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Great article from @arawnsley at the Daily Beast on phony Middle East experts (even phonier experts than usual). I made a small contribution to this article, and it was a fun one. 1/9
I was asked to run a Tungstene analysis of this handsome young man, Joseph Labba, who, according to his bio at the Post Millennial, is "an adviser to NGOs regarding matters state violence." The idea was that the face may have been as fake as the credentials. 2/9
It turns out that using digital forensics to determine if a face is an AI deepfake creation is not an insignificant problem. I ran it through Tungstene's Mercury filter, which sorts the pixels of the image into those that statistically “belong” and those that do not. 3/9
This told me to look more closely at the ear and the mouth. Deepfake AIs will compensate for areas with insufficient or noisy data by adding blur--and a closer look at the ear shows that Middle East expert Joseph Labba has weirdly flat ear ridges. 4/9
Turning to the mouth, I saw the lips and teeth did indeed look blotchy and indistinct. Then I looked more carefully at his teeth. 5/9
I thought they looked odd, so I asked my lovely wife @woodnymph79 to give me a big, toothy grin. Yup, my wife's beautiful smile, like most people's, contains four incisors between the canines. Poor Joseph seems to only have three. 6/9
Adam Rawnsley found a dentist to confirm our suspicion--our fake friend had fake teeth. Apparently teeth are a notoriously tricky problem for deepfakes. faui1-files.cs.fau.de/public/publica… 7/9
My takeaway from all this--first, Tungstene analysis can be useful even when it doesn't provide conclusive results, just by drawing the analyst's attention to a particular area or aspect of the image. 8/9
Second, the first fumbling steps in Deepfake manipulation of the media are laughably inept, and collapse under the barest scrutiny. They will get much better. 9/9
Forgot to link to the article! thedailybeast.com/right-wing-med…
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