The Metaverse is One Giant Deep Fake
The bar for faking identities in the Metaverse will be low.
There is no blurring of lines in the Metaverse where the CGI needs to blend convincingly with real world surroundings — because it’s all CGI. The Metaverse is one giant deep fake. There is no expectation of real world fidelity.
It currently takes a great deal of computational effort to pull off a deep fake in real time. It can be more convincing with the use of additional post-processing to remove any visual artifacts that might belie the authenticity of a piece of footage, especially at the hands of a talented graphic artist or video editor.
While a deep fake will soon become indistinguishable from raw digital footage of real world objects in a real world environment, and this can prove useful for someone trying to use the tech for nefarious purposes, creating a fraudulent identity in the Metaverse is only of cursory concern, artistically speaking.
The goal of a deep fake is to fool humans as to the identity of a person represented in a video, so that the facial, vocal, and motor reconstruction of that person is believable.
There is no blurring of lines in the Metaverse where the CGI needs to blend convincingly with real world surroundings — because it’s all CGI. The Metaverse is one giant deep fake. There is no expectation of real world fidelity.
Your identity, as a matter of fact, could be an avatar of a dragon roaming a fully immersive digital world, buying real estate, making banking transactions, and selling shoes as a part-time employee at the Nike outlet. And everyone who interacts with you would refer to you as YOU, no question.
We are dependent on our Metaverse host to authenticate humans in this world and everyone is who they say they are. That’s not too different from our current Web2 iteration of the internet, much less a Web3-enabled Metaverse. We are, and will continue to be, disembodied participants that exist as a database entry somewhere…security tokens floating through cyber space.
Our avatars will be graphical enhancements to our online identities that can be easily faked because they are digital characters to begin with, hacked in the same way that an ordinary email account can be hacked.
While there are forensic specialists that pore over every pore of a superimposed face of deep fake footage to determine if it’s been tampered with, no such forensic specialist will be needed in the Metaverse. Polygons can be replicated with ease, so forensic examiners will ply their craft on the audit trail information and will ignore the visual aspects of your Metaverse identity.
There won’t be any need to apply the same kind of investigative scrutiny with how we look in the Metaverse, even when computational power increases and our identities become hyper real — adding to the temptation of living and working in this environment — because the benefit to users is they can look as real as whoever they want, literally by design.
Forensic examiners will not be able to rely on biometric identification as part of their investigations, because a subject’s existence as a bag of skin and bones in the real world won’t be very helpful in the Metaverse.
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Jerry Bui is Managing Director of Digital Forensics within FTI Consulting’s Technology segment focused on forensic technology and risk & compliance issues (all opinions his own). Jerry is a Certified Fraud Examiner and has over 20 years of experience in digital forensics, ediscovery, automated risk assessments, dashboard compliance monitoring, and investigative analytics. Jerry’s team provides evidence acquisition, expert witness, and strategic consulting services to law firms and corporations. Connect with Jerry on LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.
The Digital Forensics Future (DFF) podcast is also available on the platforms below.
