AI-powered deepfakes are a bigger threat than fake news

This February, China's best-known contemporary actress, Yang Mi, surfaced in a video of a 1983 Hong Kong television drama The Legend Of The Condor Heroes. Given the prevailing China-Hong Kong friction, the fake video wherein the original actress' face was replaced with Yang garnered almost 240 million views before it was removed by Chinese authorities. Similarly, videos of US President Donald Trump mocking Belgium for joining the Paris Climate agreement, or a video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasting that the social network owns its users, were widely circulated until they were found to be fake. Known as deepfakes, this new breed of fake videos first surfaced back in 2017 with fake porn videos of some Hollywood celebrities. While initially simple open source video editing tools were used to manipulate audio and video, criminals are now using more sophisticated machine learning (ML) tools like generative adversarial networks, or GANs, that use a pair of contrasting unsupervised ML algorithms to create a deepfake.