By Kevin Park
Subheading: Deep fakes are videos where people’s likeness are pasted on to other people. You can tell the difference between edited and real photos, but not for much longer.
Have you seen Luke Skywalker in season two of Mandalorian? He looks exactly like Mark Hamill did when filming Star Wars: Return of the Jedi back in 1983. But Mark is now 70 years old; He can’t pull off the same look he did under 40 years ago. While people may argue that it was just a stunt double, 32-year-old Mark and the stunt double have some differences that were hidden in the show. The answer is a deep fake. The editing team took a stunt double, and using AI technology, put the face of 32-year-old Mark Hamill onto the stunt double.
What would have happened if it was used for something with more weight, such as politics? We could have seen Joe Biden swear allegiance to Russia right before the primaries. He would get flamed and lose because of a fake piece of data. The threat of deep fakes can also work the other way around. If a politician gets into a scandal due to a video of them beating someone up, they can claim it was a deep fake and run away from the whole mess. It can ruin the entire world in its manipulations, yet no one has done anything about them. You may think that detecting deep fakes are easy. They currently are. You can usually tell by looking at their eyes. How many times do they blink at what intervals? Deep fakes may blink too much or too fast, not what an average person would do. Please pay attention to facial hair or the lack of it. You may see some artifacts leftover from a bad edit job. Are there any shadows or glasses? If so, pay attention to them. It is extremely hard for the AI to make shadows and the refraction of light look realistic. While there are many more, these are the easiest to spot.
Currently, these deep fakes look fake; there are ways around it. Most of the precautions need a high-quality video to take notice of. If the deep fake lowers the quality of the video, they can get past the tricks. This then makes the video unrealistic because this is not 2007, where everyone has a first-generation iPhone, and the picture quality is 480p. This means the video was altered as no one has a camera with quality this bad unless they are using a relic to film something that can change the whole world, which is unbelievable at best. However, we have seen that high-quality deep fakes can be realistic, like the cameo in the Mandalorian. However, that was made by a high budget movie company, and everyday people do not have access to this technology or software, so their deep fakes won’t look as convincing. While this sounds comforting, deep fakes are technology, and much like the iPhones from 2007, can and will be improved upon, get rid of the artifacts from editing, get the timing of blinks correct, and fix the shadow and glasses’ refraction. There will be a day where a deep fake a kid made looks like a deep fake like the one Disney made, and we must prepare plans to make sure we can tell the difference between the real and fake.
References
Groh, M. (2020, April). Project Overview ' Detect Deep fakes: How to Counteract Misinformation Created by AI. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from
Shamook. (2020, December 21). The mandalorian Luke Skywalker Deepfake - YouTube. The
Mandalorian Luke Skywalker Deepfake. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from
Wolfram, S. (2019, June 12). A few thoughts about deep fakes-stephen wolfram writings. Stephen Wolfram Writings RSS. Retrieved April 11, 2022, from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/06/a-few-thoughts-about-deep-fakes/
Cool Article!