A DEEPER ALLIANCE WITH DEEPFAKE

While it has gained notoriety for its unethical use, deepfake technology has the ability to revolutionise businesses in areas like advertising, education, political campaigning, etc. Regulatory support and greater inclusion in the formal IT sector can lend it the much-needed legitimacy

- Nandini Keshari

 

In many ways, the year 2023 was a springboard for artificial intelligence, giving it a thrust it had not known before. Deep learning captured everyone’s imagination with advancement in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). But even as the world marvelled at the finetuning of GenAI models, it gasped in horror when deepfake, a subset of GenAI, started making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

A portmanteau of deep learning and fake, deepfake, or synthetic media, uses technology to create fake content, which is almost indistinguishable from the original, by manipulating images and videos. Last year, a host of celebrities, including Rashmika Mandanna, Alia Bhatt, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and others, were targeted by deepfakes, sending alarm bells ringing on its unethical use, including to cause damage to reputation and spread misinformation.  

World over, more than 90% of deepfake videos are porn. In its study titled 2023 State of Deepfakes, Home Security Heroes, a team of online experts, found that 95,820 deepfake videos were online in 2023, of which 98% qualified as pornography. However, while the scenario is scary, it would be injustice to this technology to look only at its darker side.   

How Deepfake Works  

The deepfake technology uses two algorithms—generator and discriminator—which learn from each other to create new images or videos. Divyendra Singh Jadoun, founder of synthetic media company The Indian Deepfaker, explains, “To make deepfakes, we need two things—source data and destination data.” In the context of a person’s deepfake, source data refers to the details of the person whose deepfake is being created, while destination data refers to information about the person on whom it is to be projected.