Blink twice if you are a fake. Sophisticated fake videos created by artificial intelligence are getting better and better, so tools to identify the genuine article are needed. One solution is to look at the way fake faces blink.
In recent months, eerily-realistic fake videos have been created of Theresa May, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump giving speeches, as well as of聽famous actors聽superimposed into porn scenes. To make the footage, AI needs still images of the faked person, which are then mapped onto an actor playing out the scene. The results are often difficult to distinguish from the real deal.
However, all is not lost. There may be a simple tell for computerised fakery 鈥� the people in deepfakes videos don鈥檛 blink like humans.
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The average person blinks 17 times a minute, but because most photographs don鈥檛 capture people with their eyes closed, the subjects of deepfakes videos don鈥檛 close their eyes either. 鈥淭he deepfakes algorithm inherits this basic flaw,鈥� says Siwei Lyu, at SUNY Albany.
So Lyu and his colleagues created a new fakery fighting tool that tracks the eyes in videos. Using this approach, the team鈥檚 tool managed to achieve an accuracy of 99 per cent.
Though the tool works for now, it may not remain that way for long, says Eliot Higgins, at the Atlantic Council鈥檚 Digital Forensic Research Laboratory. 鈥淚f they can make someone say something they鈥檙e not saying, I think making someone blink isn鈥檛 going to be particularly difficult,鈥� he says.
Stanford University researchers have already developed a better version of deepfakes that includes blinking and will be presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics in August. That doesn鈥檛 dissuade Lyu though. 鈥淢edia forensics is a cat and mouse game,鈥� he says.
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