August 14, 2019
Why Are Deepfakes So Effective?
It's because we often want them to be true.
Public opinion shifts, skewed election results, mass confusion, ethnic violence, war. All of these events could easily be triggered by deep fakes—realistic seeming but falsified audio and video made with AI techniques. Leaders in government and industry, and the public at large are justifiably alarmed. Fueled by advances in AI and spread over the tentacles of social media, deep fakes may prove to be among the most destabilizing of forces humankind has faced in generations.
It will soon be impossible to tell by the naked eye or ear whether a video or audio clip is authentic. While propaganda is nothing new, the visceral immediacy of voice and image give deep fakes unprecedented impact and authority; as a result, both governments and industry are scrambling to develop ways to reliably detect them. Silicon Valley startup Amber, for example, is working on ways to detect even the most sophisticated altered video. You can imagine a day when we can verify the authenticity and provenance of a video by way of a digital watermark.
Developing deep fake detection technology is important, but it's only part of the solution. It is the human factor—weaknesses in our human psychology—not their technical sophistication that make deep fakes so effective. New research hints at how foundational the problem is.
After showing over 3,000 adults fake images accompanied by fabricated text, a group of researchers reached two conclusions. First, the more online experience and familiarity with digital photography one had, the more skeptical the person evaluating the information was. Second, confirmation bias—the tendency to frame new information to support our pre-existing beliefs—was a big factor in how people judged the veracity of the fake information.
Read the full article in Scientific American.
More from CNAS
-
Episode 1: The Hand Behind Unmanned – America’s Quest for Autonomous War
Podcast
What are unmanned weapons and where did America’s quest for autonomy begin? The answer takes us back to the birthplace of the country and David Bushnell’s famed kegs of floati...
By Paul Scharre
-
Rational Security: The “Huffin’ and Puffin” Edition
Podcast
This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Contributing Editors Eric Ciaramella and Alex Zerden, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center fo...
By Alex Zerden
-
Ukraine Strikes Military and Psychological Blow to Russia
Podcast
Ukraine attacked targets deep inside Russia yesterday, in what Kyiv called “Operation Spiderweb.” The Security Service of Ukraine claimed responsibility for the attack using d...
By Samuel Bendett
-
Atomic Advantage
Reports
Executive Summary One of the most consequential national security contests now unfolds on battlefields invisible to the naked eye—across the faint radiofrequency signals of th...
By Constanza M. Vidal Bustamante
