Deepfake

3 min readAug 2, 2021

what if we were able to take a photo of a dead human being and combine it with a video using artificial intelligence of course just to make sure that his son or all his family feel the existence of this person? Cute isn’t it? especially while the increase of deaths in our time,

but what if also we use the same technique to make a porn video of a girl as revenge such as what was published in Reddit a few years ago on an account named “deepfake”?

this technique actually took its name from this fake account but what is exactly deep fake?

Deepfake:

Deep fake is actually a combination of the phrases “deep learning” and “fake”, it’s a technique that first emerged in 2017 on the internet from which you can combine and superimpose an existing image and video into the source image or video using artificial intelligence or let’s say a machine learning technique known as “generative adversarial network {GAN}

this technique is commonly used to catfish people and letting them believe a believable lie.

How did people first heard about deepfake?

as was mentioned above, this technique took its name from the fake account on Reddit, and this is because it was the first project realized using this technique published on the internet back in 2017.

this account shared hundred of porn videos of celebrities, 90% of them were young female Hollywood actresses like Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Kay Perry, Taylor Swift, and Scarlett Johansson. and then the technique went viral and covered almost all fields.

disadvantages:

a study was done in 2019 by “deep trace” shows that the majority or more precisely 96% of deepfake videos shared on the internet are adult videos, they actually found more than 15000 and the majority were female celebrities.

it is also used in politics, such as the video of with us ex-president Barak Obama saying that Donald Trump is silly and foolish and also Mark Zuckerberg saying that he is a man with total control of billions of people’s stolen data

which means because of the easy use of deepfake, it can be more and more a real threat for a lot of people.

advantages

Anything can have the bad and the good side, which is the case of deepfake and unlike what a lot of people say about it, deepfake can be beneficial in a lot of situations.

for example in the movie industry, we can create a younger version of actors if there are two roles in a movie. or we can’t talk about the impact of this technique on this industry without mentioning what has already been done in “fast and furious” when they used it on “paul walker” after his death

Can anything protect us from deepfake?:

There are various kinds of ‘protective mechanisms’:

-technological, e.g., authentication by means of an audio fingerprint layered atop generated voices, deepfake detection through high-level representations of voice samples;

-mathematical, e.g., algorithms that can determine if a voice comes from a human vocal tract based on the voice features (like prosody, phase, frequency, and tone);

educational, e.g., training humans’ ability to detect deepfakes by repeated exposure, proper use of reason, working with a coherence theory of truth.