Problem / Objective

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. General Adversarial Networks (GANs) are commonly used to generate deepfakes. 

Solution / Approach 

Detecting deepfakes used to be a very challenging task for individuals because it requires expertise in the artificial intelligence domain. But four undergraduate students from G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur, have developed Detectd, an AI-based deepfake detection platform that will allow anyone to verify the authenticity of the media they consume. Atharva Peshkar, Atharva Khedkar, Rishita Mishra, and Yash Moharir have created this platform where the user can simply visit the website, upload a media file from his local system, whether a photograph or a video, and the video is passed through a state-of-the-art model. The media is then analysed for AI forgery to find out whether the video is fake or not, and the results are returned to the user within minutes.

Impact / Implementation

A major issue with most of the deepfake detecting solutions that are presently available in the market is their unreliability and the slow pace at which results are given. Detectd currently has an accuracy of 96% and is the first of its kind in India and amongst very few available globally and at present it can provide results from as low as 3- minutes. Detectd emerged as the World Finalists and India Champions in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2021.

Image from Upsplash