A Deepfake is something very interesting and at the same time something very terrifying. This means a video that shows us a person who in fact………….isn't really the person that we see.
The most famous Deepfake is the one from 2018, where an actor named Jorden Peele makes a deepfake that shows President Obama as the protagonist of a video broadcast on YouTube. It was downright incredible and it set the tone for the alert that other people might do this in the future, but the purpose was an evil one.
This video was made by combining multiple footage with multiple moments showing President Obama in the frame. From here it was possible to combine a set of gestures and visual emotions that, together with a good vocal imitation, generated a fake video or a so-called deepfake.
Moving on to the year 2022, see that this "weapon" is put into practice. The news tells us that the mayor of Berlin had a video call with the mayor of Kyiv, only that the latter...wasn't really him in the footage. It seemed to be him in the video, he had a similar voice, but it was all a deepfake, for political purposes and to receive undue amounts of money. Digital warfare is already being used and we have been warned about it since 2018 by a comedian. How ironic, considering the same previous quality of the current president of Ukraine.
Can we spot a Deepfake?
According to a security report by AVG, report released in late June 2022, there are a few signs that a video is deepfake:
- strange blinking – it seems that the people appearing in a deepfake video did not correctly generate the natural ability to blink (in the video with Obama, the blinking part seems quite well done, although everything is on a blurred background);
- facial movement that is jerked – because the digital man is built from video frames from many different scenes, the image can "jump", and that would obviously spoil the naturalness of the facial movement;
- color tone shift – again, due to the set of frames from different days and times of the character, some movements (although suitable as a mime) may even in a micro-gesture display a different natural color tone from footage supposedly taken in a controlled setting with constant light;
- a strange mix of several facial expressions – with more complex facial expressions, a combination of adjacent frames could appear that simply betrays the video compilation used for the deepfake.
Is this important to know? Categorical! These technologies open new horizons in the world of Scams and can evolve in countless ways both for the purpose of political destabilization and in ways of stealing economic data or harming individuals. Time shows us that nothing is impossible in the field of Technology and the Internet, so it remains for us to be the first and most vigilant!
