troubling implications of Deep Fake

How to Keep Loved Ones Safe from Deep Fake?

Technology keeps on evolving, and the line between fantasy and reality is blurring with it faster than you can realize. Every year brings its own set of innovations and advancements. Some of these innovations are the expected ones. Though some leave us to watch in awe and think, “Is there anything impossible anymore?”

With cars now doubling up as water landing airplanes, that is a question always getting asked. Mobiles are not far behind. As exciting as it may all seem, the dark side of it can not get ignored. These situations are where a trusted spy app can be used to at least keep an eye on your loved one’s mobile. So you don’t remain in the dark if anything troubling activity is going on.

What is Deep fake?

The academic definition reads Deep fakes as a form of media that takes a person in an existing image or video and then replaces it with someone like the original person using AI algorithms. Combining and superimposing existing media onto the source media using machine learning techniques such as auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This trick has been getting used to disturbing degrees for:-

  • Creating celebrity pornographic videos
  • Revenge porn
  • Fake news
  • Hoaxes
  • Financial Fraud

Hollywood has been doing it for years. The most popular deep fake video example being the 1994 movie ‘Forrest Gump,’ where the title character of actor Tom Hanks gets seen interacting with the deceased former president of USA, John F Kennedy. They digitally inserted the actor into the real footage and manipulated the former president’s mouth movements to match the dialogues for the scene.

What are the troubling implications of Deep Fake?

Just this month, an employee at Ars Technica, a website that covers tech, science, politics, and society, was given 1000$ to make your deep fake in a few days. On an article published on 16th December, he reported having done that with only 552$.

An example like this is just the tip of the iceberg for how far this technology can go. Explained briefly below are some dangerous directions this technology can go:-

1. Pornography

Celebrity faces pasted onto random naked bodies is nothing new. But now it’s getting much scarier with clone like faces getting put in porn videos. A cyber-security company called Deeptrace found that 4 leading deep fake themed pornography website has attracted 134 million views since February 2018 till the reported date of 7TH October this year. There is reportedly an app that allows one to remove clothes from still image of a woman’s body or to remove the watermark from a finished product for as little as 50$. Thankfully, after much complaints, the Deepnude app was shut down this June

2. Politics

On 22nd November, this year XR (Extended Reality) Creative Director Francesca Pennetta and Co-Director Halsey Burgund, screened a documentary titled ‘In Event of Moon Disaster.’ The unique thing about this documentary was the deep fake video of Richard Nixon reading a speech if the astronauts from 1969 moon landing had not made it back safely. Barack Obama and Senator Nancy Warren, and the list of politicians whose videos get put there as the deep fake threat is increasing with every passing day.

3. Entertainment

Just to get a hint of how far this can go, type ‘Nicolas Cage in everything ever produced. ‘ In another example in February this year, the face of Yang Mi, a popular Chinese actress, was pasted onto a face in the 1983 television drama ‘The Legend of the Condor Heroes’ that got 240 million views before being removed by Chinese authorities. The implications are scary.

4. Public figures

When earlier this year, there was widespread demand for the deep fake video of American Senator Nancy Pelosi to be removed from Facebook. When Facebook didn’t, artist Bill Posters posted a deep fake video of Mark Zuckerberg boasting about the platform owning its users.

The list goes on and on. The threat is such that there are now security agencies, governments, and private organizations like Facebook coming together to combat the menace of deep fake technology. They aim to

  • Spread awareness on how to identify deep fake video, photos, and audio
  • Creating software that can help identify deep fake content

In September this year, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, the Partnership on Ai, academics from Cornell Tech, MIT, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, College Park, and the State University of New York, Albany started a Deepfake Detection challenge. Google and DARPA, which is a research wing of the Pentagon, funded the research to derive better detection techniques.

Can we detect Deep Fake?

The straight answer is Yes and no. On the one hand, there is a widespread movement to help identify deep fake content that is slowly getting viral globally. The above state collaboration is one such example where there is hopeful work happening in the right direction. One way could be a trusted spy app that can be of big help by providing you real-time information on the content on your loved one’s mobile.

But it is getting tough to nail if there is anything wrong with the video. Especially at least on the surface level for many people. This fact becomes true, especially if you are someone who hasn’t seen the original. Even on seeing the original, there is no guarantee of identifying a deep fake.

The threat is getting worse. Hao Li, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and Ceo of Pinscreen, warns that at some point, it is likely that it’s not going to be possible to detect ‘AI Fakes’ at all. So he advocated another approach get created to resolve this.

How can monitoring apps help in keeping loved ones safe from Deep fake?

All these examples are enough to scare even the most strong-willed person. As any person can get deep faked into a video of deplorable acts or an adult video and most people won’t know the difference. Someone’s life can get ruined in a matter of minutes.

You need to be on the lookout to protect your loved ones from the threat of deep fake. Parents must find the best parental control app to keep their kids safe. There are some quality spy app that can help you keep loved ones safe with the help of software apps getting developed to detect deep fakes by:-

  • Sending you to live screen-shots of their mobile screen. If they are watching a photo or video, then you can analyze it with the help of some online tools.
  • The monitoring software can deliver the images, videos, audio files, and other such multimedia files straight to the central console. You can analyze the picture to detect any problem.
  • People’s mannerisms, body language, and point of view can get used to detect any fake deep fake content.
  • The spy app will track their social media feed to view the material they are viewing to see if any deep fake content is getting displayed.

Conclusion

Deep fake is the next step in the evolution of technology. But as you can see clearly in the examples mentioned above, the consequences can turn from entertaining to scary in a matter of moments. Thankfully, work has started to detect deep fake. But you need to take the help of the most reliable software you can find online to guard your loved ones by being affected negatively as the consequences are bone-chilling.