set23
Scroll through the livestreaming videos at 4 a.m. on Taobao, China’s most popular e-commerce platform, and you’ll find it weirdly busy. While most people are fast asleep, there are still many diligent streamers presenting products to the cameras and offering discounts in the wee hours.
But if you take a closer look, you may notice that many of these livestream influencers seem slightly robotic. The movement of their lips largely matches what they are saying, but there are always moments when it looks unnatural.
These streamers are not real: they are AI-generated clones of the real streamers. As technologies that create realistic avatars, voices, and movements get more sophisticated and affordable, the popularity of these deepfakes has exploded across China’s e-commerce streaming platforms.
Today, livestreaming is the dominant marketing channel for traditional and digital brands in China. Influencers on Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou, or other platforms can broker massive deals in a few hours. The top names can sell more than a billion dollars’ worth of goods in one night and gain royalty status just like big movie stars. But at the same time, training livestream hosts, retaining them, and figuring out the technical details of broadcasting comes with a significant cost for smaller brands. It’s much cheaper to automate the job.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/19/1079832/chinese-ecommerce-deepfakes-livestream-influencers-ai/
jun23
Generative deep learning models are able to create realistic audio
and video. This technology has been used to impersonate the
faces and voices of individuals. These “deepfakes” are being used to
spread misinformation, enable scams, perform fraud, and blackmail
the innocent. The technology continues to advance and today attackers
have the ability to generate deepfakes in real-time. This new
capability poses a significant threat to society as attackers begin
to exploit the technology in advances social engineering attacks.
In this paper, we discuss the implications of this emerging threat,
identify the challenges with preventing these attacks and suggest a
better direction for researching stronger defences.
Discussion Paper: The Threat of Real Time Deepfakes
Guy Frankovits, Yisroel Mirsky
guyfrank@post.bgu.ac.il,yisroel@bgu.ac.il
Ben-Gurion University
Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering
Beersheba, Israel
(Guardado)
mai23
Researchers say the technology for real-time deepfakes has been around for the better part of a decade. What's new is the range of tools available to make them.
"We know we're not prepared as a society" for this threat, said Andrew Gardner, vice president of research, innovation and AI at Gen. In particular, he said, there's nowhere to go if you're confronted with a potential deepfake scam and you need immediate help verifying it.
Real-time deepfakes have been used to scare grandparents into sending money to simulated relatives, win jobs at tech companies in a bid to gain inside information, influence voters, and siphon money from lonely men and women. Fraudsters can copy a recording of someone's voice that's been posted online, then use the captured audio to impersonate a victim's loved one; one 23-year-old man is accused of swindling grandparents in Newfoundland out of $200,000 in just three days by using this technique.
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-realtime-deepfakes-dangerous-threat.html
fev23
Media and Comms Advisor Hamish MacLachlan-Lester says the deep-faked AI video of US President Joe Biden responding to a question with a realistic synthesised voice was done in “real-time”.
“In terms of that video, it’s not only that it’s just a deepfake, it is a real-time deepfake that is responding to a question,” Mr MacLachlan-Lester told Sky News host Cory Bernardi.
https://www.news.com.au/national/joe-biden-deepfake-responds-to-questions-in-realtime-using-ai/video/d43211a25719376cf22ef29553a296e5
out22
When Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey took a call from Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, in June, the pair discussed several important issues, including the status of Ukrainian refugees in Germany. It was a perfectly normal conversation between politicians, given the circumstances. Except Klitschko wasn’t real.
Although the mayor could see the face of the former Boxer turned politician, and was talking to him in real-time, she was actually talking to an imposter. Deepfakes – technology which creates realistic renders of famous faces using artificial intelligence (AI) – are now sophisticated enough to work in real-time.
It’s not yet clear who the tricksters behind the incident were, nor what their intentions were, but the same group reportedly fooled the mayors of Vienna and Madrid using the same Klitschko deepfake.
Since deepfakes first emerged in 2017, a persistent worry has been that they could be used to meddle in politics and otherwise cause chaos. As with many things in recent times, those fears have been replaced with cold, hard reality.
https://www.itpro.co.uk/security/369243/real-time-deepfakes-are-becoming-a-serious-threat
https://www.dw.com/en/vitali-klitschko-fake-tricks-berlin-mayor-in-video-call/a-62257289
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nboS2oevX5A
