Amazon joins Facebook's fight against deepfakes

Facebook will have some extra help in its quest to fight deepfakes. Amazon Web Services is joining the Deepfake Detection Challenge as both a technical partner and as a member of the committee overseeing the challenge. It'll offer machine learning experts for "technical support and guidance," and will offer $1 million in AWS credits to teams that need cloud services to complete their detection work. The Challenge will also add two professors, the Technical University of Munich's Laura Leal-Taixé and the University of Naples Federico II's Luisa Verdoliva, as academic advisors. At the same time, Facebook is giving researchers some of the samples they need to help spot deepfakes. It's releasing the first 5,000 example videos out of the 100,000-plus created explicitly for the Challenge.