Deepfakes threaten to undermine law and order, perhaps democracy itself. A coalition of tech companies, nonprofits, and academics joined forces to counter potential adverse impacts.
What’s new: The Deepfake Detection Challenge aims to provide a data set of custom-built deepfakes. Funded by a $10 million grant from Facebook, it also promises a prize for developing tools that spot computer-generated pictures.
The details: Facebook is producing videos with actors who have consented to having their features altered by deepfake technology.
- A working session at the International Conference on Computer Vision in October will perform quality control.
- Facebook plans to offer access on a limited basis, with full release to follow at the NeurIPS conference in December.
- A competition to identify deepfakes in the dataset will run until spring 2020, with the winner to be awarded an unspecified prize.
- Other partners include Cornell Tech, Microsoft, MIT, the Partnership on AI, UC Berkeley, University at Albany-SUNY, University of Maryland College Park, University of Oxford, and WITNESS.
Behind the news: Activists goaded Facebook to action in June, when they released a synthesized video of Mark Zuckerberg rhapsodizing over his control of billions of peoples’ data.
Why it matters: Deepfakes often are portrayed as a potential vector for political disinformation. But, as Vice and Wired point out, the clear and present danger is harassment of individuals, particularly women, activists, and journalists.
We’re thinking: The fact that deepfakes are created by adversaries means the data set — and resulting filters — will need to evolve as the fakers adapt to detection algorithms.
Can you spot fakes? Test your personal deepfake radar via this online guessing game.