How to know what's real and fake with AI
Most AI technology isn’t foolproof yet, but spotting deepfakes and other AI-generated content requires attention to detail and critical thinking.
We've officially entered an age where seeing is no longer believing. Where images, videos and voices can be entirely created by artificial intelligence, and it's starting to show up everywhere.
In New Hampshire, a deepfake robocall with President Joe Biden’s voice urged voters not to vote in the primary election.
A political attack ad in Iowa used artificial intelligence to mimic former President Donald Trump’s voice to narrate a social media post he had written.
In Russia, the real President Vladimir Putin took a question during an interview from an AI-generated version of Putin.
It’s amazing, if not unnerving how far artificial intelligence has come in just the last year.
Software like Sora and Vidu are not ready for consumer use yet, but presentations show they can turn words into hyper-realistic videos.
I asked Michelle Gilbert, a principal cloud solution architect at Microsoft, if she thinks people should be afraid of AI?
“I don't think so at all,” said Gilbert. “I think it's incredibly powerful. Get comfortable with AI, 'cause it’s here to stay.”
She is an expert on Copilot, Microsoft’s latest AI companion to its Bing search engine. Copilot can create images and even compose a completed song based on the prompt you give it.
Along with content generation, Copilot uses OpenAI's ChatGPT technology and integrates it with other Microsoft products.
Another Microsoft project called VASA-1 can turn a single AI-generated image and turn it into a 3D talking video.
Ethically, Microsoft says it’s against the tech used for deepfakes or deception, and researchers say this technology might be used in the future to spot forgeries.
AI Detection
If you come across something on social media and you aren’t sure if it’s real or not, here’s the first thing you should do, according to Al Tompkins, a journalist of 50 years and a journalism instructor at the Poynter Institute.
“Slow down,” said Tompkins. “Listen to your mother. She'd say, ‘How do you know that?’ And if the answer to that is, ‘I saw it on the internet,’ hit the brakes.”
Tompkins says most AI technology isn’t foolproof yet. Spotting deepfakes and other AI-generated content requires attention to detail and critical thinking.
“Most AI images—that have any real complexity to them at all—still have what we call digital remnants. That is an error in the image that you have to learn how to look for,” he said.
For instance, these AI images of former president Trump circulated online. In one of them, it appears he’s missing fingers. And in this image purporting Trump being arrested by police officers, certain faces appear blurry with names and badges blurred as well. Experts say AI image creators still have difficulty with things like ears, backgrounds, fingers and teeth.
“Are horizons lined up, do shadows make sense? Are there words in the image and do those make sense? All you need to do is find one. You don't need to find 30 of them,” said Tompkins.
Another powerful tool is a reverse search software like RevEye. With a right click on an image, it will search all of Bing, Google and two other search engines to see if a picture has been published elsewhere and give the image more context.
But if the image is AI-generated and has never been published before, the task gets harder. Throw in elections and wars, and the stakes get higher.
On April 13, Iran responded to an attack by launching drones and missiles at Israel.
A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found “Within seven hours of Iranian drones being launched towards Israel, 34 false, misleading or AI-generated images and videos claiming to show the ongoing conflict received over 37 million views on X (formerly Twitter).
“There's tremendous risk obviously, said Tompkins. “One, that we will misunderstand something we think is real but is not. But I think the greater risk is we will start to distrust everything. I'll see something that's astonishing and instantly think, 'That can't be right.' I'll hear somebody say something that's amazing and for whatever reason that's probably a fake.”
Software that can detect AI
Tompkins says there is none that he would trust with certainty, yet.
We tried several websites like Deepware and AI or Not and had success spotting images and videos that were manipulated with AI. But in both cases we served up known deepfakes the software could not detect.
One of the videos that fooled Deepware comes from researchers at MIT who created a posthumous speech from President Richard Nixon that never happened.
The speech was actually written in the event the Apollo 11 moon landing went wrong. But Nixon never recorded it.
“The men who went to explore the moon in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” a deepfake version of Nixon says while reading from a stack of papers.
The version is so convincing, that Deepware’s analysis of the video says “no deepfake detected,” despite the video displaying text saying it isn’t real.
We have a list of other tools you can use to help you detect if something online is real or not.
A final piece of advice from Tompkins: “The best protection you got is between your ears. The best detection you got is your own critical thinking skill.”
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