How puny humans can spot devious deepfakes

In June, a video allegedly showing Datuk Seri Azmin Ali, the Malaysian minister of economic affairs, engaged in a sexual tryst with Muhammad Haziq Abdul Aziz, a deputy Malaysian minister's secretary, surfaced online. The video spread like wildfire, and subsequently threw the country's media into a frenzy. The video had real-world consequences, and Abdul Aziz, who in the eyes of the government had committed a crime, was quickly arrested. But, according to Malaysia's prime minister, the video was just one of countless other scarily-accurate deepfake videos that have been finding their way onto the internet in the last year. Deepfakes work by using something called a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is made up of two artificial intelligent processes that are pitted against each other – a generator and a discriminator.