Stopping deepfake news with an AI algorithm that can tell when a face doesnt fit

https://spie.org/news/stopping-deepfake-news-with-an-ai-algorithm-that-can-tell-when-a-face-doesnt-fit

by rustoo • 6 years ago

146 100 6 years ago

turblety• 6 years ago

Now we can use this new AI to train another AI that can defeat it. And so continues the great cat vs mouse chase.

I don't think this is a problem that is ever going to be solved. Deep fakes will become more and more popular, and harder to detect.

IgorPartola• 6 years ago

I feel like it’s time to bring in Heinlein’s Fair Witness concept: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fair%20Witne...

If you think about it, when we had relatively few journalists and their reputation was on the line with every story they wrote they in a way were fair witnesses. Since we have moved to a hybrid model of professional journalists and a huge caste of YouTubers, podcasters, bloggers, and twitters, it has become impossible to hold everyone to a high journalistic standard. At the same time Fox News has brought on an era of politicized news so the bias is now inherent. Maybe if we had a few hundred fair witnesses that offered a professional service we could have a way to verify facts. Then again, it’s one thing to have a fair witness present facts, it’s another to have that witness’s likeness be deep faked and broadcast all over the web saying something they didn’t actually say.

Another solution may be regulatory: anyone broadcasting a deep fake with a huge disclaimer that it is a fake gets a 20% of their net worth fine. Draconian but I can see it working.

ben_w2• 6 years ago

We need something, but Fair Witnesses seem both exploitable and unachievable given the way human memories work.

amelius2• 6 years ago

Antibiotics resistance is also a cat and mouse game. It's still useful to keep playing the game though.

sildur2• 6 years ago

The difference is that all the bacteria can become resistant to the antibiotic soon after it is created.

nottorp• 6 years ago

Ref:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

Robert Sheckley's Watchbird

formerly_proven• 6 years ago

Isn't this the idea of getting better results using the adversarial network approach? So this would be inherently ill-suited to stopping deepfake news, yeah?

DarthGhandi• 6 years ago

it's great at making them better, yes

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

If the people trying to stop deepfakes can do it so can the people trying to produce them anyway. The best we can do is some way of digitally signing videos and software displays it as authentic or not but then they just make fake youtube style sites that say its authentic. The problem will go on and on.... Fake news will always spread for one reason or the next.

harryf• 6 years ago

Seems like an AI arms race just begun

jcims• 6 years ago

It's just a slobbering infant trying to roll off the bed at this point.

The battleground of what is real and fake will very quickly move into 'superhuman' realms of sensitivity, leaving us meaty minions as spectators trying to figure out which AI to trust.

tersers• 6 years ago

I used the AI to destroy the AI

nolaspring• 6 years ago

Someone just found the other half of their deep fake GAN

JimiofEden• 6 years ago

This seems like test driven development, but applied on a much larger scale.

alkonaut• 6 years ago

This seems like it’s “adversarial” to deep fakes. I wonder what that can be used for.

guscost• 6 years ago

Cool tech, but most people will have tuned out what we know as "the news" (or become jaded to its purpose beyond entertainment) before a tool like this is necessary.

chiefalchemist• 6 years ago

AI novice here. It would seem to me that the detection algorithm can be repurposed into making the original less detectable. A recursion that never ends. An advantage quickly becomes disadvantage.

Worse. All information - even facts and truth - has been subverted. What happens when there is no trust? Is this not a road to the New Darker Ages?

1f60c• 6 years ago

That's what I'm thinking. I don't want to diminish the value of this research, but this cat-and-mouse game is like a GAN[0] with extra steps.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

yes_man• 6 years ago

The problem will increasingly be "whose algorithm do we believe". Internet has revealed that people believe mostly what they want to. We have seen that a large subset of people are believing Bill Gates is behind the pandemic. Why would masses somehow be more rational in picking the most rigorous and objective neural network to recognize deepfakes, than they are in making sense of the world in general? In the end we will have multiple competing entities claiming to have the best deepfake recognition, all with their own agenda

ericlewis2• 6 years ago

I think religion might have proved that people will believe whatever they want to first. The book Sapiens really opened my eyes to people.

paulryanrogers2• 6 years ago

Well it took me 35 years but I escaped religion despite being indoctrinated from a young age. And leaving was a difficult choice but education and evidence were the keys that freed me.

Piercing cognitive biases is hard, maybe harder if those most in need feel forced.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 6 years ago

This is on point, but we need to be clear on the direction of causality, which I believe you have correct, though I'll try to state it more clearly:

The human mind and body is predisposed for social cohesion through shared narrative, and this exposed a weakness in our psychology: we are, as groups, extraordinarily gullible.

As a result we have religion, conspiracy theories, politics, and crime.

It remains to be seen whether this is an evolutionarily fit strategy.

Erlich_Bachman3• 6 years ago

This is a very low-resolution understanding of what a religion is. It has much more depth to it. (The writer of Sapiens actively tries to ignore this by reducing every single belief humans have (including religions) to random meme propagation.)

justforyou• 6 years ago

> people will believe whatever they want to first.

Including Harari. There's more wrong in that book than there is right, aside from basic facts that people should already know.

Chriatopher Ryan (Civilized to Death & Sex at Dawn) explores the few compelling points made by Sapiens in depth and without all of the disingenuity and naive philosphy present in Sapiens.

fny• 6 years ago

Because YouTube, Facebook will flag these videos before they become too widespread.

pornel• 6 years ago

You're missing a sarcasm mark.

But seriously: at best it's going to be a big "maybe, it depends". These services bounce between PR disasters of "complicit purveyors of propaganda" and "oppressive algorithms destroying free speech", so you can't rely on them to be on either side.

As deepfakes get better, the algorithms will have worse detection rate, so it'll end with Zuck testifying to congress that Facebook doesn't want to decide what is real, so everyone can post deepfakes all day long.

puranjay3• 6 years ago

A video being taken down just corroborates their belief that there is some deep conspiracy behind X event

travisoneill1• 6 years ago

"I trust Google and FB, and I would like them to decide what is true or not for me instead of deciding myself"

xiphias22• 6 years ago

Aren't digital signatures the best solution we have for this problem?

Commercial entities want to have the priviledge of being able to modify the content submitted by content creators, but the culture of trusting i.e. Twitter over client verification needs to change.

korla• 6 years ago

If the technology is too hard to understand for the masses it's unlikely to provide much resistance to desinformation campaigns.

gruez2• 6 years ago

Digital signatures would only match of the contents match bit for bit. This means that you can't recompress/remux/resize the video. This will probably provide a very poor ux for mobile or other bandwidth limited users. Also, if the video was used as part of another video (eg. TV broadcast), you'd either have to splice the digitally signed video into your existing stream (not modifying the bits at all), or provide the digitally signed original as an appendix. In either case, you'll need tooling to make verification easy, which doesn't exist today.

Nasrudith4• 6 years ago

Signing it doesn't mean it wasn't altered at some point and does nothing to actually verify the content - only if a source is who they say they are. And the key distribution is another issue.

nl• 6 years ago

Digital signatures are so far away from a solution for this problem they might as well be in a different universe.

One of the main ways people share content is by screenshotting it on their phone, or literally taking a photo of a computer screen with their mobile. Good luck using a digital signature to solve that.

biophysboy2• 6 years ago

This is absolutely right. I've become frustrated with people trying to fight misinformation by just telling anonymous strangers "facts". Algorithms are not going to help win the argument. There are a lot of people who hate those who they perceive to be "elite technocrats". And its not completely unwarranted!

Its a really tricky challenge. The "steady state" of conversations online is mutual distrust. Unless we handle this underlying issue, clever algorithms like this will be ignored.

slg• 6 years ago

I'm reminded of the Jonathan Swift quote:

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

The problem that specifically deepfakes and generally fake news highlights is that the general public does not have the aptitude, knowledge, time, or motivation to be a true arbiter of facts. We have traditionally outsourced that role to journalists. As a society we have lost faith in journalistic institutions so the onus is now back on the individual. We need a way to offload that truth-finding responsibility back onto a third party that can be trusted. Any system which requires more aptitude, knowledge, time, or motivation from the general public is unlikely to work because lacking those is exactly what got us into this mess.

Swizec• 6 years ago

trying to fight misinformation by just telling anonymous strangers "facts"

It’s even worse when you realize that most mistruths are factual. You can very easily lie with facts.

The texas sharpshooter falaft is a great example.

You get 500 samples, take 10 good samples, and say “Look! An objective truth in 10 samples we have success!”. You omit the other 490

You never said a lie, facts only, but the interpretation you lead people towards is a lie.

Or a more common example: Thing Y increases your risk of X by up to ten times!!!

Risk goes from 0.0001% to 0.001%. It’s completely irrelevant and you got a nice scary clickbait with objective facts.

nothis• 6 years ago

For me, one reason not to freak out about this is Photoshop.

It's been around for decades. Perfect photographic fakes (literally called "photoshops") are possible. Yet is there a great crisis of fake photographs taking over the news? Not really. The actual "fake news" barely even bother with photoshop (and those for whom it works, don't care about the quality). It's somehow still fairly easy to get context and at some point, you just have to trust a news outlet, just like you had to trust them for text-based news.

All we see is a trend of making it easier for people to subscribe to a bubble of "news" that fits their world view. The quality of the fakeness barely factors into this.

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

The other reason not to freak out about this is that we're already far down the path the people think deep fakes are creating.

Reddit and Twitter and the internet prove that people will react to an image of text by the tens of thousands, going straight into their brain. All of us have been guilty of this at some point.

To me it's naive to freak out about Photoshop and video deepfakes because it reveals that you're completely unaware of the degree of "shallowfaking". A screenshot of a headline or tweet spreads in a way that a deepfaked video can't, and it apparently goes right past our bullshit detector in a way that video can't.

Natsu• 6 years ago

Maybe, but I've found that a lot of viral images are doctored in one way or another.

Here are some links to recent examples of doctored photos. I know I've seen at least the deceptive image of cops "pointing a gun at children" when they were actually not on the front page of Reddit, so it's not like manipulated images have no effect:

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/884-Pr...

http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/891-Count-o...

That said, remember that not all alterations are digital:

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/590-Un...

rexpop• 6 years ago

is there a great crisis of fake photographs taking over the news?

Well, yes. Many newsworthy photos and video clips are doctored, and they sway the public discourse in subtle ways. That we haven't yet seen significant public outcry is as much a testament to their subtlety as it is to their effectiveness.

rojobuffalo• 6 years ago

I'd argue voice and video are substantially more persuasive than static images

tomrod• 6 years ago

This is by design.

Reflexive Control Theory: https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/07/how-you-can-fight-russias-...

arielbaz• 6 years ago

see also "Training a deep learning model for deepfake detection" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22433711 )

hairofadog• 6 years ago

Can god create a fake so deep that they themselves can’t detect it?

neutrallinked2• 6 years ago

DNA will set them apart

neutrallinked2• 6 years ago

We should also look towards simpler alternatives. ( For example some days back I also read about a profile made on a social media platform with a "generated" face )

1) For image platforms to prevent "generated" profile with fake faces, may be request 2 profile pictures and not one. A task that is difficult to achieve at high resolution.

2) For deep fake videos .. May be the idea be to fight the "video" part and not the "deep fake" part. By that I mean "signed" content. ABC news should "sign" generated videos and so should other publishing houses. So that any other source claiming forged voice or certain kind of "faked" content are not able to do so.

dependenttypes• 6 years ago

There is a simpler alternative imo: consider any news that do not list all of their sources as fake news. Treat them as if they were scientific papers.

varbhat• 6 years ago

What if it gives false positive results? What if it tags non-deepfake news as deepfake-news ?

bsaul• 6 years ago

Maybe advanced DRMs will be a way forward ? Have camera fingerprint / sign the video, and then every editing videos fingerprint & sign the changes performed, and send everything to a ledger ? Only way to make sure a video is actually coming from the real world...

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

We don’t need this for photographs. Why do we need it for video?

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

Deepfakes are generated by a generative adversarial network.

There are two networks: a generator, and a discriminator.

The generator generates a result, the discriminator evaluates that result.

This AI that detect fakes faces could be used to train the discriminator so that the GAN generates even better results.

adfhnionio• 6 years ago

I find all this concern a little bit overblown. Yes, it is a problem that we can make extremely convincing fakes, but we've had fakes that can fool non-experts for a very long time. The Soviet Union doctored a great many photographs in a way invisible to me (examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...). Why are we more concerned about this fakery than about airbrushing?

The solution is the same as it's always been: stick to trustworthy sources and insist that all evidence is traced and corroborated. It remains easy to learn the truth as long as you make a good faith effort to do so. In the worst case we can just stop trusting photographs altogether. We got by just fine before the camera was invented; we can do fine after it becomes obsolete.

mooneater• 6 years ago

Because good fake video is now possible for the first time, good video was nearly impossible to fake. Because people believe certain leaders who are willing to use false evidence. Because the populace is not prepared to be that discerning.

Erlich_Bachman3• 6 years ago

Hey, we all know that this will not be the end of deep fakes. It will just another channel of information to think about. Now we have to care about whether this algorithm is correct, or maybe it is also manipulated by the other political party to claim that the others' picture is fake...

But it had to be created at some point, it had to exist. This is just an inevitable next step of the progress.

trott• 6 years ago

Looking at the diagram, this appears to be just an LSTM slapped on top of a CNN. If so, I'm failing to see any novelty in this approach. RNNs on top of CNNs have been used before, including for deepfake detection. See for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.00582

The recent DeepFake Detection Challenge threw a lot of manpower at the problem earlier this year, BTW.

codecamper• 6 years ago

This is getting stupid. People.. aging, cancer, Alzheimer's still exist. Maybe time to reprioritize & organize efforts?

Nasrudith4• 6 years ago

Those are completely different deep specalties and best funded in parallel anyway given diminishing returns. Complaining about something that irrelevant to capabilities is like saying brain surgeons suck at inventing green energy.

ThomPete• 6 years ago

this is the virus killer war all over again

Ijumfs• 6 years ago

The deepfakes which support the officially blessed narrative will not receive scrutiny, while authentic videos will be "proved" to be deep fakes by some black box machination.

But we've known not to trust anything we didn't personally see ourselves for many decades.

olivermarks• 6 years ago

The challenge with algos like this is that they could be used to claim events that actually did happen didn't. So as an example credible/convincing footage of Jeffrey Epstein by a pool in Paraguay last week could be 'identified as a deep fake' and discredited, despite other supporting facts and information that lent credence to veracity.

wu-tsy• 6 years ago

Can be used as an algorithm for a new discriminator in the GAN.

mbrumlow• 6 years ago

This will just be like anti virus. Peole will start to train their algos to fool the current algo that is is being used. We will be a never ending fight.

3wolf• 6 years ago

That's GAN training in a nutshell.

peterthehacker• 6 years ago

Are deepfake face swaps a real problem yet? I can’t recall any major controversies in recent history that were caused by a deepfake face swap.

This technique can be used to create compromising videos of virtually anyone, including celebrities, politicians, and corporate public figures.

I’ve read a lot of concerned comments like this but I haven’t read about any real world examples of a controversy caused by a deepfake.

nine_k• 6 years ago

Now we need to stop believing our eyes twice: first when we see a natural-looking picture but know it is a deepfake, and second when we see a natural-looking picture we believe is not a deepfake, but the computer tells us it is.

m0zg• 6 years ago

If this is differentiable (which it seems like it should be), it could be used adversarially to create better deepfakes, BTW.

danieldrehmer• 6 years ago

as Zizek would say, "And then you use this as the basis for a GAN that optimises for faces that do fit, making better deepfakes and so on and so on"

vffhfhf• 6 years ago

People believe what they want to believe.

Just a basic search and 5 minutes in wikipedia about a topic will make you better than most people who sprout nonsence.

But you got to have a right mindset.

Human brain hates change. You have to force the bitch to take in new information and process it and prepare it for further info on the topic.

Stopping deepfake news with an AI algorithm that can tell when a face doesnt fit

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