Thread by @techreview

Does the mashup of Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Lawrence have you thinking about deepfake videos?
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Us too.

In fact, our writers have devoted a chunk of time to reporting on deepfakes and making fake videos of their own.

First, here’s how deepfakes are made.

They’re created using GANs, or generative adversarial networks. As @_KarenHao writes for us, their secret lies in two neural networks working together—or rather, against each other. technologyreview.com/s/612501/insid…

@_KarenHao “You start by feeding both neural networks a whole lot of training data and give each one a separate task.”

@_KarenHao “The first network, known as the generator, must produce artificial outputs, like handwriting, videos, or voices, by looking at the training examples and trying to mimic them.”

@_KarenHao "The second, known as the discriminator, then determines whether the outputs are real by comparing each one with the same training examples.”

@_KarenHao @willknight created his own deepfake of @TedCruz singing and gyrating to Tina Turner. The video was part of his cover story about the race to catch these fake videos. It’s a must read in our opinion. technologyreview.com/s/611810/fake-…

@_KarenHao @willknight @tedcruz Other notable efforts to spot deepfakes include this initiative by the Defense Department. technologyreview.com/s/611726/the-d…

@_KarenHao @willknight @tedcruz And these apps that can spot a single pixel out of place. technologyreview.com/s/612357/deepf…

@_KarenHao @willknight @tedcruz We'd be remiss if we didn't give a shoutout to this very cool interactive from @CNNBusiness. cnn.com/interactive/20…

@_KarenHao @willknight @tedcruz @CNNBusiness Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of deepfakes and what’s being done to spot them. Have more questions for @_KarenHao or @willknight about this technology? Reply to this thread.