Deep Learning-Powered 'Fake Faces' Will Transform Catfishing

Catfishing and the use of false profiles to scam and extort individuals online has become an unfortunate fact of our modern digital life. Even prison inmates have used such tactics to extort money from US servicemembers. Yet, catfishing has been limited to some degree by its traditional reliance on preexisting imagery and personas misappropriated from innocent user accounts to create the fake catfishing profiles. As deep learning approaches increasingly allow the creation of entirely artificial faces and voices, we are fast approaching an era in which catfishing risks overwhelming the world of online dating and being used as an intelligence tool. Automated approaches to generating entirely artificial human imagery have improved dramatically over the past few decades, from primitive systems useful only for the creation of background characters in large crowds to state-of-the-art systems capable of generating fake human faces almost indistinguishable from photographs.