Just ask yourself: is the image above a holiday snap of my sister or a deepfake face?
To continue on the intro: a photo of a person, right? As I said, if I had said it was a photo of my sister from a few years ago, you might have believed me too. However, it is not a photo of anyone. This image was borrowed from This Person Does Not Exist† It is an older example of deepfake† Where an admixture of faces is formed by means of artificial intelligence to create one very human image. Well, the above image could be anyone – of the 7.7 billion people on our globe there is probably someone who looks like it – but it is therefore a generated person.
Recognize deepfake face
Why we immediately started with the question ‘is this a deepfake face or a real photo’: it is becoming increasingly important to know what is real or fake. The risk of deepfakes is of course that you connect a person to a preconceived action. Think of statements by politicians they never made or the latest application: spamming on Linkedin. Yesterday we already talked about spammers with mean tricks, so grab your aluminum foil hat again: we need to talk about those deepfakes.
Linkedin spam
The story comes from an American researcher named Renée DiResta. She received a connection request from someone on Linkedin. Nothing strange, until she started to inspect more closely. As a researcher in the field of disinformation, she was struck by the profile picture of this ‘person’. A few imperfections in the photo that made it seem generated. Doubts were confirmed when the photo was found to be ‘perfectly’ aligned. The eyes and nose are exactly in line with each other. Reason to dive deeper into that, what Shannon Bond of NPR did. He found out that such deepfake faces are often used for Linkedin profiles. So they are fake accounts, or spam accounts.
Why?
Linkedin has a limit on how many messages you can send to prevent spam. That’s why such a deepfake face is a way to humanize a spam profile. After all, it also ensures that you don’t give the ‘real’ employees a bad name by having them spam you for your company. The target? Simple advertising. Lobbying for big companies, making offers, that kind of work. Automate for extra reach. Like yesterday: it’s actually almost harmless, but another grim way to get something simple done.
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