5 Ways to Recognize Fake Videos

Deep­fakes, fake videos gen­er­at­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, could be a major prob­lem in the future. Videos in which the face of one actor is replaced by the face of anoth­er can look fun­ny. But the same tool could one day be used to cre­ate mali­cious fab­ri­ca­tions and manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion. In a world where you can’t tell a real video from a fake, you have to ques­tion absolute­ly every­thing you see on the screen.

How­ev­er, today deep­fakes can still be rec­og­nized with the naked eye, if you only know where to look. The tech­nol­o­gy of deep­fakes is imper­fect, there­fore it leaves traces in the form of small graph­ic arti­facts in the frame. Here are five ways you can rec­og­nize a fake.

Resolution difference

Pay atten­tion to the dif­fer­ence in the res­o­lu­tion of the details of the face and the rest of the video. The sources from which arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence extracts the “donor” face are usu­al­ly of high res­o­lu­tion. This is nec­es­sary for the high-qual­i­ty work of the neur­al net­work. But for the same rea­son, the trans­ferred face in the final video may look sharp­er and more detailed than the rest of the video.

This effect is most clear­ly seen in the humor­ous video, where the face of actor Steve Busce­mi was trans­ferred to the body of Jen­nifer Lawrence:

Notice how blur­ry the Gold­en Globes logo is in the back­ground com­pared to Buscemi’s crisp and bright face.

Picture Frame Reveal

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence does a great job of trans­fer­ring one face to anoth­er. But when the back­ground face is par­tial­ly cov­ered by some object in the frame, the neur­al net­work starts to fail. In such sec­onds, the “stick­er” face begins to shift slight­ly, and a bare­ly notice­able blurred frame may appear around it.

Most clear­ly, this effect is notice­able in the fol­low­ing video. These are stills from The Shin­ing, where Jack Nichol­son’s face was changed to that of anoth­er actor, Jim Car­rey:

For most of the video, the over­lay looks very nat­ur­al. But in the moment where the hero looks into the gap and says his leg­endary phrase “Here’s John­ny!” You may notice a slight glitch in the image.

Inconsistent scaling

If the shapes of the “donor” and “recip­i­ent” skulls are very dif­fer­ent, it is dif­fi­cult for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to fit the face of one actor to the head of anoth­er. As a result, the donor face may scale dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on the cam­era angle. This is very notice­able in the video where they tried to trans­plant the face of Sylvester Stal­lone onto the body of Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger in Ter­mi­na­tor 2:

The result­ing char­ac­ter looks dif­fer­ent when the cam­era looks straight at him (0:57) or slight­ly down (2:46). In moments when the cam­era moves rel­a­tive to the hero, the “stick­er” face begins to flick­er, try­ing to adjust to the chang­ing angle.

Boundary offset

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence does not always under­stand what size the “stick­er” should be. In some frames he may use the whole face, while in oth­ers he may use only a frag­ment of it. As a result, the bor­der of the “donor” face can shift, peri­od­i­cal­ly expos­ing the facial fea­tures of the orig­i­nal.

This effect can be seen in the video, where the face of come­di­an Bill Had­er is peri­od­i­cal­ly replaced with the face of Tom Cruise:

Had­er and Cruz have a sim­i­lar face shape, so the deep­fake is done very well. But still, his cheek­bones and chin betray him. This is notice­able at the moment 1:03, although, we admit, if we did not know about the sub­sti­tu­tion in advance, we would nev­er have noticed it.

Shade mismatch

When over­lay­ing a face, the neur­al net­work tries to match its hue to the skin tone and light­ing on the orig­i­nal video. How­ev­er, she does­n’t always man­age to do it per­fect­ly. In the new video, where Jim Car­rey’s face is trans­plant­ed onto Ali­son Brie’s body, this short­com­ing of the video is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent:

Look close­ly at the skin tone around the edges and in the cen­ter of the face. Jim Car­rey’s skin is more yel­low than Ali­son Brie’s. This is espe­cial­ly notice­able on the cheek­bones, where the bor­der of the over­lay pass­es. As a result, the face looks like it was smeared with a dark foun­da­tion.

Of course, deep­fakes will improve in qual­i­ty. Per­haps in a cou­ple of years we will see fakes that will be impos­si­ble to rec­og­nize with­out spe­cial­ized soft­ware. But this should only make your approach to infor­ma­tion con­sump­tion more bal­anced and selec­tive. Tech­nol­o­gy cre­ates an unusu­al world in which you can no longer trust your own eyes. There­fore, any­one who wants to retain the abil­i­ty to think crit­i­cal­ly will have to learn to care­ful­ly select and ana­lyze the facts them­selves.

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