5/5 (1)

 

In the autumn of 2017, a Reddit user going by the name “Deepfakes” posted several pornographic videos to the Internet. Well-known actresses like Daisy Ridley, Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Scarlet Johansson appeared in these videos. However, all of these videos turned out to be fake. They were generated by Artificial Intelligence, hence the name “Deepfake”; a blend of “deep learning” and “fake”. It did not take viewers long to realize these were not real videos, and they were taken down shortly after. Ever since then, this technology has been improving. Some websites, such as Twitter and Gfycat, are actively combatting these types of videos by removing them from their platforms and proactively blocking the uploaders.

How does it work?

The Machine Learning algorithm analyses millions of frames of a particular face of the well-known actresses mentioned before. After the algorithm has learned the key features of this face, a source video or image is fed to it. The algorithm will then overlay the analyzed face onto the source video and mimic the source’s movements, resulting in a very realistic Deepfake video.

Dangers

Although picture and video editing has been around for a very long time, the new danger with Deepfakes is in the realism of these videos. The owners of these systems can use them to create shocking videos of influential people, with the public unable to distinguish them from reality.

We are all familiar with Fake News, and deepfakes are creating an extra dimension to this dangerous phenomenon. We could be heading towards an era where nobody knows if anything in the media is true anymore. People could also use this in their favor, claiming that a particular comment or action was not them, but actually a Deepfake video.

Actor Jordan Peele collaborated with Internet media and news outlet Buzzfeed to issue a public announcement on the dangers of Fake News. They did this by creating a Deepfake video of Barack Obama. Watch the video below; at 00:35 the source video is shown next to the result.

What do you think, how do we combat an issue like this?

 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed

5/5 (1)

Artificial Intelligence offers a wide range of exciting opportunities; from self-driving cars, to climate control, to healthcare. In healthcare specifically, experts are using AI and Machine Learning to develop systems that diagnose diseases by looking at photos of the conditions.

Now, they are diving even deeper. AI systems are being developed that look at the drivers of genetic diseases by analyzing the human genome, which is basically equivalent to our blue print. Causes of genetic diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s are thus also in this blue print. A genome is composed of base pairs, A pairs with T and C pairs with G. The human genome has roughly 20.000 genes and 3 billion base pairs (En.wikipedia.org, 2018). This immense amount of data makes the human genome a very hard subject to analyze and this is what AI is being used for. If these AI systems find patterns that they can link to certain diseases, we could cure these diseases before they even happen. (Cspo.org, 2018)

But how do we cure them? By editing the gene, so that the specific code for a disease is no longer present. In short, gene editing works in three steps:

1. Adding edited DNA to the cell, in this case a human embryo;
2. Breaking the DNA in a different place;
3. Repairing the DNA in the place where it was broken, conveniently cells will do this by themselves.

This is where CRISPR, or CRISPR/Cas9 in full, comes in. CRISPR is a method to break DNA in specific places. This way, experts are able to target harmless parts, while avoiding the important genes. This is critical for the process, considering breaking important genes might mess up the entire blue print (En.wikipedia.org, 2018).

Together, AI and CRISPR might be able to eliminate genetic diseases that have affected billions of people in human history. What do you think of this process and the moral implications that go hand in hand with gene editing?

 

En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Human genome. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome [Accessed 8 Oct. 2018].

Cspo.org. (2018). Where Genome Editing and Artificial Intelligence Collide | CSPO. [online] Available at: https://cspo.org/where-genome-editing-and-artificial-intelligence-collide/ [Accessed 8 Oct. 2018].

En.wikipedia.org. (2018). CRISPR. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR [Accessed 8 Oct. 2018].