India puts tech firms on notice over deepfakes inaction

India has warned tech companies that it is prepared to impose bans if they fail to take active measures against deepfake videos, a senior government minister said, on the heels of warning by a well-known personality over a deepfake advertisement using his likeness to endorse a gaming app. The stern warning comes as New Delhi … Read more

Worried About Deepfakes? Don’t Forget “Cheapfakes”

“Political ads are deliberately designed to shape your emotions and influence you. So, the culture of political ads is often to do things that stretch the dimensions of how someone said something, cut a quote that’s placed out of context,” says Gregory. “That is essentially, in some ways, like a cheap fake or shallow fake.” … Read more

‘Animate Anyone’ heralds the approach of full-motion deepfakes

As if still-image deepfakes aren’t bad enough, we may soon have to contend with generated videos of anyone who dares to put a photo of themselves online: with Animate Anyone, bad actors can puppeteer people better than ever. The new generative video technique was developed by researchers at Alibaba Group’s Institute for Intelligent Computing. It’s … Read more

India seeks to regulate deepfakes amid ethical concerns

India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s IT Minister, said the ministry held meetings with all large social media companies, industry body … Read more

Microsoft launches a deepfakes creator at Ignite 2023 event

One of the more unexpected products to launch out of the Microsoft Ignite 2023 event is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say. Called Azure AI Speech text to speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as of … Read more

Microsoft offers politicians protection against deepfakes

Amid growing concern that AI can make it easier to spread misinformation, Microsoft is offering its services, including a digital watermark identifying AI content, to help crack down on deepfakes and enhance cybersecurity ahead of several worldwide elections. In a blog post co-authored by Microsoft president Brad Smith and Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Technology for … Read more

Victims of Deepfakes Are Fighting Back

Anyone who’s spent a moment observing US political chatter in recent months has probably encountered the following prediction: 2024 will yield the world’s first deepfake election. Rapidly evolving AI video and audio generators powered by large language models have already been used by both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaigns to smear each other … Read more

Putting a Real Face on Deepfake Porn

For Taylor Klein, it starts with a weird Facebook message from a friend. A Pornhub link. She doesn’t open it. Must be spam, she figures. “I think you’ve been hacked?” she replies. Nope. Her pal insists the link is real. She clicks, and her nightmare begins. Another Body, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, … Read more

Deepfake Porn Is Out of Control

Many of the websites make it clear they host or spread deepfake porn videos—often featuring the word deepfakes or derivatives of it in their name. The top two websites contain 44,000 videos each, while five others host more than 10,000 deepfake videos. Most of them have several thousand videos, while some only list a few … Read more

An Alleged Deepfake of UK Opposition Leader Keir Starmer Shows the Dangers of Fake Audio

As members of the UK’s largest opposition party gathered in Liverpool for their party conference—probably their last before the UK holds a general election—a potentially explosive audio file started circulating on X, formerly known as Twitter. The 25-second recording was posted by an X account with the handle “@Leo_Hutz” that was set up in January … Read more