Siwei Lyu writing in The Conversation brings attention to “deepfakes” and offers a simple way to spot them.

What’s a deepfake?

From Wikipdeia:

“Deepfake, a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”, is an artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos.”

My favourite technology show, BBC Click, explains it well:

Back to Siwei:

“Because these techniques are so new, people are having trouble telling the difference between real videos and the deepfake videos. My work, with my colleague Ming-Ching Chang and our Ph.D. student Yuezun Li, has found a way to reliably tell real videos from deepfake videos. It’s not a permanent solution, because technology will improve. But it’s a start, and offers hope that computers will be able to help people tell truth from fiction.”

The key?

Blinking.

“Healthy adult humans blink somewhere between every 2 and 10 seconds, and a single blink takes between one-tenth and four-tenths of a second. That’s what would be normal to see in a video of a person talking. But it’s not what happens in many deepfake videos.”

They analyze the rate of blinking to decide the veracity of the video.

“Our work is taking advantage of a flaw in the sort of data available to train deepfake algorithms. To avoid falling prey to a similar flaw, we have trained our system on a large library of images of both open and closed eyes. This method seems to work well, and as a result, we’ve achieved an over 95 percent detection rate.”

My take: Wow! So, basically, now you can no longer believe what you read, hear or see. Interestingly, this means that IRL will take on added value. (Oops, it seems that technology has already moved on: now deepfakes can include blinking.)