Deepfake pornography is almost always non-consensual, involving the artificial synthesis of explicit videos that feature famous celebrities or personal contacts.įrom these dark corners of the web, the use of deepfakes has begun to spread to the political sphere, where the potential for mayhem is even greater.
As of September 2019, 96% of deepfake videos online were pornographic, according to the Deeptrace report.Ī handful of websites dedicated specifically to deepfake pornography have emerged, collectively garnering hundreds of millions of views over the past two years. The first use case to which deepfake technology has been widely applied-as is often the case with new technologies-is pornography. Society needs to act now to prepare itself. In the months and years ahead, deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force. “Nine months later, I’ve never seen anything like how fast they’re going. “In January 2019, deep fakes were buggy and flickery,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and deepfake expert. Experts predict that deepfakes will be indistinguishable from real images before long. But the technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. While impressive, today's deepfake technology is still not quite to parity with authentic video footage-by looking closely, it is typically possible to tell that a video is a deepfake. It has no doubt continued to balloon since then. At the beginning of 2019 there were 7,964 deepfake videos online, according to a report from startup Deeptrace just nine months later, that figure had jumped to 14,678. The amount of deepfake content online is growing at a rapid rate. Several deepfake videos have gone viral recently, giving millions around the world their first taste of this new technology: President Obama using an expletive to describe President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg admitting that Facebook's true goal is to manipulate and exploit its users, Bill Hader morphing into Al Pacino on a late-night talk show. Trump Threatens To Issue Executive Order Preventing Biden From Being Elected PresidentĪ combination of the phrases “deep learning” and “fake”, deepfakes first emerged on the Internet in late 2017, powered by an innovative new deep learning method known as generative adversarial networks (GANs).
Why It’s Important To Push Back On ‘Plandemic’-And How To Do It Why Tokyo’s New Transparent Public Restrooms Are A Stroke Of Genius Deepfake technology enables anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to create realistic-looking photos and videos of people saying and doing things that they did not actually say or do. The State Farm ad was a benign example of an important and dangerous new phenomenon in AI: deepfakes. What viewers should have felt, though, was deep concern.
The commercial surprised, amused and delighted viewers. It appeared to show footage from 1998 of an ESPN analyst making shockingly accurate predictions about the year 2020.Īs it turned out, the clip was not genuine: it was generated using cutting-edge AI.
Last month during ESPN’s hit documentary series The Last Dance, State Farm debuted a TV commercial that has become one of the most widely discussed ads in recent memory. “We want our students to compute correctly but the emphasis is really moving more towards the explanation, and the how, and the why, and ‘can I really talk through the procedures that I went through to get this answer,’” August details.Here's more on the new technology, from Forbes: When someone in the audience (presumably a parent, but it’s not certain) asks if teachers will be, you know, correcting students who don’t know rudimentary arithmetic instantly, August makes another meandering, longwinded statement. “Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on the how,” August says in the video. In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer. If you said 11 - or, hell, if you said 7, pi, or infinity squared - that’s just fine under the Common Core, the new national curriculum that the Obama administration will impose on American public school students this fall.