The World's Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes

In the age of A.I., Hany Farid is struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides for itself.

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For more than two decades, Farid, 60, had been the world’s leading expert in the field of digital forensics, but in the last six months he’d stopped trusting his own eyes. He’d made a career of differentiating visual reality from deepfakes as he fielded requests each day from governments, human rights organizations, journalists, law enforcement and thousands of others who were increasingly confused and deceived by the online world. Farid’s own research had proven that most people could no longer distinguish a real photograph from a digital creation, a real voice from an A.I. clone, a real video clip from a wholesale fabrication. Lately, he was failing his own tests.
“I feel like I’m going blind,” Farid said, and he worried that A.I. was obscuring the truth, distorting reality, fracturing democracies and slowly breaking him, too. He and his wife had begun making plans to leave California and trade the tech culture of Silicon Valley for a farm in rural Vermont.
He restarted the video and played the clip again. Sky. Bomb. Smoke. Screams. In the last hour, at least a dozen media organizations had emailed him to ask about the video. It had been published and shared by an official Iranian news agency, but that didn’t mean much to Farid, because recently he had seen deepfakes created and shared by foreign governments and by staffers at the White House. He geolocated the video using a database of millions of images from around the globe, and it pointed to a street in Minab, Iran, several hundred feet from an elementary school.
Maybe the video itself was real, Farid thought, except that someone had inserted a Tomahawk missile into the frame. He stabilized the video to get rid of the shaking and then charted the missile through a series of still frames, hunting for inconsistencies. The missile’s path was straight, its speed consistent. He zoomed in to measure pixels and calculated that the missile looked to be about 18 feet long, exactly the right size.
Sky, bomb, smoke, screams. He watched at least 100 more times, doubting his instincts and rechecking his math. For most of his career, he had been charged with identifying the rare fake in a world of shared truths. But now fakes were the norm and truth was elusive. Even after a full day of analysis and consultation with other visual experts — all of which confirmed the video’s authenticity — he couldn’t quite bring himself to declare it real.

snip …more at link

https://archive.ph/UOYLx

This is supposedly a free NYT article , but im providing the archive link to be sure .



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