Jul 19, 2019

Hany Farid Shares How ‘Dumbfakes’ Will Disrupt the 2020 Election

From San Francisco Chronicle

Deepfake videos pose a threat, but ‘dumbfakes’ may be worse

By Beatrice Dupuy and Barbara Ortutay, Associated Press

Sophisticated phony videos called deepfakes have attracted plenty of attention as a possible threat to election integrity. But a bigger problem for the 2020 U.S. presidential contest may be “dumbfakes” — simpler and more easily unmasked bogus videos that are easy and often cheap to produce.

The fact that these videos are made so easily and then widely shared across social media platforms does not bode well for 2020, said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The clock is ticking,” Farid said. “The Nancy Pelosi video was a canary in a coal mine...”

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Hany Farid is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and EECS. 

Last updated: July 22, 2019