From WMFE
PolitiFact FL: How a deepfake video of Ron DeSantis dropping out went viral
By Loreben Tuquero
We’ve seen ads that support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president employ artificial intelligence to malign DeSantis’ opponents and boost DeSantis. But a recent anti-DeSantis video used AI to do the opposite.
"BREAKING NEWS: Governor Ron DeSantis drops out of the 2024 Republican presidential primary," proclaimed a Sept. 1 post on X, formerly Twitter, that showed a two-minute video in which DeSantis sat at a desk and appeared to announce he was terminating his campaign...
University of California, Berkeley professor Hany Farid and University at Buffalo professor Siwei Lyu, who both teach computer science courses, told PolitiFact they concluded that the video is a deepfake. Farid said it combined an AI-generated voice and a stock video of DeSantis, with a mouth and lower jaw generated to match the new audio track. Lyu said the audio was likely created with a text-to-speech synthesis method...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. He specializes in digital forensics.
