Since I wrote about the creation and weaponization of deepfake videos back in October 2020, the situation has worsened. Earlier this month, several European mayors received video calls from Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv. These calls turned out to be impersonations (can you tell which image above is real and which isn’t?), generated by tricksters. The mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, was one such recipient and told reporters that the person on these calls looked and sounded like Klitschko, but he wasn’t an actual participant. When Berlin authorities checked with their ambassador, they were told Klitschko wasn’t calling her. Fake calls to other mayors around Europe have since been found by reporters.
Were these calls deepfakes? Hard to say for sure. I cover the issues and update you on the advances, if you can call them that, about deepfake tech for my Avast blog today.
Since I wrote this article several years ago, deepfake videos have proliferated online. This past week, Musk’s Trump interview spawned numerous fakes, often asking viewers to send in money to buy cryptocurrencies. The NYT has more details here.
This story in WaPo goes into more details about how deepfake videos are detected using a variety of automated tools such as TrueMedia, AI or Not, AI Image Detector, Was It AI, Illuminarty, Hive Moderation, Content at Scale and Sight Engine. Links to those tools are at the end of the article.