Skip to main content

Facebook will spend $10 million and offer a cash prize to detect deepfakes

 

Facebook will offer a cash prize to the person or group that can build a next-generation way to detect deepfakes — and it’s even creating its own original deepfakes for participants to work with.

Recommended Videos

The Deepfake Detection Challenge is a partnership between Facebook, Microsoft, the Partnership on AI, and academics. Facebook has put up $10 million towards the partnership to help detect and deal with videos and other media that have been manipulated to show someone doing or saying something they never said or did.

“The goal of the challenge is to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer,” wrote Mike Schroepfer, the Chief Technology Officer of Facebook AI, in a blog post announcing the program.

The challenge will use a brand new set of videos that feature paid actors, so no Facebook user data will be part of the program. The company will create both unmodified and “tampered” videos using different deepfake AI techniques for participants to detect. The hope is to develop a way to better detect and prevent tampered media — and give social network like Facebook a way to flag deepfakes before they go viral.

To encourage participation, there will be research collaborations and prizes as part of the challenge. Facebook has already dedicated $10 million is being dedicated to the project.

“[The] $10 million total is being given across university grants, challenge awards, workshops, and starting to build the dataset. We will continue to invest to further the development of the dataset over time and support the research community,” a Facebook spokesperson told Digital Trends.

The Deepfake Detection Challenge will begin in October and run through May 2020 globally.

Deepfakes are a relatively new technology that has grown rapidly this year. There’s already been issues with fake deepfakes purporting to show famous people saying something they never actually said, including one deepfake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaiming his power over “millions of people’s stolen data.” Experts say that the technology is advancing quickly and deepfakes will only get more convincing (and easier to create) over the next few years.

Experts say that to fight the perpetuation of deepfakes being used in the wrong way, programs like the Deepfake Detection Challenge are essential. 

“Technology to manipulate images is advancing faster than our ability to tell what’s real from what’s been faked. A problem as big as this won’t be solved by one person alone,” said Phillip Isola, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the announcement. “Open competitions like this one spur innovation by focusing the world’s collective brainpower on a seemingly impossible goal.”

Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more
Apple TV+ just got a price slash that’s tough to resist, and it won’t last long
The Apple TV main screen.

Apple has just quietly announced that it will be slashing the price on its Apple TV+ offering for a limited time deal.

While Apple prices the service at a standard $9.99 per month usually, it has just cut that way down to $2.99 per month.

Read more