What is Deepfake — Know Everything About this AI-based Technology

Vikram Singh Bisen
VSINGHBISEN
Published in
5 min readJun 15, 2019

Technologies are not only born to provide the goodness to humans, as few people make misuse of it and try to create illegal things that can embarrass them or hurt their sentiments deeply.

Deepfake, an AI-backed technology, is one that comes into the limelight due to wrong reasons defamed many people in the last few years.

What is Deepfake Technology?

Deepfake is an AI-supported technique to create ultra-realistic fake videos of people by swapping their faces other person saying and doing things that they haven’t actually done.

It includes images, videos and audios to combine with images and videos onto source images or videos.

Porn videos having the mocked face of popular celebrities on the adult star are one of the well-known examples of deepfakes.

What Does Deepfake Mean?

Using the AI with high-powered computer a graphics processing unit (GPU) and time on their hands can create realistic fake videos is known as “Deepfakes”.

Deepfakes are not only limited to videos but the audio is also targeted to create such fake voice-based contents. Though, it is much more difficult to compare the face swapping but the voice of another person can be manipulated with any other person speaking something that is not originally said by him seems very original.

How Does Deepfake Technology Work?

Neural network based technology is used to make Deepfake videos. The deep learning process is used into deepfake creation that is kind of ultramodern application of neural net simulation to massive data sets.

Primarily neural networks are capable to “learn” to perform tasks by considering, generally without being programmed with any task-specific rule.

Deepfakes use the human tendency through generative adversarial networks (GANs) in which two machine learning models are trained with the data sets to create fake videos at the same time also detect fake videos. The forger ML model keeps continuing creating fake videos until the second model fails to detect the forgery.

How Deepfake Videos are Created?

The larger the quantity of training data sets it would be easier for a forger to create deepfakes that can be believed easily. Political celebrities and Hollywood’s popular actresses became the victims of Deepfake technology.

It has misrepresented their personalities and pose a grave threat to women not prominent could have their reputations damaged by the depiction in involuntary deepfake pornography or revenge pornography.

What Software is Used to Make Deepfakes?

There are many software available in the market to create deepfakes. One of them is FakeApp that allows the normal person to make the deepfake content, though this website has been banned but still many apps are active in the market.

Samsung AI has recently developed a new artificial intelligence system that can generate a fake clip by feeding it as little as one photo. Usually requires big data sets of images in order to create a realistic forgery but here you don’t need a huge amount of images or videos to create deepfakes misusing the AI for humans.

Topic Trending: How Can Artificial Intelligence Benefit Humans?

Samsung has used this technology into famous Leonardo Da Vinci painting of Mona Lisa in which it has assigned a series of ‘facial landmarks’ to the portrait and then applied an algorithm that has access to metadata from a vast amount of image banks to form a different ‘movements’ of the Mona Lisa’s head that you can spot below.

Popular Deep Fake News

The most popular Deepfake news was a fake video of the former US president Barack Obama in which he was expressing a profanity-laced opinion on US president Donald Trump.

Similarly, a fake video of Steve Buscemi came into the market in which her face was superimposed onto Jennifer Lawrence while speaking at the Golden Globes award show.

Apart from this, many other celebrities also became the news headlines due to deepfakes porn videos of popular actresses gone viral making millions of people excited to watch such contents.

However, knowing the truth all the leading porn sites have removed such fake videos from their websites that were embarrassing such celebrities.

Deepfake in Pornography

Actually, Deepfake is a major threat to popular celebrities by creating their deep fake porn videos. The images of such celebrities or popular actresses are freely available on the Internet at their social media pages or other entertainment sites.

Many times such videos are created as revenge porn, in which deepfake creator needs a bunch of photos of the victim from various sources to superimposed the same on the body of a porn star and raunchy videos posted on adults websites.

Female celebrities including Taylor Swift, Natalie Portman, Emma Watson, Gal Gadot, Michelle Obama, Daisy Ridley, Meghan Markle, Sophie Turner and Kate Middleton had become the victims of deepfake pornography.

How to Detect Deepfake Video?

Detecting deepfakes is not possible with the normal human eye but there are few activities and signs that you can spot deepfake videos.

Quality of video, irregular blinking of eyes, inconsistent skin tone, unnatural movement of the body or facial expressions and unusual changes in the background suchlike lighting conditions or color etc. are the major clues you can detect the deepfakes.

Video: Why Detecting Deep Fake is Difficult?

However, AI-enabled applications can detect such loopholes or fake videos using the same level of technology that has been used to create such contents. While on the other hand, human-powered deepfake detection services are also offered by companies to check and find out the fake videos, audio and texts with better accuracy.

This article was originally submitted on www.vsinghbisen.com

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Vikram Singh Bisen
VSINGHBISEN

Content Writer | Stock Market Analyst | Author & News Editor at The Telegraph Daily