The era of scams and fake news is everywhere around us – and one thing called “deepfakes” are the latest assault on our relationship with reality. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these, deepfakes are videos generated with help from artificial intelligence (AI) of celebrities saying things that they never actually said. Analysts are now confident that blockchain could be the ultimate solution for these videos and finally put an end to deepfakes as we know them.
But how would the technology work against them?
Well, if there is one thing that we know from the blockchain news, the database technology which props up popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum excels when it comes to verifying information and confirming that is real. In that way, blockchain could help a deepfake of (for example) Mark Zuckerberg saying something that he never said – to confirm whether the statement has been real and make access to an open blockchain.
All of this has been studied before and summarized in a 72-page report issued by Witness Media Lab. The report goes in depth on the tools that stand a chance to push back against the threat of deepfake videos. Blockchain could definitely lower and eliminate all of the threats. In fact, this is not the first time this idea has floated in the cryptonews – but it is definitely one of the more thoughtful explanations that we have given.
So, the general idea on how blockchain could fight deepfakes goes like this…
Images, videos and audio can be cryptographically signed, geotagged and timestamped in order to establish their origins. This is a kind of “verified capture” which calls for applications to perform a number of checks, ensuring that the transmitted data conforms with the source material.
In other words, blockchain could be the ultimate solution for verifying sourced media against copycats or the manipulations in the same way that it verifies cryptocurrency transactions. This is what everyone should know at this point…
However, the technical setup definitely has its own limits. According to the forensics expert featured in the report named Hany Farid, any finished blockchain solution for fighting deepfakes is still years away due to the complexity involved there.
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