In the second season of BBC mystery thriller The Capture, deepfakes threaten the future of democracy and UK national security. In a dystopia set in present day London, hackers use AI to insert these highly realistic false images and videos of people into live news broadcasts to destroy the careers of politicians. But my team's research has shown how difficult it is to create convincing deepfakes in reality. In fact, technology and creative professionals have started collaborating on solutions to help people spot bogus videos of politicians and celebrities. We stand a decent chance of staying one step ahead of fraudsters.

In the second season of BBC mystery thriller The Capture, deepfakes threaten the future of democracy and UK national security. In a dystopia set in present day London, hackers use AI to insert these highly realistic false images and videos of people into live news broadcasts to destroy the careers of politicians. But my team's research has shown how difficult it is to create convincing deepfakes in reality. In fact, technology and creative professionals have started collaborating on solutions to help people spot bogus videos of politicians and celebrities. We stand a decent chance of staying one step ahead of fraudsters.

In the second season of BBC mystery thriller The Capture, deepfakes threaten the future of democracy and UK national security. In a dystopia set in present day London, hackers use AI to insert these highly realistic false images and videos of people into live news broadcasts to destroy the careers of politicians. But my team's research has shown how difficult it is to create convincing deepfakes in reality. In fact, technology and creative professionals have started collaborating on solutions to help people spot bogus videos of politicians and celebrities. We stand a decent chance of staying one step ahead of fraudsters.

Deepfake images and videos pose a significant threat to biometric systems used for remote identity verification, and existing liveness technologies can detect them, making an attack vector for non-deepfakes a vulnerability businesses need to be aware of. 'Why Deepfakes aren't the Real Challenge for Remote Biometrics' was presented by Ann-Kathrin Freiberg of BioID in the latest lunch talk presented by the European Association for Biometrics (EAB). More than 250 attendees from more than 40 countries around the world pre-registered for the presentation, many of whom were highly engaged in discussion throughout. The origin of the term based on the use of deep learning to manipulate or fake an image, video or audio file was reviewed, and Freiberg shared several examples of deepfakes, including a morph fake created by a BioID employee from a free app and a single image found on the internet. Some basic tips for spotting deepfake videos were shared, such as observing the transition between different areas of the face and head, and frequency or lack of blinking.

It seems like every few days there's another example of a convincing deepfake going viral or another free, easy-to-use piece of software (some even made for mobile) that can generate convincing video or audio that's designed to trick someone into believing a piece of virtual artifice is real. But according to The Wall Street Journal, there may soon be serious financial and legal ramifications to the proliferation of deepfake technology. The publication reported last week that a UK energy company's chief executive was tricked into wiring €200,000 (or about $220,000 USD) to a Hungarian supplier because he believed his boss was instructing him to do so. But the energy company's insurance firm, Euler Hermes Group SA, told the WSJ that a clever AI-equipped fraudster was using deepfake software to mimic the voice of the executive and demand his underling pay him within the hour. "The software was able to imitate the voice, and not only the voice: the tonality, the punctuation, the German accent," a Euler Hermes spokesperson later told The Washington Post.