Trump shared that video on Twitter—but it wasn’t real. It was a deepfake.
Microsoft Video Authenticator analyzes these kinds of images and videos and assigns them a confidence score (computer science talk for a percentage chance) that shows how likely it is that someone has manipulated that piece of media.
“In the case of a video, it can provide this percentage in real-time on each frame as the video plays,” Microsoft said in its blog post.
Still, despite the technical prowess, this is only a Band-Aid solution. Inevitably, as these detection tools roll out, bad actors will come up with new ways to build deepfakes that fly beneath the radar.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
“Thus, in the longer term, we must seek stronger methods for maintaining and certifying the authenticity of news articles and other media,” Microsoft wrote. “There are few tools today to help assure readers that the media they’re seeing online came from a trusted source and that it wasn’t altered.”
Earlier this year, in a bid to stop the spread of disinformation, social media platforms began to take steps to ban deepfakes. But again, these are steps—not leaps or bounds.
In January, Facebook said it was making new efforts to “remove misleading manipulated media” from the platform. However, Facebook lets satire and parody videos slide through the cracks—notably, that Pelosi video doesn’t seem to violate its new deepfake policy. TikTok and Twitter have similar policies, which mostly amount to labeling the potentially misleading photos or videos, or reducing their visibility in the feed.
Taking matters into its own hands, Microsoft is partnering with a coalition of news organizations, including The New York Times and the BBC, to introduce new tech that ensures all content the public is digesting is actually authentic.
Content producers can add digital hashes, which are a sequence of letters and numbers that act like a unique “fingerprint” for the content, as well as certificates, that will live on as metadata wherever those photos or videos go. Plus, a reader that functions like a browser extension checks those certificates and hashes so the public can be certain what they’re viewing is authentic.
This is undoubtedly a positive step, but it’s a reminder that you should always double- and triple-check the information you’re consuming. If you can’t verify a photo or video is real from a trusted source, assume the worst.
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
