How to spot AI-generated deep fake?
MEDIA BYTES
By Rev. Marty Levesque
With the rise of AI, Artificial Intelligence, individuals need to be weary and media savvy now more than ever. AI allows for deep fakes to be rapidly produced and disseminated widely.
A deep fake refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, typically in the form of audio, video, or images. In the context of deep fakes, images, audio, and video are used to manipulate or generate new media content that appears realistic but is synthetic.
So here are a few tips that will help spot a deep fake.
1) Look for odd details. It’s important to always analyze the details in images and look out for discrepancies when something feels off. Manipulated images typically lack realistic lighting, and the hands are often digitally mangled.
2) Unnatural or blurred-out images. Faces of the people often have unnatural skin tones and waxy or blurred-out features. These are strong indications that the images are fake.
3) Is anything strange in the background? Are the words blurred out on street signs? AI struggles with creating natural streetscapes with complete signs for streets or restaurants.
4) Botched hands and writing. AI struggles to write words correctly on uniforms. And often hands are at weird angles or have 6 fingers.
5) Deep fake videos tend to have a couple of main features: unnatural eye movements and the audio seems just out of sync.
These tips should help in the near term, however, as AI technology improves, it will become harder to detect discrepancies between real and fake content online. For this reason, the most important way to spot deepfakes and avoid misinformation is to fact-check and question the reliability of the sources sharing the content.
It is important to get information from official and trusted sources such as official government agencies, and credible news platforms. In most cases, a quick search online, using reliable news sources or fact-checking organizations such as Snopes.com can help identify whether something is true or not.
"The wise are cautious and turn away from evil, but the fool throws off restraint and is careless." Proverbs 14:16
Rev. Marty Levesque is the rector of All Saints’ in Waterloo. He served as diocesan social media officer.