deepfakes
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X confirms it blocked Taylor Swift searches to ‘prioritize safety’
X confirmed in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that it's halted searches for Taylor Swift after nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes of the artist went viral last week. Fans mass-reported the offending accounts in attempt to get them removed.
Controversial AI image platform Civitai dropped by its cloud computing provider after reports of possible CSAM
After a 404 Media investigation found Civitai's image generation platform could be used to create images that ‘could be categorized as child pornography,’ its cloud computing provider OctoML has decided to cut ties.
YouTube's first AI-generated music tools can clone artist voices and turn hums into melodies
Musicians like John Legend and Troye Sivan are lending their voices.
YouTube will let musicians and actors request takedowns of their deepfakes
The company is also rolling out clearer labels on content created using AI.
Impostor poses as Ukraine's Prime Minister in video call with UK defense secretary
The Right Honorable Ben Wallace suspects Russia was involved in the call.
A Telegram bot network is being used to create deepfake nudes
A security firm called Sensity says it recently discovered a network of deepfake bots on chat app Telegram creating computer-generated naked images of women on request. In Russia, the bot also found its way onto VK, the country’s largest social media network.
Adobe Photoshop can now identify 'shopped images
Adobe has unveiled a new attribution tool for Photoshop that will help consumers better understand the authenticity of images while giving proper credit to creators.
Microsoft will identify manipulated media with a confidence score
Microsoft is rolling out new tools to combat misinformation, specifically deepfakes.
Recommended Reading: Zoom's security struggles
During the last month, the company has drawn increasing scrutiny over its security practices from both the public and government officials. NBC News offers a look at the company’s current predicament in a chat with CEO Eric Yuan.
Reuters joins Facebook's fact-checking program
Reuters, one of the world's biggest news agencies, is joining Facebook's third-party fact-checking program. First launched in 2016, the program has tried to curb the spread of disinformation on the social network with help from organizations like the Associated Press, PolitiFact and Factcheck.org. As part of the partnership, Reuters has created a new team dedicated to verifying content that people share through Facebook, with the social media giant paying Reuters for the service.
TikTok-owner ByteDance reportedly built a deepfake maker
TikTok parent company ByteDance has built a feature that could let users create their own deepfakes, TechCrunch reports. The feature, referred to as Face Swap, was spotted in code in both TikTok and the Chinese app Douyin. It asks users to scan their face and then transfers their image to videos.
Facebook helped Reuters create an online course on identifying deepfakes
Reuters has released a new 45-minute online course designed to help give journalists the tools they need to spot and avoid sharing manipulated pictures, videos and audio clips. While deepfakes are obviously a major component of the material, there's also advice on how to approach real media that's been co-opted so that it presents an entirely different story than it did originally. Even if you're not a journalist, you can check out the course for free.
Twitter reveals how it plans to address deepfakes
Twitter said last month it was working on ways to better to handle deepfakes. It just released draft guidelines on how to address the problem and it's looking for the public to weigh in and help shape policies on what it describes as "synthetic and manipulated media."
Twitter vows to introduce new rules against deepfakes
Twitter promises to introduce new policy to fight deepfakes, especially when they could "threaten someone's physical safety or lead to offline harm." The social network has announced that it's working on created rules to address what it calls "synthetic and manipulated media" posted on its website. Photos, videos, and audio that had been significantly altered to fabricate events that never happened fall under that classification.
These deepfake celebrity impressions are equally amazing and alarming
Actor Jim Meskimen partnered with deepfake artist Sham00k to make his celebrity impressions a little more realistic. Meskimen and Sham00k shared the results in a YouTube video, and honestly, they're pretty remarkable. While Meskimen did the voices, deepfake software applied the facial features of 20 celebrities, including George Clooney, Nicholas Cage, Colin Firth, Robert De Niro, Nick Offerman, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Robin Williams and George W. Bush.
Google fights deepfakes by releasing 3,000 deepfakes
Google has released a pretty huge dataset of deepfake videos in an effort to support researchers working on detection tools. Deepfake videos look and sound so authentic, they could be used for highly convincing disinformation campaigns in the upcoming elections. They could also cause countless issues for individuals like celebrities whose faces can be used to create fake pornographic videos that look authentic.
Facebook teams up with Microsoft and MIT to fight deepfakes
With deepfakes expected to pose a major challenge in the upcoming 2020 election and beyond, Facebook detailed one way in which it plans to take on the problem. As part of a new partnership that involves, among others, Microsoft, MIT and the University of Oxford, Facebook plans to invest more than $10 million to take part in an industry-wide effort to fight deepfakes. The initiative is called the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC). It aims to create open source tools that companies, governments and media organizations can use to better detect when a video has been doctored. Facebook's contribution to the project includes hiring actors to create videos researchers can use to test the detection tools they create.
Recommended Reading: Algorithms and school surveillance
Aggression Detectors: The unproven, invasive surveillance technology schools are using to monitor students Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao, ProPublica Following the rise in mass shootings, schools, hospitals and other public places are installing tech to monitor people. Part of this effort includes using algorithm-equipped microphones to capture audio, with the goal of detecting stress or anger before bad things happen. The problem? They aren't reliable and their mere existence is a massive invasion of privacy.
A new tool detects deepfakes with 96 percent accuracy
A new tool developed by researchers from the USC Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI) may prove to be a major help in the ongoing war against deepfakes. The tool focuses on subtle face and head movements as well as artifacts in files to determine if a video has been faked, and can allegedly identify the computer-generated videos with up to 96 percent accuracy, according to a paper published by the Computer Vision Foundation.
Recommended Reading: Fighting deepfakes
Top AI researchers race to detect 'deepfake' videos: 'We are outgunned' Drew Harwell, The Washington Post The 2016 US presidential election was plagued by fake news and election meddling across the internet. With the rise of so-called deepfake technology, fact-checkers and arbiters of truth face a new challenge. And as The Washington Post reports, researchers aren't ready to separate the real from the fabricated in 2020.
