Deepfakes have come across as serious problems this year and big companies are now paying attention. Amazon announced today it's joining the DeepFake Detection challenge (DFDC) driven by major corporations such as Facebook and Microsoft to boost efforts to identify manipulated content. The company is going to contribute $1 million in AWS credits over the next two years to researchers. AWS is also working with DFDC partners to explore hosting complicated datasets for deepfake detection on the cloud service using its Amazon S3 scalable infrastructure. Find out at TNW's Hard Fork Summit Amazon said researchers have to apply for a grant of a minimum of $1,000 and a maximum of $10,000.

Google has released a database of 3,000 deepfakes - videos that use artificial intelligence to alter faces or to make people say things they never did. The videos are of actors and use a variety of publicly available tools to alter their faces. The search giant hopes it will help researchers build the tools needed to take down "harmful" fake videos. There are fears such videos could be used to promote false conspiracy theories and propaganda. Deepfake technology takes video and audio clips of real people, often politicians or celebrities, and uses artificial-intelligence techniques to alter them in some way, for instance putting words in their mouth or transposing their head on to body of an actor in pornography. Since their first appearance in 2017, many open-source methods of generating deepfake clips have emerged.

With deepfakes expected to pose a major challenge in the upcoming 2020 election and beyond, Facebook detailed one way in which it plans to take on the problem. As part of a new partnership that involves, among others, Microsoft, MIT and the University of Oxford, Facebook plans to invest more than $10 million to take part in an industry-wide effort to fight deepfakes. The initiative is called the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC). It aims to create open source tools that companies, governments and media organizations can use to better detect when a video has been doctored. Facebook's contribution to the project includes hiring actors to create videos researchers can use to test the detection tools they create.