Tracer Newsletter #50 (20/04/20)-Extinction Rebellion release deepfake of Belgian Prime Minister linking Covid-19 with climate crisis
Welcome to Tracer- your guide to the key developments surrounding deepfakes, synthetic media, and emerging cyber-threats.
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Extinction Rebellion release deepfake video of Belgian Prime Minister linking Covid-19 with the climate crisis
Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists released a deepfake video of the Belgian Prime Minister Shophie Wilmès making a speech linking Covid-19 to the climate crisis.
How did XR publish the video?
The video was created as part of XR Belgium’s “tell the truth” campaign, with the source footage taken from a national address delivered by Wilmès about the Covid-19 pandemic. The XR activists then composed an alternative speech asserting that Covid-19, Ebola, Swine flu, and other diseases are caused by the “exploitation and destruction by humans of our natural environment”. The published video depicts Wilmès delivering exerts of this alternative speech, with the activists using undisclosed editing techniques to synchronised her lip movements in the original video with new segments of voice audio. While Belgian media claimed this new voice audio was synthetically generated, this has not been confirmed by the creators. The speech was sent to the office of Wilmès and other Belgian politicians before being published online.
Highlighting the importance of responsible deepfake creation practices
Deepfakes are increasingly being used in the context of political commentary and satire, with many Youtube creators and activists publishing similar videos. However, there is significant controversy surrounding how individuals and groups should create, label, and release these deepfakes responsibly. Although the XR activists did say the video was fake in the description, they did not explicitly label the video in the video title, and did not include any watermarking on the video itself. This presents a controversial use case at a time when floods of false and misleading information are appearing online, with a report from Journalism.Design identifying at least some viewers who believed the video to be authentic.
This week’s developments
1) Google’s Play store updated its deceptive behaviour policy to include a ban on apps for creating deceptive deepfakes and manipulated media. (TechCrunch)
2) UPenn and Google researchers published a study assessing how different techniques for sampling generated text impact human raters’ and automatic discriminators’ performance. (arXiv)
3) Dutch broadcaster VPRO launched an international competition challenging participants to create a “Eurovision like” song using generative AI tools. (VPRO)
4) A QAnon related conspiracy theory circulated on Twitter, revolving around the claim that Tom Hanks’ home-recorded SNL appearance was a deepfake. (Twitter)
5) Synthetic photo generation startup Rosebud released masks4all, a web-tool that automatically applies a face mask to an uploaded profile picture. (RosebudAI)
6) Universidad Autonoma de Madrid researchers published an analysis of deepfake detection techniques, with a focus on their limitations when detecting “2nd generation” deepfakes such as those found in Facebook’s Deepfake Detection Challenge. (arXiv)
7) The Partnership on AI created an AI incident reporting scheme where individuals can report cases where AI systems have caused or nearly caused harm. (PAI)
8) Researchers from the Indian Statistical Institute and Indian Institute of Technology published a technique for realistically editing stylised text in an image. (Github)
Opinions and analysis
Toward trustworthy AI: AI mechanisms for supporting verifiable claims
A consortium of academic and industry experts outline 10 practical mechanisms developers can adopt to demonstrate more responsible AI development.
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