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The Data Scientist

Manipulated Digital Content

A Beginner’s Guide to Spotting Manipulated Digital Content

The Internet is proliferating in every nook and cranny of the world, as well as practically in all aspects of our lives. From politicians using media content to drive support to deepfake videos spreading confusion, fact-checking has become a vital bulwark against misinformation. 

In today’s digital ecosystem, learning to spot manipulated digital content is not just a valuable skill but a necessity. This blog post will take you through a few important ways you can identify manipulated digital content and safeguard yourself from “fake” content. 

Understanding Types of Fake Content

Digital videos, audio, and images have been around for years and have been tampered with innumerable times. However, the rise of artificial intelligence and advanced editing software has taken the manipulation game to a whole new level. The online world is slowly turning dangerous, and our sense of reality is being thrown into doubt.

Deepfakes

Remember the scandal earlier this year involving deepfake, compromising images of Taylor Swift creating a whirlpool on X? One of the images blew out of proportion to rake in around 47 million views! It was after a lot of hue and cry by her fans that the platform took the images down and blocked Taylor Swift’s searches on X. 

Deepfakes are among the most advanced forms of manipulated media. They rely on cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms to create highly realistic images or videos of people. The counterfeit content, in most cases, imitates the nuances, like facial expressions and mannerisms, of the desired individual. 

Cheapfakes

Cheapfakes, as the name suggests, are videos and images edited using widely available software. Here, you may find cropped images or videos with the playback speed reduced or increased—nothing too fancy like deepfakes. However, they can still do the damage in a less sensitized group.

Photoshopped Images

Manipulation of images is incredibly widespread, to the point where the act itself has become synonymous with the software used to carry it out, Adobe Photoshop. You can have subtly retouched pictures with significant modifications, like removing elements or seamlessly blending multiple images.  

Telltale Signs of Manipulated Visual Media

The first clear sign of deepfakes or cheapfakes can be the unnatural movement of the eyes of the person in the video. Deepfake videos often struggle to mimic the organic blinking patterns and movements due to the limitations of the training systems.

Moreover, inconsistent lip and head movements can be detected by computer vision algorithms. They analyze facial landmarks, compare them to expected patterns of human behavior, and report any anomalies.

Other telltale signs are improper lighting, shadows, and reflections that do not seem organic to the frame. When elements from different sources are combined in a frame, it is impossible to get uniform lighting. Image forensic techniques, like error level analysis (ELA) or shadow detection algorithms, can easily catch these glitches.

Furthermore, variations in skin tone or hair color can also be identified. There is color space analysis software that employs machine learning to catch hold of unnatural elements in a frame of video. 

Various platforms on the Internet bundle all these detection technologies as a service, offering a multi-layered approach. For example, AU10TIX provides a recommended deepfake detector that boasts cutting-edge neural network technology to analyze non-ID data and behavioral patterns. 

Incorporating such robust AI-driven check mechanisms safeguards your system against injection attacks, and ensures your customer’s authenticity. Moreover, such platforms also provide on-the-spot damage control to minimize losses and recover quickly from an attack.

Verifying Suspicious Audio Content

Detecting audio fakes might be a little tricky, as compared to texts and videos. However, it is not impossible, with the first line of defense being your ears. 

Does their voice have an unusually high or low pitch? Or, is there something slightly off about the rhythm of their speech? Pay close attention to the speaker’s intonation, cadence, and overall speech patterns. You might be able to pick up subtle inconsistencies. 

Background noise can be a clear indication of audio tampering. Whenever multiple audio segments are edited together, the struggle to have a homogenous background is real. Just like light settings, merging different background noises and making them sound like one is next to impossible.

One audio-forensic technique that is currently in widespread use is spectrographic analysis. It provides a visual representation of audio frequencies over time and can reveal patterns that are inconsistent with natural speech.

A recent incident involving Scarlett Johansson reflects the growing prowess of AI tools. She was shocked to find an AI-generated voice called Sky, similar to hers, being used by Chat GPT without her consent.

However, according to OpenAI, the “Sky” voice was not intended to imitate Johansson’s voice. The company mentioned that it was captured by a skilled actor. It stated that it would refrain from disclosing the identities of the actors due to privacy concerns.

Spotting manipulated media can be challenging unless there is something about the content that raises your suspicions. Developing the healthy skepticism and analytical ability to detect these manipulations requires your sense of judgment rather than your eyes or ears. 

Improving your media literacy skills can assist you in identifying questionable news and enabling you to verify or dismiss it.