Facebook says its AI can detect deepfakes and where they come from

Facebook claims to have found a way to spot deepfakes within its platforms. Deepfakes are fake photos or videos created by artificial intelligence and machine learning and they are admirably so convincing that an infinite eye can’t discern them.

Facebook together with Michigan State University have developed an AI that is not only capable of detecting deepfakes, but can discover where it came from by reverse engineering it.

According to the researchers,

“We begin with image attribution and then work on discovering properties of the model that was used to generate the image. By generalizing image attribution to open-set recognition, we can infer more information about the generative model used to create a deepfake that goes beyond recognizing that it has not been seen before.”

This system doesn’t work on a deepfake, but can also compare and pinpoint similarities in a number of deepfakes. It is therefore understood that this system could be used to detect deepfakes behind a generative source, making it potentially easier to track coordinated misinformation campaigns.