Deepfakes, digitally manipulated images, or videos where artificial intelligence and deep learning are implemented to replace a person’s face or voice with a targeted face to deceive people. Deepfakes have taken the digital world by storm, offering exciting opportunities and provoking alarming threats. The rapid surge in the extensive deployment of deepfake technology can be witnessed by a tenfold increase taking place from 2022 to 2023, indicating how fast the technology is evolving. Deploying deepfake detection strategies is crucial to stay ahead of the curve and fight against rising threats.What are Deepfakes and How they Work?
Deepfakes are a complex blend of two words ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake media’, it’s a digital manipulation strategy where the faces or voices of the targeted individuals are swapped, creating highly realistic digital personas truly resembling the targeted identities. Some deepfakes are harmful and offer beneficial applications in media, art & entertainment while others are solely generated for malicious purposes.
Deepfakes are often used to impersonate influential people or higher executives to get illegitimate access into systems or dupe unsuspecting people. Just recently, a finance worker in Hong Kong was duped into transferring $25.6 million to a fraudulent account, where fraudsters lured the employee posing to be the CEO of the company.
Artificial intelligence and deep learning models are largely employed to generate highly realistic and convincing manipulated identities. Deep learning, involves Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which are trained on diverse datasets of identities and are employed to construct convincing faces. GANs comprise of two parts namely generator and discriminator. The generator successfully alters the faces with the targeted identity and the discriminator evaluates the effectiveness of deepfakes. This complex process is repeated continually until the discriminator fails to distinguish between real and fake.
Are Deepfakes Illegal? A Closer Look
It’s hard and tricky to channel whether deepfakes are legal or not. Understanding the legal status of deepfakes is challenging and concerning. The creation of manipulated digital content doesn’t evade law but using deepfakes for illicit purposes such as stealing intellectual property, committing crime, harassing, or invading privacy rights is against certain laws. Governments and regulatory bodies stress to maintain the integrity of sensitive information and there are laws governing the responsible use of confidential information, but there are no such laws limiting the creation of deepfakes. Most deepfakes generated for malicious purposes are constructed without individuals' consent, circumventing privacy rights.
Dark Side of Deepfake Technology: Misuses & Threats
The roots of deepfake technology can be traced back to the 1990s, however technological developments and the advent of deep learning have propelled the technology to new heights, offering easier and effortless ways to generate highly realistic deepfakes. As deepfakes appear highly convincing, it’s hard to distinguish between genuine and fake content. The potential of deepfake technology for misuse is quietly alarming, requiring users as well as businesses to stay watchful and implement stringent deepfake detection online.
Deepfakes are created to spread information, manipulate people’s perceptions, sway elections, or damage victims' reputational image. Predominantly, deepfakes are created to disseminate pornographic material without asking for explicit consent. Women are the obvious target of porn deepfakes and this threat is growing with each passing day. It is reported that a single case of porn deepfake video was recorded in 2016, however, the number drastically soared in 2023, reaching 143, 733.
It's essential to know that deepfakes don’t just harm victims at individual levels but also disturb the financial integrity, causing victims to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Deepfake Detection & Prevention: How to Flag Fake Identities
The potential of deepfake images or videos can’t be overlooked, to curb this threat, researchers and policy are joining heads to establish sophisticated deepfake detection technology. The effectiveness of deepfake detection needs to be accelerated as deepfakes are getting more sophisticated day by day with technological developments. Individuals can actively flag fabricated identities by staying alert and paying heed to minute details.
Look for inconsistencies or abnormal movements, undoubtedly deepfakes appear highly realistic but they can’t exactly mimic human behavior or movements. The presence of irregular movements or deviating behavior flags the existence of deepfakes.
Minutely evaluate the synchronization between the voice and movements of the person speaking in the video and validate the authenticity of the information before trusting or sharing. Noticeable mismatches or delays in the movements or discrepancies alarm the presence of manipulated videos.
Final Thoughts
Staying cautious can help you evade deepfakes, however, it’s crucial to deploy sophisticated deepfake detection technology that can flag deceptive identities in real time. AI-powered deepfake detection solutions are highly accurate and detect anomalies in a matter of seconds, as they are trained on many identities. Furthermore, integrating biometric liveness detection into facial recognition technology can facilitate businesses to flag manipulated identities and restrict their entry into systems timely.
