LibGuides: Media Literacy (Education Outreach): Deepfakes

Dangers of Deepfakes

Some deepfakes -- like singing cat deepfakes -- are entertaining and harmless, but deepfakes can also pose a significant threat. Harmful uses of deepfakes include creating:

Political disinformation
Blackmail material
Malicious, violent, or sexually explicit material
Altered evidence used in court
Fraud or phishing scams
Cybersecurity threats

How to Spot Deepfakes

Deepfake technology is becoming more sophisticated with each new generation of AI programs, but it is not perfect yet. Below are some tips from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab to help you spot deepfakes:

Pay attention to the face. High-end deepfake manipulations are almost always facial transformations.
Pay attention to the cheeks and forehead. Does the skin appear too smooth or too wrinkly? Is the agedness of the skin similar to the agedness of the hair and eyes? Deepfakes may be incongruent on some dimensions.
Pay attention to the eyes and eyebrows. Do shadows appear in places that you would expect? Deepfakes may fail to fully represent the natural physics of a scene.
Pay attention to the glasses. Is there any glare? Is there too much glare? Does the angle of the glare change when the person moves? Once again, Deepfakes may fail to fully represent the natural physics of lighting.
Pay attention to the facial hair or lack thereof. Does this facial hair look real? Deepfakes might add or remove a mustache, sideburns, or beard. But, Deepfakes may fail to make facial hair transformations fully natural.
Pay attention to facial moles. Does the mole look real?
Pay attention to blinking. Does the person blink enough or too much?
Pay attention to the lip movements. Some deepfakes are based on lip syncing. Do the lip movements look natural?

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning This link opens in a new window
Previously known as Lynda.com, LinkedIn Learning provides access to thousands of online courses and tutorials in seven different languages to help you learn about leadership, career searching, software, marketing, and many other skills essential to the job market. These self-paced courses include videos that vary from a few minutes long to multi-hour courses with downloadable exercise files. With the new upgrade, you also have access to the LinkedIn Learning app!
Please use your library barcode and pin to log into the upgraded LinkedIn Learning. If using the app, the library code is slcl.

Find a great assortment of video courses on media literacy, misinformation, deepfakes, and artificial intelligence. Below is a sampling of deepfake course and video titles to explore:

Understanding the Impact of Deepfake Videos
Understanding Deepfakes and Deception
Explore the Threat of Deepfakes

EBSCOhost Web

EBSCOhost Web This link opens in a new window
Gateway access to general interest, health care, and children's magazine databases. Search both "deepfake" and "deep fake" for best results.

Gale General OneFile

General OneFile This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive general interest resource providing periodical and news information. Also includes Fodor travel guides, NPR programs, and more than 20 reference sets on a wide range of topics. Search both "deepfake" and "deep fake" for best results.

Morgan Freeman Deepfake Example

Libby

Libby This link opens in a new window
Libby is an innovative mobile app from OverDrive designed to make borrowing and enjoying e-books, magazines, and audiobooks from the library easier than ever.

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman; Michael Bhaskar (As told to)
ISBN: 9780593593950
Publication Date: 2023-09-05
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance--from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes "the containment problem"--the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies--as the essential challenge of our age.

Catalog Resources

Deepfakes by Nina Schick
ISBN: 9781538754306
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
Uncover everything you need to know about "deepfakes" and what could become the biggest information and communications meltdown in world history. In a world of deepfakes, it will soon be impossible to tell what is real and what isn't. As advances in artificial intelligence, video creation, and online trolling continue, deepfakes pose not only a real threat to democracy -- they threaten to take voter manipulation to unprecedented new heights. This crisis of misinformation which we now face has since been dubbed the "Infocalypse." In DEEPFAKES, investigative journalist Nina Schick uses her expertise from working in the field to reveal shocking examples of deepfakery and explain the dangerous political consequences of the Infocalypse, both in terms of national security and what it means for public trust in politics. This all-too-timely book also unveils what this all means for us as individuals, how deepfakes will be used to intimidate and to silence, for revenge and fraud, and just how truly unprepared governments and tech companies are for what's coming.