In January 2024, world-famous American musician and singer Taylor Swift’s explicit deepfake images circled the internet. It triggered a controversial debate and resulted in the UK’s laws taking a step and making pornographic deepfake image creation a crime from now on. Recently UK’s government took stringent steps in making pornographic deep fakes a crime and if such material is distributed online by anyone could result in jail time as well. The question arises as to why celebrity deepfakes are becoming common. Let’s find out in this blog and explore the preventive measures that can help celebrities and other people protect their digital presence and dignity from illicit actors.
What is a Celebrity Deepfake?
A deepfake is highly realistic yet a fake image, voice, or video is created of the targeted individual using Artificial Intelligence. The content created in deepfake is highly deceptive and is mostly used for defaming someone or committing identity fraud through impersonation. Deepfakes have the power to damage the goodwill and reputation of originally alive people to an extent that may result in serious consequences like psychological dilemmas that can lead to suicide attempts as well. A person’s entire life savings can be wiped out of his account using a deepfake attack to bypass identity verification filters to gain access to his or her financials.
A celebrity deepfake is intended for both positive and negative intentions. Here’s an overview of it.
Positive Celeb Deepfakes
These types of deepfakes of celebrities are used solely for marketing, branding, and personality endorsement purposes that use deepfakes of celebrities upon their consent by paying them royalties. Celebrities who are aged and have lost their young looks now but are still considered legends and have fan following are paid millions of dollars and their deepfakes are used to market different brands around the world.
Negative Celebrity Deepfakes
Celebrities are often targeted by deepfake manipulators for sexually explicit material. In the case of Taylor Swift, many celebrities became targets of explicit celeb deepfake attacks. Celeb deepfakes. It usually defames the targeted celebrity and damages their reputation.
Recent Celeb Deepfake Cases
Celebrity Deepfakes are created not only for movie and entertainment industry stars but also for government officials, public leaders, and other famous personalities. United States President Donald Trump Deepfakes became famous in his tenure highlighting his incorrect policies and other issues. Here are some of the recent and famous celeb deepfake examples.
- Tom Hanks’ deepfake was intended to promote a dental plan that was rejected by himself.
- Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s deepfake was recently used for a fraudulent giveaway. The deepfake was detected and a general public awareness message came from Brad promptly avoiding huge losses to customers.
- Ukraine’s president Zelensky’s deepfake video circled the internet calling his soldiers to lay down weapons in the ongoing war with Russia.
Types of Deepfakes
There are 4 types of deepfakes:
- Face Swaps that use AI techniques take the face image of one person and swap it with another using different techniques like face embedding.
- Voice Cloning creates voice deepfake of people from prerecorded voices of individuals that are mostly used for deceptive phone calls for illicit gains like fraud.
- Body Swaps are deepfakes that can create fake body images of individuals.
- Text Deepfakes copy the text style, tone, and diction from writing pieces of specific individuals and can be used to manipulate government-issued letters or different official documents. It also includes forging the signatures of individuals.
How Facial Recognition Detect Celeb Deepfakes?
Firstly, the celebrities need to understand the importance of detection of deepfakes. For this purpose, celebrities can employ a facial recognition solution while onboarding for any online platform or service. This will help them protect their online images and photos because third-party identity vendors are obligated to securely use your data and can help in differentiating between celebrities’ original and deepfake images.
The facial identity solution identifies deepfake in images through the following techniques:
- Active Liveness Detection calls for checking the liveness of the user by prompting him to perform certain actions in front of the camera.
- Passive Liveness check will perform automated liveness checks through algorithms in prerecorded images and videos.
Tips to Prevent AI Celeb Deepfake Attacks
Apart from liveness detection, certain preventive measures can help celebrities protect their digital photographs from misuse.
- Using privacy settings on social media, locking picture viewing from unknown people, and using multi-factor authentication can help protect personal data including images and videos.
- Promptly demanding and ensuring that the marketing firms ensure full safety and security of your legitimate deepfake and other images to be used and protected at all times.
- Celebrities can also stay in close contact with the regulatory authorities and cyber crime cell of their jurisdiction to keep them updated about any deepfake of them.
Wrap Up
Celebrity Deepfakes are harmful and dangerous to the integrity and dignity of famous individuals. It is a social illness that damages a personality both financially and socially. To curb this, a robust facial recognition solution that uses AI liveness detection and other mechanisms promptly can help in preventing celeb deepfakes. Governments can also follow the footsteps of the UK’s governments and make stringent laws, fines, and penalties on misused celeb deepfakes. They can also regulate marketing companies and brands to carefully use celeb deep fakes and compensate them if it causes them any reputational damage or financial loss.
