A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of a recently passed California law aimed at curbing the spread of AI-generated deepfakes depicting political candidates. In his decision, Judge John Mendez wrote, “While a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed two bills on Tuesday aimed at banning “deepfakes” — digitally manipulated video or images — of candidates before elections, as well as at prohibiting digital “disinformation” during elections.
AI giant OpenAI has revealed its newest creation, an AI system named Sora that can generate realistic videos from text descriptions. As AI-generated deepfake videos already cause problems online ranging from fake porn to realistic scam calls, the advent of easy to create video comes with the potential for trouble.
DataGrade founder and former Google consultant Joe Toscano, who was featured in the popular Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma,” already uses the innovative technology on a regular basis and believes it will add “immense value” to society.
“Instead of one person who learns how to make this fake content, or auto generate a fake image or things like that, now millions, billions of people can all do it at once at infinite light speed,” Toscano told Fox News Digital. “It just moves so fast now. So, the thing that concerns me the most is not necessarily the outcomes, because we’ve already seen these outcomes. It is that those outcomes are just going to increase in quantity exponentially.”
Intel has developed a technology that can successfully distinguish between real videos and deepfakes in real-time using skin analysis. Its new technology, FakeCatcher, can detect fake videos with a 96% accuracy rate and is the ‘world’s first real-time deepfake detector’ to return results in milliseconds.
A team of researchers has found that biometric tests used by banks and cryptocurrency exchanges to verify users’ identities can be fooled by deepfake technology.
The following video illustrates how good deep fakes are becoming. If you didn’t know this was fake, a casual viewer could be forgiven for believing this real footage. And in a short time this will be regarded crude.