Deepfakes Are Getting Better, Easier to Make, and Cheaper – By Patrick Tucker (Defense One) / Aug 6 2020
GitHub is becoming a destination site for make-your-own-deepfake software.
Deepfakes —computer-generated images and footage of real people — have emerged as a major worry among the national security set. A new paper from researchers at FireEye finds that tools published to open source repositories such as GitHub are reducing the amount of technical expertise required to produce ever-more-convincing deepfakes. Moreover, they are increasingly easy to purchase from disreputable marketing and PR firms.
In the paper published online today and presented (virtually) at the cybersecurity conference Black Hat, researchers Philip Tully and Lee Foster write that it takes thousands of dollars and weeks to produce new software tools for synthetic media generation. “However, the application of transfer learning can drastically reduce the amount of time and effort involved,” they write. In other words, a set of commonly-available tools has emerged that lends itself to the creation of faked images and voice recordings.
They mention a generative adversarial [neural] network or GAN model dubbed StyleGAN2, the underling code of which is available on GitHub. Tully and Lee showed that with a dataset of compiled Tom Hanks pics, structured to be of the same size and general direction, they could easily use StyleGAN2 tools to create new, convincing images of the actor, which they revealed in their Wednesday demonstration.
Continue to article: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/08/deepfakes-are-getting-better-easier-make-and-cheaper/167536/
