In the era of rapidly developing technologies, awareness and appropriate security are becoming an indispensable element of our everyday life. It is crucial to develop tools to detect deepfake manipulations and to educate society about potential threats.
One of the tools that cybercriminals can use is deepfake voice. Artificial intelligence, based on scripts, can create entire statements, which it transforms into any voice. Very small samples of the original voice are enough to create such a simulation. The resulting simulation is virtually indistinguishable from the original utterance. This method is very often used in various types of fraud.
Deepfake voice is also often used in the case of fake telephone conversations, e.g. when the boss asks us to send secret documents to a private e-mail address. Such calls are aimed at extorting data from us or causing us to send our logins or passwords to a given number. It is worth remembering that criminals very often also use psychological effects, which involve informing the victim about an accident or the problems of a loved one. Combined with a familiar-sounding voice on the phone, this can easily confuse us and lead to financial damage.
Deepfake image, a new dimension of image manipulation
Until recently, altering photos using programs like Photoshop required significant skill and time to achieve realistic results. However, deepfake image technology has gone a step further, allowing you to quickly and easily create completely imaginary images and videos that are almost impossible to distinguish from reality. Thanks to advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, deepfake allows you to manipulate faces, facial expressions and voices in a way that seemed unreal just a few years ago. In a few minutes, for example, a speech can be generated by a politician who has never appeared in a given place and has never uttered these words, or a famous athlete advertising a quick profit on a super new cryptocurrency exchange, or the use of someone's image (available publicly on social media) to obtain benefits. money.
How to defend yourself against deepfake voice and deepfake image?
Even though artificial intelligence tools are becoming more and more advanced, we have the best weapon against them – our mind. If something seems strange to us in an ad we see, it probably is. For example, if we answer the phone and someone says in a familiar voice that they need help – let's verify this by asking about a shared memory, writing to this person or calling their number. A rational and, above all, calm approach to the content we see and hear on the Internet will allow us to recognize those that have been falsified. It is worth sticking to these simple rules, even when what we see or hear seems quite realistic.
The simplest method of verification is also to look for additional information on the Internet using, for example, an Internet search engine. Let's clarify our search with the note "fake news". If anyone has already encountered something similar, the results will help us
in deciphering the fraud. In the era of ubiquitous manipulation, we all need to become adepts of the art of "white intelligence" to have tools to verify the content we find.
