the art of deception is as old as time itself and covers everything from counter-intelligence to halloween masks but one incredibly convincing method of subterfuge that's rapidly becoming more common is the deep fake the idea behind a deep fake is that it creates images that strongly resemble a certain subject usually a person that isn't actually them but i'm not talking about some kind of cheap obvious photoshop job that involves cut pasting your head onto a weightlifter friends vacation photos instead deep fakes can be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing to the average human eye thanks to
the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning so here's how it works programs that generate deep fakes use not one but two different ais working together the first ai will scan many images of the subject to be faked and then create new faked images the second ai will then examine these fakes and compare them to real images and if the differences are too stark the second ai will mark the image as an obvious fake and tell the first ai so the first ai takes this information and continually adjusts the fake images until the second ai's
error rate hits a certain target that is to say until the second ai can't tell a fake from the real thing anymore this system is called a generative adversarial network and although the idea behind it is fairly simple advances in processing power have made it a very powerful tool for producing convincing looking fakes and because it's a fairly general purpose technology it has lots of cool applications for example an ai network like this can analyze lots of people with a similar look to create a fake model for advertising purposes it's much cheaper than hiring a
real model and paying them for a photo shoot much of course to the chagrin of attractive yet unemployed people everywhere deep fakes could also help with age progression photos used by the police to help find missing people or even to upscale old school video games more realistically so they look nice on modern displays but if you've seen stories about deep fakes in the news you probably know that there's a much darker side to the technology unsurprisingly the majority of the deep fake videos on the internet right now are pornographic in nature with the idea often
being to swap in a celebrity's face without their consent resulting in several well-known actresses falling victim to the practice and because deep fake technology has gotten good enough to create fake videos that make it appear as though people have been caught on camera saying things they haven't seriously it can accurately match up lip movements to convincingly fake speech there's a huge concern that it could be used to spread faked videos of politicians saying insightful or inflammatory things in order to push a certain agenda of course this doesn't mean that everyone out there will be fooled
but with how realistic deep fakes can be and how polarized the political climate is in many parts of the world political deep fakes could easily convince enough people recently a video surfaced of nancy pelosi giving a speech while slurring her words apparently drunk the video wasn't even a deep fake it was merely slowed down but it still racked up millions of views before finally being exposed as fake and with accusations of political manipulation becoming more common these days the rise of deep fake technology has led some observers to believe that it will have a tangible
effect on political discourse and even election results although it remains to be seen if these fears actually come to pass there are a number of cheaply accessible deep fake tools that allow people to create deep fakes without a ton of technical skills so if you want to tinker with them yourself i'd say just go ahead but stay away from the politics and stick to swapping linus faces into your friend's wedding video are you concerned about a data breach causing your credit card info to fall into the wrong hands then check out today's sponsor privacy.com techwiki
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