A new paper from Israel proposes the institution and ongoing development of a ‘deepfake CAPTCHA’ protocol, to challenge audio or video callers that may be using deepfake technologies to attempt to deceive or defraud.
In the original, and the various cinematic incarnations of Jack Finney’s 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers, the fact that aliens are ‘taking over’ the earthly population is signaled to their loved ones by some imperceptible changed quality that cuts through the perfect simulation of their form.
There is an interesting vulnerability in video deepfakes that, to date, has been generally overlooked by the security research community, perhaps because ‘live’, real-time deepfakes in video calls have not been a major cause for concern until very recently.
2022 has seen the emergence of ‘live’ deepfakes in videoconferencing as an acknowledged security threat. In June, the FBI issued a warning to businesses about the increasing use of deepfake technologies to apply for remote work positions; in July, also in the United States, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) warned against the use of deepfakes as an enabler for a new and unsettling strain of fraudulent and criminal phishing and social engineering attacks.
Excluding ‘traditional’ CGI methods, which date back to the 1970s, there are currently three mainstream AI-based approaches to creating synthetic human faces, only one of which has attained any widespread success or societal impact: autoencoder frameworks (the architecture behind current viral deepfakes); Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs); and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF).
Towards the end of our new feature on the future of autoencoder-based deepfakes, we preview a new capability in FaceSwap, set for release this Saturday…
The way we refer to visual effects (VFX) work may be changing soon. For instance, at the time of writing, the relatively new technology of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) makes it possible to recreate entire scenes – including humans, homes, exterior environments, and almost anything else you can imagine – inside an AI’s neural network, from a handful of static photos.
The Metaverse is a nebulous concept. Questions abound as to what it will look like and what we will look like within it. We believe it has to be hyperreal.
