HOUSTON – In less than 10 minutes, it is now possible to create nearly indetectable deepfake videos of anyone and everyone you please.
“Deepfakes” are technically snippets of video in which the face or body has been digitally manipulated so that they appear to be someone else.
But the central idea behind deepfakes can extend into still images and audio, too.
“So if you’d asked me this a year or two ago, I would have said, ‘If you’re looking at a photo of a person and you’re not sure whether it’s real or whether it was generated, one thing you might look at is the hands,’” Peter Salib, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, said.
Early deepfakes appeared to have trouble rendering hands correctly, including mastering the intricacies of moving 10 independent fingers convincingly.
In some cases, hands were rendered with too many fingers.
But the most obvious giveaways are disappearing quickly. In just a few minutes, this reporter was able to use a web application to quickly and effectively replace the faces of his children in an eight-second video clip with A.I. renderings of the kids’ parents’ faces.
The final product is virtually undetectable to the untrained eye.
Still, for the time being, there are sometimes giveaways to deepfakes. Salib cautioned that this list could become obsolete in a matter of months as the technology is improving by leaps and bounds.
Tips to Spot a Deepfake
1. HANDS
2. JAGGED FACE EDGES
3. LIP SYNC OFF (VIDEO)
4. SKIN TEXTURE MISMATCH (FACE VS BODY)
5. LIGHTING DIFFERENCES
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