Deepfakes Are Getting Better and That's Bad

Since the advent of photographic editing applications like Photoshop, it's been possible to edit photos so that the changes aren't apparent to the naked eye, although it's possible for specialized software to detect the changes. In the last year or so, it's become possible to do the same kind of manipulation with video, and that has serious social implications, most of which are not good. 

Forbes has a long article that looks at what are now known as deepfakes and their implications. It's a good article, and worrisome.

The amount of deepfake content online is growing at a rapid rate. At the beginning of 2019 there were 7,964 deepfake videos online, according to a report from startup Deeptrace; just nine months later, that figure had jumped to 14,678. It has no doubt continued to balloon since then.

While impressive, today's deepfake technology is still not quite to parity with authentic video footage—by looking closely, it is typically possible to tell that a video is a deepfake. But the technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. Experts predict that deepfakes will be indistinguishable from real images before long.

“In January 2019, deep fakes were buggy and flickery,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and deepfake expert. “Nine months later, I’ve never seen anything like how fast they’re going. This is the tip of the iceberg.”

Today we stand at an inflection point. In the months and years ahead, deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force. Society needs to act now to prepare itself.