Facebook's Deepfake Challenge That Will defeat Deepfakes. Hopefully.

Nowadays, we are seeing a new wave and great advancements in different technologies. Things like Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Artificial Intelligence are improving every single day. And Researchers and scientists are having amazing use-cases with these technologies which can change the direction of our world.

But there's a price that concerns a lot of developers and researchers. A lot of people can use systems to spread wrong information. But the biggest disadvantage from my point of view is the arise of deepfakes.

Deepfakes are realistic AI-generated videos of real people saying and doing fictional things.

Facebook Combat-mode

Facebook announced the Deepfake Detection Challenge, to combat the spread of wrong information. Goes by the name DFDC, the main purpose of the challenge is to create a realistic dataset that can be used to train models that accurately detect deepfakes and report them.

We want to catalyze more research and development in this area and ensure that there are better open source tools to detect deepfakes. ( Mike Schroepfer ) - Facebook CTO

What’s brilliant is that there’s a great collaboration from other companies and Universities too. — Microsoft, MIT, UC Berkeley, Cornell Tech, Oxford and the list goes on.

Facebook is donating more than $10 million to fund the project. I believe this will rise and help with the ambitions and hopes for researchers, scientists, developers and even organizations to come with great ideas to defeat the huge wave of disinformation in social media and across the internet.

The Deepfake Detection Challenge will include a data set and leaderboard, as well as grants and awards, to spur the industry to create new ways of detecting and preventing media manipulated via AI from being used to mislead others. ( Mike Schroepfer )

It's also great to notice that Facebook is getting academic support from different universities which will definitely be a great help with to make the challenge successful.

“In order to move from the information age to the knowledge age, we must do better in distinguishing the real from the fake, reward trusted content over untrusted content, and educate the next generation to be better digital citizens. (Hany Farid) -Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Facebook has clarified that it won't use any user information or data to create the dataset. Only paid actors will take part in the challenge. If you want to know more details about the challenge you can visit this link.