Opinion | The challenge of detecting fake content

The information revolution has dramatically disrupted the news industry. Technologies like generative adversarial networks use two neural networks—one to generate a fake image and the other to evaluate whether the first neural network succeeded in creating a suitable image. This technology is called deep fakes and while at present it is being primarily used by the porn industry to generate fake celebrity videos, it isn’t hard to imagine how these techniques, in the hands of the unscrupulous, could be used for extortion, defamation and false propaganda. Theoretically speaking, it should be possible to use the same neural network technologies that created deep fakes in the first place to develop forensic techniques that can detect fake content. To make all this more efficient, the immutable life record could be made accessible through APIs so that social medial services and other platforms that disseminate content can dynamically verify the content they carry against the true record of the life of a given person.