Adobe built an AI to spot Photoshopped faces

Adobe, the company behind the ubiquitous photo-editing program Photoshop, just unveiled a new artificial intelligence tool capable of spotting whether images have been manipulated. The research, which sprang from a partnership with scientists from UC Berkeley and funding from DARPA, focuses on edits made with Photoshop's "liquify" tool, which can subtly reshape and touch up parts of an image, according to an Adobe blog post. While Adobe doesn't plan to release the tool to the public, reports The Verge, it's a sign that the company is taking seriously the propagation of digitally-altered, misleading media. To train the edit-detecting neural net, the Adobe scientists fed it pairs of images -- an undoctored photo of someone's face and a version that had been tweaked with the liquify tool. After enough training, the neural net could spot the edited face 99 percent of the time.