At the venue of 2019 NeurIPS conference, Facebook has launched its Deepfake Detection Challenge asking researchers to build tools to spot deepfake videos. The initiative will also have Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft as partners. The Deepfake Detection Challenge invites people around the world to build innovative new technologies that can help detect deepfakes and manipulated media. 

Deepfakes has become of one of the new and powerful tools for spreading misinformation and has possessed a severe challenge to researchers and organizations across the globe. Deepfakes can create AI-generated videos showing real people doing and saying fictional things. As a result, “no single organization can solve this on its own. That’s why we’re working together on an ongoing initiative,” says the website for the Deepfake Detection Challenge 

“In partnership with leaders in the industry and in academia, we are launching the challenge at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and providing entrants with the full release of a new, unique data set of 100,000-plus videos specially created to aid research on deepfakes. Participants will use the data set to create new and better models to detect manipulated media, and results will be scored for effectiveness,” wrote Jerome Pesenti, Vice President of Facebook AI, in a blog post explaining the challenge. 

The datasets for the Deepfake Detection Challenge is available on Kaggle; the winner can win up to $1 million in total prizes. 

 “Ensuring that cutting-edge research can be used to detect deepfakes depends on large-scale, close-to-reality, useful, and freely available data sets. Since that resource didn’t exist, we’ve had to create it from scratch. The resulting data set consists of more than 100,000 videos featuring paid actors in realistic scenarios, with accompanying labels describing whether they were manipulated with AI.” explains Cristian Canton Ferrer, the Facebook AI Research Manager on the new DFDC data set.

Facebook has dedicated more than $10 million in awards and grants for the challenge to help encourage more participation. AWS is also contributing up to $1 million in AWS credits and offering to host entrants’ models if they choose. The DFDC leaders are committed to sharing their expertise as well as technical and other resources.