How Deepfake Videos Are Used to Spread Misinformation

In a video, a news anchor with neatly combed black hair and a short beard described what he saw as the United States' shameful inaction against gun violence.
Video

In another video, a news anchor announced China's role in geopolitical relations at an international summit.
Video
But something w like turned off. Their voices were stilted and out of sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a video game pixelated quality and their hair looked unnaturally stuck to their heads. The captions were full of grammatical errors.
The two broadcasters, who allegedly host a media outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. These are computer generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known case of "deepfake" video technology being used to create fictitious people in the part of a state-aligned information campaign.
"This is the first time we've seen this in the wild," said Jack Stubbs, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a research company that studies disinformation. Graphika discovered the pro-China campaign, which seemed intended to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and undermine the United States for English-speaking viewers.
Technology "Deepfake , which has been making steady progress for nearly a decade, has the ability to create talking digital puppets. The A.I. software is sometimes used to misrepresent public figures, such as a video that circulated on social media last year wrongly showing Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, announcing a surrender. But the software can also create characters from anything, going beyond traditional editing software and expensive special effects tools used by Hollywood, blurring the line between fact and fiction to an extraordinary degree.

With few laws to manage the spread of the technology, disinformation experts have long warned that deepfake videos could further block people from discerning the reality of fakes online, that can be misused to stir up unrest or cause political scandal. Those predictions have now come true.
Although the use of deepfakes in the recently uncovered pro-China disinformation campaign was ham...

Technology Feb 9, 2023 0 47 Add to Reading List

How Deepfake Videos Are Used to Spread Misinformation

In a video, a news anchor with neatly combed black hair and a short beard described what he saw as the United States' shameful inaction against gun violence.

In another video, a news anchor announced China's role in geopolitical relations at an international summit.

But something w like turned off. Their voices were stilted and out of sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a video game pixelated quality and their hair looked unnaturally stuck to their heads. The captions were full of grammatical errors.

The two broadcasters, who allegedly host a media outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. These are computer generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known case of "deepfake" video technology being used to create fictitious people in the part of a state-aligned information campaign.

"This is the first time we've seen this in the wild," said Jack Stubbs, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a research company that studies disinformation. Graphika discovered the pro-China campaign, which seemed intended to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and undermine the United States for English-speaking viewers.

Technology "Deepfake , which has been making steady progress for nearly a decade, has the ability to create talking digital puppets. The A.I. software is sometimes used to misrepresent public figures, such as a video that circulated on social media last year wrongly showing Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, announcing a surrender. But the software can also create characters from anything, going beyond traditional editing software and expensive special effects tools used by Hollywood, blurring the line between fact and fiction to an extraordinary degree.

With few laws to manage the spread of the technology, disinformation experts have long warned that deepfake videos could further block people from discerning the reality of fakes online, that can be misused to stir up unrest or cause political scandal. Those predictions have now come true.

Although the use of deepfakes in the recently uncovered pro-China disinformation campaign was ham...