Are You Better Than a Machine at Spotting a Deepfake?

Sarah Vitak: This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. Early last year a TikTok of Tom Cruise doing a magic trick went viral. I mean, it's all the real thing."] Matt Groh: A deepfake is a video where an individual's face has been altered by a neural network to make an individual do or say something that the individual has not done or said. Vitak: That is Matt Groh, a Ph.D. student and researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Groh: It seems like there's a lot of anxiety and a lot of worry about deepfakes and our inability to, you know, know the difference between real or fake. Vitak: But he points out that the videos posted on the Deep Tom Cruise account aren't your standard deepfakes. The creator, Chris Umé, went back and edited individual frames by hand to remove any mistakes or flaws left behind by the algorithm. It takes him about 24 hours of work for each 30-second clip. It makes the videos look eerily realistic. But without that human touch, a lot of flaws show up in ...