Microchips in coronavirus vaccines. Pedophile rings in pizza restaurants. Jewish space lasers. The Internet–bless its heart–has always suffered from its share of wacky wingnuts and conspiracy theories. But in the wake of the November 3 presidential election and the January 6 Capitol riot, social media platforms and governments are stepping up their efforts to crack down on the most problematic content, and AI plays a leading role. Read More
Tag Archives: Fake
A Mysterious Obama Biography Was Selling Like Crazy on Amazon. Did a Human Write It?
Update, Nov. 20, 2020, at 12:03 p.m.: After creeping into the Top 100 on Amazon, this title was removed from the site on Friday morning. Other “University Press” books are still for sale, however.
Perhaps you’ve heard that there is an exciting new Barack Obama book that everyone’s talking about! I’m not talking about A Promised Land, the 751-page memoir and large physical object for which publisher Crown paid Obama tens of millions of dollars and which Obama spent four years writing (without a ghost, he brags).
No, I’m talking about Barack Obama Book, a 61-page tome by an author named “University Press.” Why is Barack Obama Book selling so well? Thanks to sponsored listings and canny search engine optimization, the book appears above Barack Obama’s actual memoir if you search Amazon for—you guessed it—“barack obama book.” Read More
The AI Company Helping the Pentagon Assess Disinfo Campaigns
In September, Azerbaijan and Armenia renewed fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory in the Caucasus mountains. By then, an information warfare campaign over the region had been underway for several months.
The campaign was identified using artificial intelligence technology being developed for US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which oversees US special forces operations.
The AI system, from Primer, a company focused on the intelligence industry, identified key themes in the information campaign by analyzing thousands of public news sources. In practice, Primer’s system can analyze classified information too. Read More
NEW Sassy Justice with Fred Sassy
AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos
Facebook and Twitter earlier this week took down social media accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that interfered in the U.S. presidential election four years ago, that had been spreading misinformation to up to 126 million Facebook users. Today, Facebook rolled out measures aimed at curbing disinformation ahead of Election Day in November. Deepfakes can make epic memes or put Nicholas Cage in every movie, but they can also undermine elections. As threats of election interference mount, two teams of AI researchers have recently introduced novel approaches to identifying deepfakes by watching for evidence of heartbeats. Read More
The creators of South Park have a new weekly deepfake satire show
It’s the first example of a recurring production that will rely on deepfakes as part of its core premise.
The fake news: A new weekly satire show from the creators of South Park is using deepfakes, or AI-synthesized media, to poke fun at some of the most important topics of our time. Called Sassy Justice, the show is hosted by the character Fred Sassy, a reporter for the local news station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who sports a deepfaked face of president Trump, though a completely different voice, hair style, and persona. Read More
Detecting Deep-Fake Videos from Phoneme-Viseme Mismatches
Recent advances in machine learning and computer graphics have made it easier to convincingly manipulate video and audio. These so-called deep-fake videos range from complete full-face synthesis and replacement (face-swap), to complete mouth and audio synthesis and replacement (lip-sync), and partial word-based audio and mouth synthesis and replacement. Detection of deep fakes with only a small spatial and temporal manipulation is particularly challenging. We describe a technique to detect such manipulated videos by exploiting the fact that the dynamics of the mouth shape – visemes – are occasionally inconsistent with a spoken phoneme. We focus on the visemes associated with words having the sound M(mama), B(baba), or P(papa) in which the mouth must completely close in order to pronounce these phonemes. We observe that this is not the case in many deep-fake videos. Such phoneme-viseme mismatches can, therefore, be used to detect even spatially small and temporally localized manipulations. We demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of this approach to detect different types of deep-fake videos, including in-the-wild deep fakes. Read More
In a battle of AI versus AI, researchers are preparing for the coming wave of deepfake propaganda
… Deepfake detection as a field of research was begun a little over three years ago. Early work focused on detecting visible problems in the videos, such as deepfakes that didn’t blink. With time, however, the fakes have gotten better at mimicking real videos and become harder to spot for both people and detection tools.
There are two major categories of deepfake detection research. The first involves looking at the behavior of people in the videos. … Other researchers, including our team, have been focused on differences that all deepfakes have compared to real videos. Read More
Deepfake Putin is here to warn Americans about their self-inflicted doom
AI-generated synthetic media is being used in a political ad campaign—not to disrupt the election, but to save it.
Two political ads will broadcast on social media today, featuring deepfake versions of Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Both deepfake leaders will be giving the same message: that America doesn’t need any election interference from them; it will ruin its democracy by itself. Read More
YouTube’s Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories
From flat-earthers to QAnon to Covid quackery, the video giant is awash in misinformation. Can AI keep the lunatic fringe from going viral?
Mark Sargent saw instantly that his situation had changed for the worse. A voluble, white-haired 52-year-old, Sargent is a flat-earth evangelist who lives on Whidbey Island in Washington state and drives a Chrysler with the vanity plate “ITSFLAT.” But he’s well known around the globe, at least among those who don’t believe they are living on one. That’s thanks to YouTube, which was the on-ramp both to his flat-earth ideas and to his subsequent international stardom.
… Crucial to his success, he says, was YouTube’s recommendation system. …For four years, Sargent’s flat-earth videos got a steady stream of traffic from YouTube’s algorithms. Then, in January 2019, the flow of new viewers suddenly slowed to a trickle. Read More
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