In the digital age, information spreads fast but misinformation spreads like wildfire. The ease of communication has enabled the rapid transmission of fake news, and the phenomenon has become so prevalent that it’s taken on proportions of a pandemic – an information pandemic – or infodemic.

The problem escalates manifold when the medium of misinformation is video – something so compelling and seemingly true that even the smartest and most skeptical of minds could be taken for a ride. Known as deepfakes, these are AI-generated videos showing real people doing and saying fictional things.

The answer to this problem of rumour-mongering lies within Artificial Intelligence, much like many other contemporary problems. Here are some of our best stories that aptly explain the role of AI in curbing the spread of false information.

On Chatbots:

• India's AI-enabled COVID-19 helpdesk to suppress misinformation: The onset of the global pandemic brought about a panic wave in the country, so the government took it upon itself to curb the spread of rumours and misinformation. The Government of India wanted a solution that would empower citizens with the right steps to take precautionary measures for staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The key objective was to offer a 24/7 helpdesk that answered coronavirus queries and helped prevent the spread of false information. India deployed the world’s largest WhatsApp chatbot – MyGov Corona Helpdesk – in record time to aid our fight against the pandemic by disseminating timely and right information. Read more...
• Combatting Covid-19 infodemic with AI virtual assistant: As India confronted the challenge of the pandemic, it also sought to curb the spread of rumours. To fight the so-called infodemic, An AI-driven agent, called MyGov Saathi, was deployed to better prepare the citizens for the crisis and empower them to reduce their risk of contracting the virus. This emerged as an easy-to-use, efficient tool that could keep pace with evolving guidance about COVID-19. MyGov Saathi was embedded on the ‘self4society’ microsite of MyGov. This persona-based chatbot was tuned to provide customised answers for queries relevant to farmers, migrants, senior citizens, frontline workers and other citizens alike so they all adopt behaviours that minimise transmission and exposure to the coronavirus. Read more...

On Fake News:

• Artificial Intelligence: A shield against ‘fake news’?: While AI technology can be used to create misinformation, it also helps to combat it. It can be effectively used to identify and eliminate fake news. In fact, in the last few years, through the use of several algorithms, AI has been able to identify patterns to distinguish between human and machine-generated content successfully. These algorithms are created by feeding them existing articles from various fake news sources that also contain sets of authentic information and references. Some AI-powered analytical tools can also include stance classification to determine whether a headline matches with the article body or not. This is done by processing the text to analyse a writer’s style. Read more...
• Goldfinger: Do you remember the James Bond villains of the cold war era? They were always trying to start a war between USSR and USA so as to profit from it? Well, there is a new villain in town, and this one seems in a better position to start a war. NLP algorithm called GPT-2 by OpenAI is so good that the tech community is rallying around keeping the source code a secret, lest some eager state or private actor intentionally or otherwise decides to start World War III. On a positive note, with the advent of such powerful tools, there is an entire industry just being born – tools to tell you whether this is a real social media account, tools to tell you whether a person posted this or a bot did, new spamming filters, cyber policing, cyber help, new techniques for IP tracking, masking of abusive content – new tools, new language and a new skill set to traverse all of this. Read more...

On Deepfakes:

• Using AI to combat deepfakes: Can we fight fire with fire? If ML and AI are being used to create deepfakes, could they also be used to detect these ‘fake’ videos? That’s what several experts are counting on. Work on deepfake detection has been spurred on by fears computer-generated videos could even influence elections, target businesses, or foment civil disorder. In the United States, which has already seen a debate rage over alleged external interference in the 2016 elections, many fear deepfakes could be the next tool to be ‘weaponised’. Deepfakes can affect anyone - the CEO of a firm, a head of state, or even the common man - no one is immune, and the consequences could even be deadly. For this reason, it wouldn’t be unusual for deepfake- busting AI solutions to become to become a valuable asset for content hosts, governments, and businesses alike. Read more...
• Facebook Deepfake video detection competition yields 65% accuracy: In December’19, Facebook launched a 6-month-long Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) in partnership with industry leaders and academic institutions. The open initiative’s aim was to create encourage innovation of autonomous algorithmic detection systems to identify and cull the emerging threat of Deepfake videos. Deepfake videos are highly convincing AI-generated videos of real people and events that can potentially be used for disinformation campaigns. Facebook created a dataset of thousands of videos for research of Deepfakes by spending around $10 million on creating phone-shot, genuine-appearing videos that would generally be available on social networks. The social media network used more than 3,500 actors from varied backgrounds, race, age, gender, etc. to produce amateur-style videos. Read more...
• Google release datasets to fight deepfakes: To combat widespread abuse of deep fakes, Google, in collaboration with Jigsaw, announced the release of a large dataset of visual deepfakes today. These datasets produced by Google are incorporated into the the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples' new FaceForensics benchmark. These datasets are now available to the research community for developing synthetic video detection methods. Read more...

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