New technique uses light to spot deepfakes in seconds


U.S. President Donald Trump has often been the subject of deepfake images and videos.

U.S. President Donald Trump has often been the subject of deepfake images and videos.
| Photo Credit: Pau Casals/Unsplash

Many deepfake videos are easy to spot — the eyes move in strange ways, there’s an extra finger on a hand or the light is weirdly distributed — but many are just as hard, if not impossible. Recent research in Nature Communications found that humans are able to spot deepfakes only 50% of the time.

In a leg-up to humans in this fight against unreal information, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found a way to tell if a video is a deepfake based on the light in it. In lab tests, the method was so good that it almost never failed to spot a manipulated video.

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