OTTAWA — Barack Obama says he’s concerned “deepfake” videos will have real-life consequences, messing with people’s abilities to sort fact from fiction.

The former U.S. president told an Ottawa audience Friday evening he’s seen fake videos bearing his likeness, powered by artificial intelligence, modelling his voice and movements.

He explained part of the problem is because the human brain hasn’t adapted quickly enough to process the onslaught of information readily available to them on multiple platforms, and A.I. is only going to make things worse. Especially for democracies, he said.

“The marketplace of ideas that is the basis of our democratic practice has difficulty working if we don’t have some common baseline of what’s true and what’s not.”

As we await the inevitable post-truth, technocratic dystopia that we’re headed towards, though, we should all take a moment to admire the novel uses a group of Russian researchers have found for deepfakes (they call them “talking head models”).

Most notably, researchers from Moscow’s Samsung AI Center and Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology have taken portraits such as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and managed to make them move as if they’re (pretty much) real people talking in the present day.

Researchers from the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University are developing methods to identify when an image has been altered using artificial intelligence and “digital watermarks” to help detect deepfakes.

Concerns about malicious use of those advances have given rise to a debate about whether deepfakes could be used to undermine democracy. The concern is that a cleverly crafted deepfake of a public figure, perhaps imitating a grainy cell phone video so that it’s imperfections are overlooked, and timed for the right moment, could shape a lot of opinions. That’s sparked an arms race to automate ways of detecting them ahead of the 2020 elections. The Pentagon’s Darpa has spent tens of millions on a media forensics research program, and several startups are angling to become arbiters of truth as the campaign gets underway. In Congress, politicians have called for legislation banning their “malicious use.”

Last week, Samsung researchers announced a system that can create realistic deepfake video avatars from just one image. Around the same time, a doctored video surfaced of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been slowed down to make her appear drunk. These two unsettling events, representing an impressive achievement by the Samsung team and a less sophisticated case of "malinformation" around Pelosi, bring the issue of AI-augmented deepfake videos starkly back into the limelight. Last year, deepfake videos dominated the headlines, culminating in deepfake celebrity pornography and a blanket ban by Reddit in August 2018.

Societies around the world are grappling with how to best respond to the rise of doctored videos. From this week's Pelosi video’s slowed playback to AI-produced “deep fakes,” the world of video is shedding the old motto that “seeing is believing.” This raises the question of whether these digital falsehoods, especially newer AI-created videos, represent something fundamentally new or whether they are merely a technological update of the age-old plague of false information. In particular, reflecting on Orson Welles’ infamous October 30, 1938 radio adaptation of The War of The Worlds reminds us that believable falsehoods have been with us since the early days of modern broadcast mass communication.

Imagine if someone created a video of you by simply stealing your profile picture from Facebook or Instagram. Now, the bad guys over the online platform do not have to hand over this tech yet. However, Samsung has now figured out a way to make this happen.

Now, deepfakes are fabricated clips that use big sets of data images to create video clips that appear to do something they never ever did or said. This real looking forgery was a far cry a few years back with a stringent set of work required to achieve the same. Now, Samsung managed to develop a new system comprised of AI or Artificial Intelligence which can generate fake clip simply by feeding just 1 picture.

One Of The most difficult things about detecting manipulated photos, or "deepfakes," is that digital photo files aren't coded to be tamper-evident. But researchers from New York University's Tandon School of Engineering are starting to develop strategies that make it easier to tell if a photo has been altered, opening up a potential new front in the war on fakery.

The 2020 presidential campaigns appear to have done little to prepare for what experts predict could be a flood of fake videos depicting candidates doing or saying something incriminating or embarrassing.

The House Intelligence Committee has slated a hearing in June that will examine a series of national security matters, including the threat of videos manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) that look strikingly real, a panel aide said.

The congressional hearing on June 13 will be one of the first to primarily focus on so-called deepfakes, which experts and lawmakers say pose a major disinformation threat heading into the 2020 election.

Over the last few years, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown by leaps and bounds. Researchers are working on driverless cars, voice-controlled smart assistants and image recognition that can spot tumors in photos better than radiologists.

On the retail front, AI is already changing how customers shop online. Algorithms are already suggesting items you might like based off of previous searches or purchases. The Echo Look is Amazon’s “style assistant” that takes a photo of your outfit and makes fashion recommendations that are conveniently available for sale on Amazon. And AI will transform online commerce for retailers in an even more major way in the near future — realistic digital models may eventually replace humans.

A new deepfake combining comedian Bill Hader and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger is going viral online. The video, produced by a deepfake creator known as Ctrl Shift Face, has already been viewed more than 300,000 times on YouTube alone.

The clip shows Hader during a 2014 interviewwith late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien doing his best impression of the former California governor. But this time, Hader’s impression is accompanied by Schwarzenegger’s actual face.

Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí once said in an interview, “I believe in general in death, but in the death of Dali, absolutely not.” Now, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, has worked to fulfill the painter’s prophecy by bringing him back to life — with a deepfake.

The exhibition, called Dalí Lives, was made in collaboration with the ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), which made a life-size re-creation of Dalí using the machine learning-powered video editing technique. Using archival footage from interviews, GS&P pulled over 6,000 frames and used 1,000 hours of machine learning to train the AI algorithm on Dalí’s face. His facial expressions were then imposed over an actor with Dalí’s body proportions, and quotes from his interviews and letters were synced with a voice actor who could mimic his unique accent, a mix of French, Spanish, and English.

I can be an adult about this. I'm a mature, functioning human being. I can handle 59 seconds of baby footage with SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk's face superimposed onto the child's face. Oh god, who am I kidding? I'm broken.

I like babies. I like Elon Musk. But I also like garlic and chocolate, I just don't ever want to experience them together in one. 

"The most realistic AI voice clone we’ve heard”

Up until now, these voices have been noticeably stilted and robotic, but researchers from AI startup Dessa have created what is by far the most convincing voice clone we’ve ever heard — perfectly mimicking the sound of MMA-commentator-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan.

Listen to clips of Dessa’s AI Rogan, and take a quiz on the company’s site to see if you can spot the difference between real Rogan and faux Rogan.

"I just listened to an AI generated audio recording of me talking about chimp hockey teams and it's terrifyingly accurate," Rogan wrote on Friday. "At this point, I've long ago left enough content out there that they could basically have me saying anything they want, so my position is to shrug my shoulders and shake my head in awe, and just accept it. The future is gonna be really f---ing weird, kids."

Online videos may be today’s most efficient information vector. They are the closest thing to a real-life event happening in front of your eyes, as opposed to pictures, texts, or even a combination of both. Nevertheless, the emergence of maliciously altered videos and deepfakes puts us at risk of being dangerously misinformed. To counter this, sound forensic methods supported by specifically designed signal processing tools and artificial intelligence are being used to detect most falsifications.

Yet often, misinformation conducted via video does not rely on a technical alteration but rather on false claims that accompany the footage. This could be achieved through a misleading title, a falsely alleged geographical location, or through anachronism, which consists in attributing filmed events to a false period. Anachronism can also include the resurfacing of older videos that not only add to the spread of fake news but affect open source research.

The following investigation shows how an unaltered video, which depicted a real event that happened at an originally correctly claimed date, confused the audience and online investigators by re-surfacing under a different title during a significantly more susceptible political context.

Government should be cautious about moving to new law for “deepfake” audio and video, a new Law Foundation-backed study released today says.

Co-author Tom Barraclough predicts that deepfake and other synthetic media will be the next wave of content causing concern to government and tech companies following the Christchurch Call. While it is tempting to respond with new law, the study finds that the long list of current legislation covering the issues may be sufficient.

Companion piece: Deepfake and the law - Expert Reaction

A new report funded by the Law Foundation cautions against rushing to develop new laws to respond to synthetic media. Instead, the authors say there is already a long list of laws that cover the issue, including the Privacy Act, Copyright Act and the Harmful Digital Communication Act.

The SMC asked experts to comment on the report and deepfakes more broadly.

A Hollywood union has thrown its weight behind legislation in California’s Senate that would make pornographic deepfakes a crime.

Bill SB564, which has passed California’s Judiciary Committee, is being sponsored by The Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA).

It extends the definition of a consenting individual to include not just an actual act, or a performance, but a “realistic digitized performance in which the individual did not actually perform”.

Members of SAG-AFTRA and Los Angeles Congressman Adam Schiff sounded alarms Monday about the proliferation of “deep fake” technologies — realistic digital forgeries including sex scenes.

“We have a medium in which lies and fear travel faster than anything else and this has happened practically overnight,” said Schiff during a two-hour panel discussion at union headquarters in Los Angeles.

“I am deeply concerned that deep-fakes could be used to spread disinformation or interfere in our elections, and we have already seen these technologies used to harass, exploit and invade the privacy of private citizens, particularly women,” said Schiff. “We have another election coming up and it’s more important than ever for the public to distinguish between what is real and what is fake. Our democracy depends on it.”