AI deepfakes are getting more realistic. CU scientists developed a better way to spot them - University of Colorado Boulder

Hundreds of the nation’s smartest computer scientists gathered for a conference in Denver last fall, and Tuan Tran had a big test for them:Could they tell the difference between the real Brad Pitt and an AI-generated version of him? Tran, a doctoral candidate in computer science at CU Boulder, rolled the tape on a large projector. Only half of the audience could spot the deepfake. “These deepfake generating models are becoming very strong,” Tran said. To address this, Tran and a team of researchers at CU Boulder set out last year to build their own system for spotting fakes in video. It uses far less computing power to achieve the same results as the current detection models. The team of scientists at CU Boulder who developed a new deepfake detection system includes, from left, Eric Keller, Sangtae Ha, Shirin Ebadi and Tuan Tran. (Credit: Scott Franz/CU Boulder)Their findings were presented at SIGCOMM, a flagship conference in computer networking and systems held in August in Denver.  Bad actors have used AI-generated deepfakes to impersonate financial officers at major companies and convince employees to wire large amounts of money.