Dealing with Deep Fakes

Context: 

A deepfake is often in the news because it distorts reality and attempts to persuade us that something false is true.

Earlier Highlights:

• On May 28, the wrestlers protesting peacefully in New Delhi were tackled to the ground, arrested, and boarded in a van to keep them from disrupting the inauguration of the Parliament building. Shortly after, a photo appeared to show four of the beleaguered wrestlers posing with wide smiles for a selfie in the van.
• People worldwide have already used the technology to create a video of Barack Obama verbally abusing Donald Trump, hack facial recognition software, manufacture ‘revenge porn’, etc. 
• On May 22, a deep fake image purporting to show a towering column of dark smoke rising from the Pentagon received sober coverage from a few Indian television news channels. The image was soon found to have been machine-made.

What is a Deep Fake?

• A deepfake is something that a machine has produced using deep learning and contains false information.

An ‘upgrade’ from Photoshop:

• Deepfaking is a significant ‘upgrade’ from photoshopping images as it transcends the limits of human skill. Here, machines iteratively process large amounts of data to falsify images and videos, sometimes in real time, and with fewer imperfections.
• Deepfake images and videos thus have an unsettling legacy. 

Tools used for good:

• Alongside deepfaked images and videos, we have chatbots that mimic intelligence, but we can’t tell the difference when they make a mistake. 
  • This leads some to believe certain information to be ‘true’ simply because a machine gave it to them.
• Using deep learning, the ALS Association in the U.S. founded a “voice cloning initiative” to restore the voices of those who had lost it to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. 
• Deep learning has also been adapted in comedy, cinema, music, and gaming. Experts have recreated the voices and/or visuals of visual artists and are enhancing our ability to understand, and even reinterpret, history (although some of these attempts haven’t been free of controversy).

Redeemable Technology:

• In the words of a famous political philosopher, Adrienne de Ruiter, to protect against the “manipulation of hyper-realistic digital representations of our image and voice.” 
  • This “should be considered a fundamental moral right in the age of deep fakes”. 
  • And a stepping stone for us, as individuals, is to become more scientifically, digitally, and public-spiritedly literate. 

News Source: The Hindu