Nowadays, social media is flooded with videos created using artificial intelligence (AI), which often deceived people. In such a situation, the important question is how to recognize fake videos on social media and identify which video or content have been created with AI?
Over the past few months, some high-profile
AI videos have fooled a large number of people. They all had something in common.
A fake but cheerful video of wild rabbits jumping on a trampoline received more
than 240 million likes on TikTok.
Millions of people liked a clip of two
people making love on the New York subway, but they were disappointed when it
turned out to be fake.
I personally believed a viral video of an
American pastor in a conservative church who was speaking surprisingly
left-wing views. ‘Billionaires are the only minority we should be afraid of.’
I was stunned. But this was another AI.
AI Tools
AI video-making tools have also improved a
lot in the last six months, and you might be fooled again and again, until you
start looking at everything with a questionable eye.
Welcome to the future. But there are some
points to consider. One is very obvious.
If you watch a video that is of poor
quality, even if the footage is blurry, alarm bells should ring in your mind
that you are watching an AI video.
“It’s the first thing we look at,” says
Henny Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California,
Berkeley.
The sad reality is that AI video tools will
get even better, and this advice will soon become obsolete.
But if you’ll observe closely with me for a
minute, this advice might help you to some extent.
“If you see something that’s really low
quality, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fake,” says Matthew Stam, professor
and head of the Multimedia and Information Security Lab at Drexel University in
the US.
It’s a sign that you want to take a closer
look at what you’re seeing.
“The well-known text-to-video generators
like Google’s Vue and OpenAI’s Sura still produce small discrepancies,” says
Farid. “But it’s not like there’s going to be six fingers or garbled text; it’s
much more than that.”
Even today’s most advanced models often
produce issues like abnormally smooth skin textures, strange or changing
patterns in hair and clothing, or small background objects moving in
unrealistic or impossible ways.
These can be easy to overlook, but the
clearer the image, the more likely you are to spot the things that tell you
it’s AI.
That's what makes low-quality videos so
appealing.
When you ask AI to create something that
looks like it was made with an old phone or security camera, it can hide
artifacts that would normally raise suspicion.
Skip content and continue reading.
Length
“There are three things to look for:
resolution, quality and length,” says Farid.
Length is the easiest to look at. “Most AI
videos are very short, even shorter than the typical videos we see on TikTok or
Instagram, which are about 30 to 60 seconds long.”
The majority of the videos I’m asked to
verify are six, eight, or 10 seconds long. That’s because AI videos are
expensive to produce, so most tools create short clips.
Also, the longer the video, the more likely
it is that the AI will mess up.
You can stitch multiple AI videos together,
but you’ll see cuts every eight seconds or so.
Resolution and Quality
The other two factors, resolution and
quality, are related but different.
Resolution refers to the number or size of pixels
in an image, while compression is a process that reduces the size of a video
file by extracting detail. It often has blocky patterns and blurred edges.
“What do I do if I’m trying to fool
people?” says Farid. “I create my fake video, then I reduce the resolution so
that you can see it, and then I add compression that further obscures any
possible nuances. It’s a common technique.”
The problem is that by the time you read
this, big tech companies will be spending billions of dollars to make it even
more realistic.
“I have some bad news,” says Stam. “If you
can find the signs you see in the videos, you won’t find them very soon.”
“I expect these signs to disappear from
videos within two years. At least the ones that are very obvious because
they’ve already disappeared from AI-generated images. You can’t even trust your
eyes anymore.”
This doesn’t mean that the truth has been
lost. When researchers like Farid and Stam are verifying a piece of content,
they have more sophisticated techniques at their disposal.
“When you create or edit a video, it leaves
behind tiny digital traces that our eyes can’t see, like fingerprints at a
crime scene,” Stam says.
“We’re seeing techniques emerging that can
help find and expose those fingerprints.”
For example, sometimes the distribution of
pixels in a fake video can be different from the original video. But such
factors are not foolproof.
Technology companies are also working on
new standards for verifying digital information.
Essentially, cameras can add information to
the file when they take a picture to help prove it’s real.
Using the same token, AI tools can
automatically add similar details to their videos and photos to prove they’re
fake.
Stam and others say these efforts can help.
The real solution, according to digital
expert Mike Caulfield, is for us all to start thinking differently about what
we see online.
“Video is going to become more like text in
a big way, where the source is what matters most, not the features, and we can
be prepared for that,” says Caulfield.
Videos and images used to be different from
text because they were harder to fake and alter. That’s gone now.
Now the only thing that matters is where
the content came from, who posted it, what the context is, and whether it’s
been verified by a reliable source.
The question is: when will we all
understand this reality?
“I think this is the biggest information
security challenge of the 21st century, but the problem is only a few years
old,” says Stam. “The number of people working to tackle it is relatively small
but growing rapidly. We will need a combination of solutions, education, smart
policies and technical approaches that all work together. I am not optimistic.”
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