Deepfakes, explained

Brut America

Is this video of Will Smith in Kendrick Lamar's new music video fake or real?  Deepfakes are computer-generated fake videos and they are on the rise. Here's why they can be dangerous ...

Transcript

00:00In a land where hurt people hurt more people, I'm calling it culture.

00:05I genuinely love the process of manipulating people online for money.

00:09President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.

00:24Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet.

00:28If humans are already tricked by, you know, simple spam emails,

00:31I think deepfakes are going to be really effective

00:33in the future if there aren't tools in place against them.

00:44There's a project called the Video Rewrite Program,

00:46and that was the first major application of a deepfake.

00:48And you take one person talking in a video track and sync it to a different audio track

00:52and manipulate their face to make it seem like they're talking from the other audio track.

00:58I'm a little teapot, short and stout.

01:05The term deepfake comes from deep learning mixed with fake events.

01:08So the fake event is the, you know, output of what a deepfake comes up with.

01:12And then deep learning is the process to come up with the algorithms

01:17and everything to, you know, combine the image with the video.

01:20Deepfake relies on a neural network,

01:22which basically takes a large sample of data and finds patterns throughout them.

01:27So you can take an image and apply it to a video of somebody moving their face.

01:42What's up, TikTok?

01:45Every now and then I like to treat myself.

01:48Deep Tom Cruise, if that was used for malicious purposes,

01:52you know, you could use a platform like TikTok to go viral and spread,

01:55you know, pretty dangerous news.

01:57Let me show you some magic.

02:00It's the real thing.

02:11As a human, if we pull up a video of someone and if the voices sound similar enough,

02:15I feel like the image of the, you know, the deepfake will kind of trick the ears into like,

02:20you know, being like, oh, hey, that's that person's voice.

02:22And, you know, there are pretty good voice actors who can,

02:25who can almost replicate the real thing.

02:28So,

02:51they take a train, a ton of data of other humans moving their faces,

02:55and then they can apply it to a still image.

02:57But what they have to do is they first have to use algorithms to

03:00take that image at a low quality resolution and turn it into a high quality resolution.

03:04It's bringing deepfakes to the masses in a way that hasn't really been seen before.

03:08I think by being able to take like, for example, like an old deceased family member,

03:11taking one of their pictures and kind of, you know,

03:13turning them back into life, that could be a really cool experience for a lot of people.

03:27Oh, my God.

03:47Taking a world leader and making a deepfake out of them.

03:50And basically, they could, you know, say whatever they want.

03:52They could say things to cause public unrest, you know, say like,

03:57I guess, give dangerous information or dangerous, I guess, like commands,

04:01you know, to people, you know, family members can be impersonated.

04:03So, scams can happen that way as well.

04:05I'd say like 10 years ago, when text was the biggest thing, text and images,

04:09it wasn't nearly as big of an issue.

04:11But now, you know, I already feel like the shorter form video platforms

04:15already have a huge like misinformation issue and fake news issue,

04:19because video is so convincing.

04:21I'm sure like hackers are going to get much more creative about this stuff,

04:24especially going forward.

04:33But I think big tech is going to be banding together and focusing on tools

04:37that can help prevent deepfakes or at least catch them right away and probably like

04:41provide labels to say, hey, this like, you know, isn't good,

04:44especially, you know, on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, any of these apps.

04:48These social media companies are the ones that need to be focusing on creating these tools,

04:52I think at the forefront of all of this,

04:54because they're the ones who'd be most heavily impacted and their users as well.

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