In the third week of Russia's war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky appeared in a video, dressed in a dark green shirt, speaking slowly and deliberately while standing behind a white presidential podium featuring his country's coat of arms. Except for his head, the Ukrainian president's body barely moved as he spoke. His voice sounded distorted and almost gravelly as he appeared to tell Ukrainians to surrender to Russia.
"I ask you to lay down your weapons and go back to your families," he appeared to say in Ukrainian in the clip, which was . "This war is not worth dying for. I suggest you to keep on living, and I am going to do the same."
Five years ago, nobody had even heard of deepfakes, the persuasive-looking but false video and audio files made with the help of artificial intelligence. Now, they're being used to impact the course of a war. In addition to the fake Zelesnky video, which went viral last week, there was another widely circulated deepfake video depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin supposedly declaring peace in the Ukraine war.
Experts in disinformation and content authentication have about the potential to spread lies and chaos via deepfakes, particularly as they become more and more realistic looking. In general, deepfakes have improved immensely in a relatively short period of time. doing coin flips and covering Dave Matthews Band songs last year, for instance, showed how deepfakes can appear convincingly real.
Neither of the recent videos of Zelensky or Putin came close to TikTok Tom Cruise's high production values (they were noticeably low resolution, for one thing, which is a common tactic for hiding flaws.) But experts still see them as dangerous. That's because they show the lighting speed with which high-tech disinformation can now spread around the globe. As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation. Even a bad deepfake risks muddying the waters further.
"Once this line is eroded, truth itself will not exist," said Wael Abd-Almageed, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California and founding director of the school's Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory. "If you see anything and you cannot believe it anymore, then everything becomes false. It's not like everything will become true. It's just that we will lose confidence in anything and everything."
Back in 2019, there were concerns that deepfakes would influence the 2020 US presidential election, including a at the time from Dan Coats, then the US Director of National Intelligence. But
Siwei Lyu, director of the computer vision and machine learning lab at University at Albany, thinks this was because the technology "was not there yet." It just wasn't easy to make a good deepfake, which requires smoothing out obvious signs that a video has been tampered with (such as weird-looking visual jitters around the frame of a person's face) and making it sound like the person in the video was saying what they appeared to be saying (either via an AI version of their actual voice or a convincing voice actor).
Now, it's easier to make better deepfakes, but perhaps more importantly, the circumstances of their use are different. The fact that they are now being used in an attempt to influence people during a war is especially pernicious, experts told CNN Business, simply because the confusion they sow can be dangerous.
Under normal circumstances, Lyu said, deepfakes may not have much impact beyond drawing interest and getting traction online. "But in critical situations, during a war or a national disaster, when people really can't think very rationally and they only have a very truly short span of attention, and they see something like this, that's when it becomes a problem," he added.
Snuffing out misinformation in general has become more complex during the war in Ukraine. Russia's invasion of the country has been accompanied by a real-time deluge of information hitting social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Much of it is real, but some is fake or misleading. The visual nature of what's being shared — along with how emotional and visceral it often is — can
Nina Schick, author of "Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse," sees deepfakes like those of Zelensky and Putin as signs of the much larger disinformation problem online, which she thinks social media companies aren't doing enough to solve. She argued that responses from companies such as Facebook, which it had removed the Zelensky video, are often a "fig leaf."
"You're talking about one video," she said. The larger problem remains.
As deepfakes get better, researchers and companies are trying to keep up with tools to spot them.
Abd-Almageed and Lyu use algorithms to detect deepfakes. Lyu's solution, the jauntily named , allows anyone to upload a video to check its authenticity, though he notes that it can take a couple hours to get results. And some companies, such as cybersecurity software provider Zemana, are working on their own software as well.
There are issues with automated detection, however, such as that it gets trickier as deepfakes improve. In 2018, for instance, Lyu developed a way to spot deepfake videos by tracking inconsistencies in the way the person in the video blinked; less than a month later, someone generated a deepfake with realistic blinking.
Lyu believes that people will ultimately be better at stopping such videos than software. He'd eventually like to see (and is interested in helping with) a sort of deepfake bounty hunter program emerge, where people get paid for rooting them out online. (In the United States, there has also been some legislation to address the issue, such as a prohibiting the distribution of deceptive video or audio of political candidates within 60 days of an election.)
"We're going to see this a lot more, and relying on platform companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter is probably not sufficient," he said. "Nothing actually beats human eyes."
The Israeli military targeted a top Hezbollah figure in a strike on Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday, two security sources in Lebanon said, sharply escalating the year-long conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed group.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tapped Treasury Board President Anita Anand to take on additional duties as Canada's minister of transport on Thursday.
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Driving into the tunnels of Nutrien's Rocanville mine, the largest potash mine in the world by production volume, feels like driving down a lonely highway in the middle of the night.
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Two men from Barrie have been charged after a deadly shooting at a park in Keswick on Wednesday.
A growing group of brides and wedding photographers from across the province say they have been taken for tens of thousands of dollars by a Barrie, Ont. wedding photographer.
Ontario Provincial Police executed a search warrant in Walkerton.
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Standing up, speaking out, and showing solidarity — survivors and supporters gathered in the core to take back the night in Windsor. The city is just one of a growing list of communities that have declared intimate partner violence (IPV) an epidemic.
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In a rare move, the Greater Victoria School District Board of Education has been slapped with a ministerial order from the province requiring it to update a student safety plan – drawing concern around political posturing leading up to an election.
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To appreciate why Mimi Vandermolen is so pleased to notice one particular vehicle she’s walking past, you need to know that seeing this many cars in one place would have been unimaginable when she was growing-up in the post-war Netherlands.
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The Red Bridge, a historic landmark in Kamloops, B.C., was completely destroyed by fire early Thursday morning.
Animal protection officers in British Columbia have rescued three pit bulls – including one that gave birth to 10 puppies – from a rat-infested home in Kelowna.
A Vulcan, Alta., man has been charged with a Lethbridge woman's murder after her body was found in the Oyen area.
A Lethbridge couple got a good reminder as to why you should keep your vehicle doors locked at all times.
Lethbridge residents who live near the police range can expect to hear plenty of shots fired Wednesday and Thursday.
A new community health profile in the Algoma District shows the area is significantly below provincial averages in a number of health metrics.
North Bay Police Service says one person has died following an industrial accident at the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission Rail Yard on Tuesday.
Three northern Ontario residents are charged with drug trafficking after the vehicle they were in got stuck along a bush road off Highway 17 on Monday.
Newfoundland and Labrador's chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
A 16-year-old biennial event aimed at fostering business in the country's eastern Arctic and northern regions has been cancelled indefinitely as a dispute unfolds between Inuit in Canada and a Labrador group claiming to share their heritage.
Jim Lester’s farm hopped on the cow-cuddling trend in early August, and his time slots have been pretty well sold out ever since.
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