From The Washington Post
Fooled by AI? These firms sell deepfake detection that’s ‘REAL 100%.’
By Nitasha Tiku and Tatum Hunter
In a world desperate not to be fooled by artificial intelligence, Deep Media is a rising star.
The Bay Area start-up — which claims it can identify eerily lifelike, AI-created images, audio and video with 99 percent accuracy — has won at least five military contracts worth nearly $2 million since late 2022, including a $1.25 million deal to develop a custom detector to help the Air Force counter Russian and Chinese information warfare. Last month, its CEO, Rijul Gupta, testified before a Senate subcommittee about the threat AI “deepfakes” pose to U.S. elections...
Forensic scholar Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Post he’s spoken with four different developers this month who boast near-perfect detection rates. But he said start-ups can boost their numbers by grading themselves on a curve: They often train detection models on a particular set of deepfakes and then evaluate their ability to identify the same type of fakes.
In the real world, deceptive media may not exhibit the patterns AI has learned to detect, Farid said, adding that a more reliable approach requires a nimble combination of computer programming, physics, open-source intelligence and forensics...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
