Digital forensic experts are studying mannerisms of the 2020 presidential candidates over concerns of doctored videos created to mislead voters, The Hill reports.
One professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is building biometric models to detect fake videos of major political figures, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Deepfakes are fake videos or audio recordings that look and sound just like the real thing.
"So the basic ideas, like with President Obama, is we've been analyzing hours and hours of his videos, and we've been doing this for Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and all of the candidates," Hany Farid said. "We've been mapping out particular talking styles of the candidates.
"[There is a] link between what Obama says and how he says it, and we build what we call soft biometrics that we then can [use to] analyze a deepfake and say, 'Oh, in that video, the mouth, which is synthesized to be consistent with Jordan Peele's voice, is in some ways decoupled from the rest of the head. It's physically not correct,'" he added.
Lawmakers have warned of "deepfake" videos ahead of the 2020 election, and the Pentagon, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is working with several of the country's biggest research institutions to get ahead of the problem. Additionally, institutions like Carnegie Mellon, the University of Washington, Stanford University, and The Max Planck Institute for Informatics are experimenting with deepfake technology.
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