Is ‘Deepfake’ hysteria mostly fake news?

Deepfakes touch a nerve. They are easy to latch on to as an issue of ethical concern. Yet despite the technology being around for many years, there has been no deepfake apocalypse. The surprising thing about deepfakes is that there are so few of them. That is not to say it cannot happen. But it is an issue that demands some cool head thinking.

Deepfakes have been around for a long time. Roman emperors sometimes had their predecessors' portraits altered to resemble themselves, thereby rewriting history to suit their narrative or to claim a lineage. Fakes in print and photography have been around as long as those media have existed.

In my own field, learning, a huge number have for decades, used this deliberate fake. It is entirely made up, based on a fake citation, fake numbers put on a fake pyramid. Yet I have seen a Vice Principal of a University and no end of Keynotes at conferences and educationalist use it in their presentations. I have written about suck fakery for years and a lesson I learnt a long time ago was that we tend to ignore deepfakes when they suit our own agendas. No one complained when a flood of naked Trump images flooded the web, but if it’s from the Trump camp, people go apeshit. In other words, the debate often tends to be partisan.

When did AI deepfakes start?

Deepfakes, as they're understood today, refer specifically to media that's been altered or created using deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

The more recent worries about AI creating deepfakes have been around since 2017 when ‘deepfake’ (portmanteau of deep learning & fake) was used to create images and videos. It was on Reddit that a user called ‘Deepfake’ starting positing videos in 2017 of videos with celebrities superimposed on other bodies.

Since then, the technology has advanced rapidly, leading to more realistic deepfakes that are increasingly difficult to detect. This has raised significant ethical, legal, and social concerns regarding privacy, consent, misinformation, and the potential for exploitation. Yet there is little evidence that they are having any effect of either beliefs or elections.

Deliberate deepfakes

The first widely known instance of a political AI deepfake surfaced in April 2018. This was a video of former U.S. President Barack Obama, made by Jordan Peele in collaboration with BuzzFeed and the director’s production company, Monkeypaw Productions. In the video, Obama appears to say a series of controversial statements. However, it was actually Jordan Peele's voice, an impressionist and comedian, using AI technology to manipulate Obama's lip movements to match his speech. We also readily forget that it was Obama who pioneered the harvesting of social media data to target voters with political messaging.

The Obama video was actually created as a public service announcement to raise awareness about the potential misuse of deepfake technology in spreading misinformation and the importance of media literacy. It wasn't intended to deceive but rather to educate the public about the capabilities and potential dangers of deepfake technology, especially concerning its use in politics and media.

In 2019, artists created deepfake videos of UK politicians including Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, in which they appeared to endorse each other for Prime Minister. These videos were made to raise awareness about the threat of deepfakes in elections and politics

In 2020, the most notable deepfake video of Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès showed her give a speech where she linked COVID-19 to environmental damage and the need to take action on climate change. This video was actually created by an environmental organization to raise awareness about climate change.

In other words, many of the most notable deepfakes have been for awareness, satire, or educational purposes.

Debunked deepfakes

Most deepfakes are quickly debunked. In 2022, during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was circulated. In the video, he appeared to be making a statement asking Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms. Deepfakes, like this, are usually quickly identified and debunked, but it shows how harmful misinformation during sensitive times like a military conflict, can be dangerous.

The recent images of Donald Trump were explicitly stated to be deepfakes by their author. They had missing fingers, odd teeth, a long upside down nail on his hand and weird words on hats and clothes, so quickly identified. At the moment they are easy to detect and debunk. That won’t always be the case, which brings us to detection.

Deepfake detection

As AI develops, deepfake production becomes more possible but so do advances in AI and digital forensics for detection. You can train models to tell the difference by analysing facial expressions, eye movement, lip sync and overall facial consistency. There are subtleties in facial movements and expressions, blood vessel giveaways, as well as eye blinking, breathing, blood poulses and other movements that are difficult to replicate in deepfakes. Another is checks for consistency, in lighting, reflections, shadows and backgrounds. Frame by frame checking can also reveal flickers and other signs of fakery. Then there’s audio detection, with a whole rack of its own techniques. On top of all this are forensic checks on the origins, metadata and compression artefacts that can reveal the creation, tampering or its unreliable source. Let’s also remember that humans can also be used to check, as our brains are fine-tuned to find these tell-tale signs, so human moderation still has a role. 

As deepfake technology becomes more sophisticated, the challenge of detecting them increase but these techniques are constantly evolving, and companies often use a combination of methods to improve accuracy and reliability. There is also a lot of sharing of knowledge across companies to keep ahead of the game.

So it is easier to detect deepfakes that many think. There are plenty of tell-tale signs that AI can use to detect, police and prevent them from being shown. These techniques have been honed for years and that is the reason why so few ever actually surface on social media platforms. Facebook, Google, X and others have been working on this for years. That is why they have not been caught flat-footed on the issue. 

Deepfakes in learning 

We should also remember that deepfakes can be useful. I have used them to create several avatars of myself, which speak languages I cannot speak. They have been used to recreate historical figures for educational documentaries and interactive learning experiences. You see and hear historical figures ‘come to life’, to make the learning process more engaging. Language courses have used them to create videos and immersive language learning experiences, as the lip-synch is now superb. Even museums and educational institutions have started using deepfake technology to create more immersive exhibits. On top of this real training projects in sectors like medicine, now use deepfake technology to create realistic training videos or simulations, where patients and healthcare staff can be represented.

Conclusion

We too readily jump to conclusions when it comes to AI and ethics, there is often a rush to simplistic moralising, when the truth is deeper and more complex. Technology almost always has multiple uses with varying degrees of beneficial and damaging uses. We tend to lean towards the negative through confirmation and negativity bias. This needs to be avoided by a more detailed discussion of the issues, not presenting everything in apocalyptic terms.