LISTEN: What are ‘deepfakes,’ and what is Brooklyn doing to fight them?
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This type of manipulation, known as “deepfakes,” is one of the newest ways people are spreading misinformation today. Creators alter videos by swapping out faces and/or changing voices, sometimes creating entirely new messages.
Deepfakes take one person’s face and represent the facial expressions of that person, while generating the face of a different person with exactly the same facial expression, according to Professor Siwei Lyu of the University of Albany, who has worked in media forensics for more than 20 years.
Lyu and his team have made notable progress in exposing deepfakes, but as creators of the fakes evolve, their research has had to adapt as well.