Microsoft’s new video authenticator could help weed out dangerous deepfakes
The tool believes the image on the right is fake with 100 percent confidence. (Microsoft/)Deepfakes can be fun. Those videos that perfectly inserted Jim Carrey into Jack Nicholson’s role in The Shining were endlessly entertaining. As the upcoming U.S. election closes in, however, analysts expect that deepfakes could play a role in the barrage of misinformation making its way out to potential voters.This week, Microsoft announced new software called Video Authenticator. It’s designed to automatically analyze videos to determine whether or not algorithms have tampered with the footage.The software analyzes videos in real-time and breaks it down frame-by-frame. In a way, it works similarly to familiar photographic forensic techniques. It looks for inconsistencies in edges, which can manifest as subtle changes in color or small pixel clusters (called artifacts) that lack color information. You would be hard-pressed to notice them with your own eyes, especially when dozens of frames are...