Visitors to a Ukrainian news website on the evening of February 18 2022, were greeted by a familiar sight, a video of their president giving a speech. While the resemblance was there, the face seemed slightly out of sync with the head of the Ukrainian president.
In the video, Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the war was over, a fact that the majority of Ukrainian people knew was false. It was a deepfake video. While this was happening online, the ticker at the bottom of the screen on the channel’s live television feed read the same message. It claimed – again, falsely – that Ukraine was surrendering.
Our team at the Lero research centre in University College Cork has just published a first-of-its-kind study examining the ways in which deepfake videos were presented and discussed on Twitter during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Deepfake technology is a recent technological development that essentially allows people to create videos of events that never happened. It seems particularly well suited to the spreading of disinformation, misinformation and “fake news” on social media platforms and elsewhere online. Deepfakes are also very suited to being used in cyberwarfare.
https://theconversation.com/deepfakes-in-warfare-new-concerns-emerge-from-their-use-around-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-216393
The frontline of war propaganda is deepfakes, making people doubt everything they see.
15 Years In Prison For Fake News! Putin Signs New Law On Russia’s Special Military Operations In Ukraine
Deepfake, propaganda and disinformation | How Russia and Ukraine battled the information war
Ukraine's deputy prime minister says it is educating its citizens about the dangers of deepfakes as it fights Russian disinformation in 'a war of technologies'
Vladimir Putin has been forced to use deepfakes and body-doubles to attend public events over his rapidly deteriorating health, according to an alleged Kremlin insider.
Telegram channel General SVR, allegedly run by a high-ranking Kremlin official who has ‘insider’ knowledge of Putin’s condition, has long maintained the Russian President is secretly battling a range of illnesses including dementia and several types of cancer.
Their latest report claims Putin was forced to cancel a string of events in December after suffering from ‘frequent bouts of dizziness and headaches’ linked to Parkinson’s disease.
A deepfake detector can spot fake videos of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy with high accuracy. This detection system could not only protect Zelenskyy, who was the target of a deepfake attempt during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also be trained to flag deepfakes of other world leaders and business tycoons.
“We don’t have to distinguish you from a billion people – we just have to distinguish you from [the deepfake made by] whoever is trying to imitate you,” says Hany Farid at the University of California, Berkeley.
Fact Check: Deepfake video shared as Putin’s double fighting on Ukraine frontline By Fact Checker | Published: Friday, October 14, 2022, 11:52 [IST] New Delhi, Oct 14: Amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine, a video on the social media is in circulation which appears to show Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking to a person behind the camera while wearing a Russian soldier uniform.
Ukraine’s intelligence of the Ministry of Defense disrupted Russians’ deepfake attempt to contact the founder of Bayraktar company Haluk Bayraktar. Russian agent was disguised as Ukraine’s Prime Minister but met a fake secretary of Baykar company and was told he would go to prison.
The use of deepfakes to evade security controls and compromise organizations is on the rise among cybercriminals, with researchers seeing a 13% increase in the use of deepfakes compared with last year.
That's according to VMware's eighth annual "Global Incident Response Threat Report," which says that email is usually the top delivery method.
A deepfake video that claims to feature footage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is circulating online. In it, a figure identified as him is seen calling on citizens of his country to surrender to Russian forces.
A deepfake video uses artificial intelligence technology to create new, fake footage from existing images and videos. The results can appear quite convincing, although the “Zelenskyy” video appeared obviously fake, as many social media users pointed out.
The mayors of several European capitals have been duped into holding video calls with a deepfake of their counterpart in Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko.
The mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, took part in a scheduled call on the Webex video conferencing platform on Friday with a person she said looked and sounded like Klitschko.
“There were no signs that the video conference call wasn’t being held with a real person,” her office said in a statement.
It was only after about 15 minutes, when the supposed Kyiv mayor at the other end of the line started to talk about the problem of Ukrainian refugees cheating the German state of benefits, and appeared to call for refugees to be brought back to Ukraine for military service, that Giffey grew suspicious.
Vladimir Putin has undergone surgery to remove fluid from his abdomen, an anti-Russian Telegram channel has claimed.
Vladimir Putin has 'successful' cancer surgery as Kremlin 'deepfakes' media appearance
A Russian Telegram channel which often claims inside knowledge of Putin's health has claimed all of the leader's media appearances last week were either pre-recorded or faked
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-successful-cancer-surgery-27037213
DEEPFAKES Of Zelensky, Putin Go Viral, Changing PROPAGANDA WARFARE
Ukraine has accused Russia of preparing to launch a ‘deepfake’ of President Volodymr Zelensky.
Authorities have alleged the deepfake will depict Mr Zelenksy making a statement on the war during which he will express a negative attitude towards certain cities.
Opinion: The Zelensky deepfake is a warning for Corporate America
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN A DEEPFAKE GOT WEAPONIZED IN THE UKRAINE WAR…
‘We are not prepared’: Russia uses artificial intelligence, deep fakes in propaganda warfare
In the third week of Russia's war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky appeared in a video, dressed in a dark green shirt, speaking slowly and deliberately while standing behind a white presidential podium featuring his country's coat of arms. Except for his head, the Ukrainian president's body barely moved as he spoke. His voice sounded distorted and almost gravelly as he appeared to tell Ukrainians to surrender to Russia. "I ask you to lay down your weapons and go back to your families," he appeared to say in Ukrainian in the clip, which was quickly identified as a deepfake. "This war is not worth dying for. I suggest you to keep on living, and I am going to do the same." https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/25/tech/deepfakes-disinformation-war/index.html
Videos recently published online appeared to show the presidents of Russia and Ukraine issuing major statements about the Ukraine war. But the videos were quickly identified by experts as fake and removed from social media.
The videos are known as “deepfakes.” A deepfake is a video designed to fool people into thinking that is “real.” People who create deepfakes use different technology tools and methods to make people appear to say things they never said.
Vídeos "deepfake" usados na guerra da desinformação
A Zelensky Deepfake Was Quickly Defeated. The Next One Might Not Be
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/international/world-news-politics/fb-removes-deepfake-video-of-ukrainian-president-1092102.html
It is not clear whether anyone was convinced. Internet users immediately flagged the discrepancies between the skin tone on Zelenskiy's neck and face, the odd accent in the video, and the pixelation around his head. A Facebook official later said https://twitter.com/ngleicher/status/1504186935291506693 the company was removing the footage from its platform.
Nina Schick, the author of "Deepfakes," said the video looked like "an absolutely terrible faceswap," referring to programs that can digitally graft one person's face onto another's body -- part of a wider family of computer techniques that can create hyperrealistic forgeries known as "deepfakes." https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-03-16/deepfake-footage-purports-to-show-ukrainian-president-capitulating
AI and disinformation in the Russia-Ukraine war
From false videos circulating on TikTok to AI-generated humans and deepfakes, the Russia-Ukraine war is playing out both in the physical world and virtually.
Digital weaponry: Russia using deepfakes to spread misinformation against Ukraine, claims report
Digital war: How Russia is using deep fakes in Ukraine for propaganda
In war, with boots on the ground comes the battle for the mind. The Russia-Ukraine conflict now has deep fakes deployed for propaganda.
https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/world/story/digital-war-how-russia-is-using-deep-fakes-in-ukraine-for-propaganda-324531-2022-03-02
Prior to its invasion of Ukraine, there were speculations that Russia was planning to produce a graphic fake video showing a Ukrainian attack as a pretext for an invasion. Although this “false flag” operation did not play a major role in the end, deepfake technology is increasingly recognized as a potentially useful and effective tool in armed conflict. This post unravels a large swath of unregulated space in which hostile actors can use deepfake as a method of information warfare without legal liability.
The Application of Artificial Intelligence for Information Warfare
Deepfake is a simulation of reality in computer imagery generated with the application of artificial intelligence to replace one person’s likeness with another in recorded video. Its use to create a misleading video has already been prevalent in a political context and has raised concerns about its potentially adverse impact on democratic processes. When it is used as a deliberate means to deceive the public in international relations, deepfake can be broadly classified as a form of information warfare.
Influence operations with ties to Russia and Belarus have been found using deepfakes to push anti-Ukraine disinformation.
Last week, AI News reported on the release of a study that found humans can generally no longer distinguish between real and AI-generated “deepfake” faces.
https://artificialintelligence-news.com/2022/03/01/deepfakes-are-being-used-push-anti-ukraine-disinformation/
