They say seeing is believing. They probably weren’t alive in 2024.

Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to manipulate media. Sometimes it’s for relatively benign projects like de-aging an actor or mindless diversions like distorting your selfies. However, the same tools in the hands of malicious actors can be used to spread misinformation using “deepfakes”.

Deepfakes are AI-generated or -manipulated images, videos or audio recordings that show a person saying or doing something they didn’t actually do. The potential negative impact on news and politics is obvious and huge. It’s already been used to try to convince people Ukraine was surrendering in the early days of its war with Russia.

To combat this digital deception, RIT (Go Tigers!) is working on a project called DeFake with the National Science and Knight foundations. The goal is to use human expertise and the latest technology to identify deepfakes and stop their spread. You can read about it in fall issue of University Magazine.