Deepfakes aren’t a big problem on Facebook right now, but the company continues to fund research into the technology to guard against future threats. Its latest work is a collaboration with academics from Michigan State University (MSU), with the combined team creating a method to reverse-engineer deepfakes: analyzing AI-generated imagery to reveal identifying characteristics of the machine learning model that created it.
The work is useful as it could help Facebook track down bad actors spreading deepfakes on its various social networks. This content might include misinformation but also non-consensual pornography — a depressingly common application of deepfake technology. Right now, the work is still in the research stage and isn’t ready to be deployed.
Previous studies in this area have been able to determine which known AI model generated a deepfake, but this work, led by MSU’s Vishal Asnani, goes a step further by identifying the architectural traits of unknown models.
[…]