Fighting Deepfakes Gets Real

Researchers, legislators, and Big Tech are trying to combat the growing threat of phony media created with the help of artificial intelligence.

- Bernhard Warner

LIKE A ZOMBIE HORDE, they keep coming. First, there were the pixelated likenesses of actresses Gal Gadot and Scarlett Johansson brush stroked into dodgy user-generated adult films. Then a disembodied digital Barack Obama and Donald Trump appeared in clips they never agreed to, saying things the real Obama and Trump never said. And in June, a machine-learning-generated version of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg making scary comments about privacy went viral.

Welcome to the age of deepfakes, an emerging threat powered by artificial intelligence that puts words in the mouths of people in video or audio clips, conjures convincing headshots from a sea of selfies, and even puts individuals in places they’ve never been, interacting with people they’ve never met. Before long, it’s feared, the ranks of deepfake deceptions will include politicians behaving badly, news anchors delivering fallacious reports, and impostor executives trying to bluff their way past employees so they can commit fraud.

So far, women have been the biggest victims of deepfakes. In late June, the app Deepnudes shut down amid controversy after journalists disclosed that users could feed the app ordinary photos of women and have it spit out naked images of them.

There’s concern the fallout from the technology will go beyond the creepy, especially if it falls into the hands of rogue actors looking to disrupt elections and tank the shares of public companies. The tension is boiling over. Lawmakers want to ban deepfakes. Big Tech believes its engineers will develop a fix. Meanwhile, the researchers, academics, and digital rights activists on the front lines bemoan that they’re ill equipped to fight this battle.