To detect and fight a battle against deep fakes, two major companies in technology – Facebook Inc and Microsoft Corp are partnering with several universities to launch a contest, the company said in a blog post here recently.
Facebook will be putting $10 million into the “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” which aims to spur detection research. As part of this initiative, Facebook will also be commissioning researchers to produce realistic deep fakes to create a data set for testing detection tools.
The company said the videos, which will be released in December, will feature paid actors and that no user data would be utilised.
Just before the U.S. presidential elections, which will be held in November 2020, social platforms have been under pressure to tackle the threat of deep fakes.
Though there hasn’t been a well-made deep fake video with major political consequences in the United States, the potential for manipulated video to cause turmoil was recently demonstrated by a “cheap fake” clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, manually slowed down to make her speech seem slurred.
