People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones

As generative AI continues its ballistic trajectory, everything from text to audio, image, and video generation continues to improve in mimicking human-generated content. Through a series of perceptual studies, we report on the realism of AI-generated voices in terms of identity matching and naturalness. We find human participants cannot reliably identify short recordings (less than 20 seconds) of AI-generated voices. Specifically, participants mistook the identity of an AI-voice for its real counterpart 80% of the time, and correctly identified a voice as AI-generated only 60% of the time. In all cases, performance is independent of the demographics of the speaker or listener.

DeepSpeak Dataset v1.0

We describe a large-scale dataset--{\em DeepSpeak}--of real and deepfake footage of people talking and gesturing in front of their webcams. The real videos in this first version of the dataset consist of $9$ hours of footage from $220$ diverse individuals. Constituting more than 25 hours of footage, the fake videos consist of a range of different state-of-the-art face-swap and lip-sync deepfakes with natural and AI-generated voices. We expect to release future versions of this dataset with different and updated deepfake technologies. This dataset is made freely available for research and non-commercial uses; requests for commercial use will be considered.

Misinformation is not about Bad Facts: An Analysis of the Production and Consumption of Fringe Content

What if misinformation is not an information problem at all? Our findings suggest that online fringe ideologies spread through the use of content that is consensus-based and "factually correct". We found that Australian news publishers with both moderate and far-right political leanings contain comparable levels of information completeness and quality; and furthermore, that far-right Twitter users often share from moderate sources. However, a stark difference emerges when we consider two additional factors: 1) the narrow topic selection of articles by far-right users, suggesting that they cherrypick only news articles that engage with specific topics of their concern, and 2) the difference between moderate and far-right publishers when we examine the writing style of their articles. Furthermore, we can even identify users prone to sharing misinformation based on their communication style. These findings have important implications for countering online misinformation, as they highlight the powerful role that users' personal bias towards specific topics, and publishers' writing styles, have in amplifying fringe ideologies online.

Nepotistically Trained Generative-AI Models Collapse

Trained on massive amounts of human-generated content, AI (artificial intelligence) image synthesis is capable of reproducing semantically coherent images that match the visual appearance of its training data. We show that when retrained on even small amounts of their own creation, these generative-AI models produce highly distorted images. We also show that this distortion extends beyond the text prompts used in retraining, and that once poisoned, the models struggle to fully heal even after retraining on only real images.

Finding AI-Generated Faces in the Wild

AI-based image generation has continued to rapidly improve, producing increasingly more realistic images with fewer obvious visual flaws. AI-generated images are being used to create fake online profiles which in turn are being used for spam, fraud, and disinformation campaigns. As the general problem of detecting any type of manipulated or synthesized content is receiving increasing attention, here we focus on a more narrow task of distinguishing a real face from an AI-generated face. This is particularly applicable when tackling inauthentic online accounts with a fake user profile photo. We show that by focusing on only faces, a more resilient and general-purpose artifact can be detected that allows for the detection of AI-generated faces from a variety of GAN- and diffusion-based synthesis engines, and across image resolutions (as low as 128 x 128 pixels) and qualities.

An Evaluation of Forensic Facial Recognition

Recent advances in machine learning and computer vision have led to reported facial recognition accuracies surpassing human performance. We question if these systems will translate to real-world forensic scenarios in which a potentially low-resolution, low-quality, partially-occluded image is compared against a standard facial database. We describe the construction of a large-scale synthetic facial dataset along with a controlled facial forensic lineup, the combination of which allows for a controlled evaluation of facial recognition under a range of real-world conditions. Using this synthetic dataset, and a popular dataset of real faces, we evaluate the accuracy of two popular neural-based recognition systems. We find that previously reported face recognition accuracies of more than 95% drop to as low as 65% in this more challenging forensic scenario.

Single and Multi-Speaker Cloned Voice Detection: From Perceptual to Learned Features

Synthetic-voice cloning technologies have seen significant advances in recent years, giving rise to a range of potential harms. From small- and large-scale financial fraud to disinformation campaigns, the need for reliable methods to differentiate real and synthesized voices is imperative. We describe three techniques for differentiating a real from a cloned voice designed to impersonate a specific person. These three approaches differ in their feature extraction stage with low-dimensional perceptual features offering high interpretability but lower accuracy, to generic spectral features, and end-to-end learned features offering less interpretability but higher accuracy. We show the efficacy of these approaches when trained on a single speaker's voice and when trained on multiple voices. The learned features consistently yield an equal error rate between $0\%$ and $4\%$, and are reasonably robust to adversarial laundering.

Art and the science of generative AI: A deeper dive

A new class of tools, colloquially called generative AI, can produce high-quality artistic media for visual arts, concept art, music, fiction, literature, video, and animation. The generative capabilities of these tools are likely to fundamentally alter the creative processes by which creators formulate ideas and put them into production. As creativity is reimagined, so too may be many sectors of society. Understanding the impact of generative AI - and making policy decisions around it - requires new interdisciplinary scientific inquiry into culture, economics, law, algorithms, and the interaction of technology and creativity. We argue that generative AI is not the harbinger of art's demise, but rather is a new medium with its own distinct affordances. In this vein, we consider the impacts of this new medium on creators across four themes: aesthetics and culture, legal questions of ownership and credit, the future of creative work, and impacts on the contemporary media ecosystem. Across these themes, we highlight key research questions and directions to inform policy and beneficial uses of the technology.

Lighting (In)consistency of Paint by Text

Whereas generative adversarial networks are capable of synthesizing highly realistic images of faces, cats, landscapes, or almost any other single category, paint-by-text synthesis engines can -- from a single text prompt -- synthesize realistic images of seemingly endless categories with arbitrary configurations and combinations. This powerful technology poses new challenges to the photo-forensic community. Motivated by the fact that paint by text is not based on explicit geometric or physical models, and the human visual system's general insensitivity to lighting inconsistencies, we provide an initial exploration of the lighting consistency of DALL-E-2 synthesized images to determine if physics-based forensic analyses will prove fruitful in detecting this new breed of synthetic media.

Perspective (In)consistency of Paint by Text

Type "a sea otter with a pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer" or "a photo of a teddy bear on a skateboard in Times Square" into OpenAI's DALL-E-2 paint-by-text synthesis engine and you will not be disappointed by the delightful and eerily pertinent results. The ability to synthesize highly realistic images -- with seemingly no limitation other than our imagination -- is sure to yield many exciting and creative applications. These images are also likely to pose new challenges to the photo-forensic community. Motivated by the fact that paint by text is not based on explicit geometric modeling, and the human visual system's often obliviousness to even glaring geometric inconsistencies, we provide an initial exploration of the perspective consistency of DALL-E-2 synthesized images to determine if geometric-based forensic analyses will prove fruitful in detecting this new breed of synthetic media.