While you may think of Donald Trump and his love of the term “Fake News”, this is not a new term. However, it is becoming harder to determine when something is, in fact, fake news. Why you may ask? Technology is making it easy for content to be created from virtually nothing of real substance. Couple this with the reach and viral nature of social media and such fake news can spread like wildfire.
It’s Been Photoshopped
We are under no illusion that for years magazine publishers have been “Photoshopping” images of models to slim down their waists, sharpen up their jawlines or even totally change the colouring of their skin. This ability used to be restricted to people with a high level of technical skill in using expensive image editing software.
Now there are many cheap or free image editing tools that do all the hard work for you and are easily accessed online. For example, Canva has a range of add-ins that allow you to remove the background of an image with one click, apply a filter or retouch a facial image in a photograph. There’s even a tool to turn an image into a letter mosaic.
Tools available in Canva for image editing
Gone are the days of looking at a printed photograph at face value. There is no telling the extent of edits that could have been made to it. One way of determining if an image has potentially been edited is using an analysis tool such as Fotoforensics. These tools examine the metadata of an image along with a few other tell-tale signs to determine if an image has potentially been edited. We will have a look at metadata in a future article.
Deep Fakes
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the game when it comes to the generation of synthetic media, such as videos. A synthetic video is one that has been created not from filming a real-life setting but from generating video from data and creating something that looks real, not animated.
Because we would think a photograph could be edited, we would sometimes want video evidence instead. Yes, a video can be edited, but that is pretty advanced stuff. Or so it used to be…
Deep fakes are the creation of videos from data including photographs, text and other information. Many people have been amazed at the realism of Tom Cruise in the video below, however, this is not him at all. It is in fact a deep fake video.
Want to know more about synthetic data? Check out this guide from Synthesis.
What are the implications?
How can we trust anything we see online you may ask? The answer is it is becoming harder and harder to know what is real and what isn’t. Therefore, media and information literacy are becoming more important as AI progresses and infiltrates more aspects of our lives. We need to be aware of what is developing and changing in society to enable us to make a judgement on the information we are consuming online.
Level 3 of the Digital Literacy Licence delves into artificial intelligence, deep fakes and the metaverse and how to develop our media and information literacy.