Technology can't rescue us from AI-generated fake news
After two decades as a digital forensics expert Hany Farid has come to know the telltale signs of a fake image. The shadows are often a dead giveaway. âThey tell you a lot about the scene,â he says. âThe nature of the light in the scene, where it was coming from.â Forgers often get them wrong, putting shadows in improbably locations or omitting them altogether. http://bit.ly/2DKOfqa
For most of Faridâs career, digital forensics has boiled down to a simple question. "Itâs asking whether the video, image or audio recording has been manipulated since it was recorded,â he says. But now the question is no longer âhas this blemish been removed or this scene altered,â itâs âdid this scene ever exist in the first place?"
âThereâs a whole new host of ways of manipulating photographs now,â Farid says. Photoshop has made it easier for anyone to edit images convincingly enough to fool untrained eyes into thinking theyâre seeing the real deal. The kind of image that Farid finds himself working on for courts or news agencies has changed too. Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket, heâs often presented with blurry footage taken at an unknown time and place and uploaded to the web anonymously. http://bit.ly/2DZUwig