Disinformation and Deepfakes
Hany Farid
Fall 2022 Trustworthy Information Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy
We are awash in disinformation consisting of lies, conspiracies, and general nonsense, all with real-world implications ranging from human-rights violations to threats to our democracy and global public health. Adding to this disinformation landscape is a new form of manipulated media — so-called deepfakes.
Although varied in their form and creation, ‘deepfakes’ refer to text, image, audio, or video that has been automatically synthesized by a machine-learning system. Deepfakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios.
I will discuss the online disinformation landscape and what interventions are available. I will also provide an overview of how deepfakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how they can be perceptually and forensically distinguished from reality.
This lecture will also be live streamed via Zoom.
Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in electrical engineering & computer sciences and the School of Information. He is also a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics, Development Engineering, Vision Science Program, and is a senior faculty advisor for the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception.
He received his undergraduate degree in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989, his M.S. in computer science from SUNY Albany, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1999 where he remained until 2019.
He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
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Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Denise Simard.