Facebook, Microsoft launch contest to detect deepfake videos - Reuters

The social media giant is putting $10 million into the "Deepfake Detection Challenge," which aims to spur detection research. As part of the project, Facebook is commissioning researchers to produce realistic deepfakes to create a data set for testing detection tools. The company said the videos, which will be released in December, will feature paid actors and that no user data would be utilized. In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, social platforms have been under pressure to tackle the threat of deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to create hyper-realistic videos where a person appears to say or do something they did not. While there has not been a well-crafted deepfake video with major political consequences in the United States, the potential for manipulated video to cause turmoil was recently demonstrated by a "cheapfake" clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, manually slowed down to make her speech seem slurred.