Deepfakes and deep media: A new security battleground

That's troubling not only because these fakes might be used to sway opinions during an election or implicate a person in a crime, but because they've already been abused to generate pornographic material of actors and defraud a major energy producer. In anticipation of this new reality, a coalition of academic institutions, tech firms, and nonprofits are developing ways to spot misleading AI-generated media. Their work suggests that detection tools are a viable short-term solution but that the deepfake arms race is just beginning. The best AI-produced prose used to be closer to Mad Libs than The Grapes of Wrath, but cutting-edge language models can now write with humanlike pith and cogency. San Francisco research firm OpenAI's GPT-2 takes seconds to craft passages in the style of a New Yorker article or brainstorm game scenarios.