Facebook launches $10 million Deepfake Detection Challenge to fight deceptive videos

As concerns grow over the threat of AI-generated'deepfakes' videos, some of the top names in tech have revealed a plan to fight fire with fire. Deepfakes can, quite literally, put words in a person's mouth; in recent examples, footage of celebrities and politicians have been altered to convincingly show them doing or saying they never really did. Facebook, Microsoft, and the Partnership on AI have now teamed up with researchers from a slew of US universities to launch the Deepfake Detection Challenge, which seeks to create a dataset of such videos in order to improve the identification process in the real world. Facebook is commissioning consenting actors for the effort, and says it has set aside $10 million for related research and prizes. As concerns grow over the threat of AI-generated'deepfakes' videos, some of the top names in tech have revealed a plan to fight fire with fire Deepfakes have rapidly grown more realistic in the short time since they first sprung into existence.